How to choose your blog’s target audience

An important part of your blogging journey is choosing your blog’s target audience.

You cannot be everything for everybody.

I have been writing this marketing blog since 2013 and initially it was just a broad commentary on marketing trends and updates. I struggled to document, churn and curate the massive volumes of content generated in marketing, with very little success.

2014 - after a year of struggling - I realized - enough is enough - time to hit reset.

I decided to focus on something slightly narrower, and hence I chose to focus on digital marketing. Along this time, I realized that along with topic specialization, I also need to narrow down my readership profile as well. Obviously, I was not catering to the CMO demographic. So I further refined my target group to early stage marketers - an area where I knew I could add value.

So both in terms of topic coverage and readership profile, I managed to trim down the audience who I believed was not the correct fit for my blog readership.

But guess what? Yeah, yeah. Too broad again.

Niche - is a word whose magic I had just started believing in.

When I was writing about marketing in general, I was competing with perhaps a million bloggers.

By narrowing down my target audience, I reduced my competition set [I still believe it is slightly broad], established my credentials and gained readership. I kept on refining this further till I achieve an ideal reader - content - expertise fitment.

Today, I write for early stage marketers on marketing topics that they need advice on. Mostly my content is geared towards simplifying marketing for this demographic. My secondary audience also comprises of people who want to use digital marketing to set up their online businesses.

If your audience changes over time, it’s not a federal crime. Our experience, opinions and knowledge all shape our narrative - and these things transform and get refined with time. 

All this is good - but how do I define my blog’s target audience - I am still finding my feet, so to speak in the blogging world.

Step #1: Mission statement

One strategy that you can use to refine your target audience profile is to write down your blog’s mission statement.

Consider this:

My blog helps _(subject)_____ do _(action)___________

The subject should be your ideal reader

Action is what your blog enables them to do better after they read your content.

Step #2: Reader Profile

After you have defined your blog’s mission statement, you need to dig deeper to define your blog’s reader profile. Read your blog and think of all the people who might find this useful and interesting.

Age

Industry

Location

Skills

Interest

Based on the reader profile matrix above, I have drawn a brief sketch of my ideal reader.

Annie is a young marketing professional. She has just started working in a company in the past year. At times she struggles with certain marketing concepts and wishes she had some advice around implementation. Though a lot of content is available online, but she really needs something that explains things lucidly. Of late, she was tasked with starting an SEO program within her team. This is a skill that she had not come across during her formal education. She tried browsing through various websites and teach herself about SEO. She briefly considered about joining a course as well. But even though there were about a million sites on SEO, she wish someone understood her skill level and helped her learn the concepts. Most of the websites that listed “SEO for beginners” were either really not for beginners or were not credible enough. To top that, she was also tasked with finding an SEO agency. She needed to know what questions to ask the agency, what factors should she consider while shortlisting an agency - she was hesitant to ask all of this at work. And at the same time, wanted to learn all this to well at her workplace.

This is the way in which I have defined my blog’s target audience.

Step #3: Needs Analysis

You need to find out what is that exactly your target audience needs.

What kind of content is she looking for?

Annie, for example, is looking to understand how to hire an SEO agency [ Hey - you can read this post Five things that you need to know before you hire an SEO agency here]

What is Search Engine Optimisation? Read this post here

You need to understand your target audience really well.

What are your readers’ personal / professional objectives?

Is it to learn more about marketing? To get noticed at work? To have access to a trusted source of advice?

Is it to learn how to start a fashion blog to supplement their income?

What's stopping him or her from achieving their goals?

Is it fear / lack of expertise?

Lack of advice from trusted / credible sources?

What does he or she need help with?

Is it advice on how to approach concepts which are new for them - for example Search Engine Marketing?

The answers to the above questions will help you in deciding what should you blog about - which is the next topic in this series.

But, in case you are thinking, why should you laser refine your target audience? After all, the more readers that you have, the better, right?

Unfortunately, in the age of goldfish attention spans, it doesn’t work that way.

The correct target audience for you will be your strongest advocate. This community of like minded, passionate segment will be much more valuable than a broad, volume centric readership. 

Ultimately, you will not be able to cater content to fit the needs of a broad audience. So even if it sounds great to have a more diffused readership, but those readers are soon going to be disengaged because the content that you generate just cannot keep up with the nature of everyone’s demands. For example, I would have loved to have audience from advertising and media planning, but I knew that I could not keep designing content for this demographic as it was out of my core area of expertise. I had to simply let some areas go and retain and sharpen the others. 

Hopefully, this post has been of some help to you in establishing your blog’s target audience. Have you struggled as well in establishing your blog’s target audience? Do let me know in the comments section below.