Does Your Content Reach Your Target Audience?

So you’ve spent hours researching keywords to drive traffic to your website or blog, and you’ve made sure to use those keywords in your content. If everything has gone according to plan, you’re getting some good search engine rankings for your keywords, and visitors are starting to show up on your site.

But does your content really speak to your audience?

Let’s forget about SEO for a minute. Your visitors don’t really care how well you’ve optimized your content for search engine spiders. What they care about is getting what they came for – useful content they can use to improve some aspect of their lives.

But your site content also has to be engaging. That means that you have to speak on your audience’s level. You should take into account certain factors, including:

• Age
• Gender
• Geographic region
• Education level
• Financial level
• Life experience
• Interests

If your content misses the mark on any of these factors, your website or blog is not going to perform as well as it could.

To some degree, it is possible to reverse engineer your sales process to determine who your target audience is. Let’s say you’re running a site that offers blogging templates through an affiliate program. Who is most likely to want a blogging template?

• Age: This product could appeal to anyone from about 20 to 55, but the target audience for this skews a bit young, probably in the 25 to 35 range.
• Gender: Both, although males are more likely to want a good blogging template for the purpose of making money online.
• Geographic region: Since bloggers come from all over the world, it would be a good idea not to post content specific to a particular geographic region.
• Education level: Most bloggers who would bother buying a template are college educated.
• Financial level: Moderate income, say $30,000 – $60,000. Above that, quite a few people would rather pay a programmer to create a custom blog design.
• Life experience: The target audience is web savvy, and has at least a vague idea of how to use blogging to communicate about their interests. 
• Interests: Online business weighs in heavily here. Not too many personal bloggers (the online diary type) are going to bother purchasing a premium template. Quite a few members of your target audience will either be interested in making money from blogging, or using their blogs to promote another website.

Great. So if you’re promoting a blogging template, your content should be written to target young, educated people who are web savvy and interested in using a blog for business or financial gain.

If you hire a copywriter to produce content for your site, it’s critical to make sure that he or she knows who your target audience is. If you haven’t taken the time to figure this out, or don’t communicate this to your copywriter, you’re effectively wasting your money.