You need to very accurately define the group of people who is going to see your message. This can make all the difference on how a website site looks and what content is in it and how it is arranged.
This needs to be a very accurate definition. Is it your existing customers? Are you providing them with a new service or information you give to them in some other way? Are you trying to attract new customers?
Define the group by their characteristics. Is it men? Women? Both? A certain age group? A certain income level? a certain geography? Any or all of these things can be combined into a simple phrase. For example:
If you were trying get people to join a business networking group in a certain area, the audience would be small business owners that lived a certain distance from the place where the group meets.
If you wanted to sell durable work clothes to tradesmen, your audience might be plumbers and electricians and other men between the ages of 35 and 49.
If you wanted to sell jewelry and cosmetics, your audience might be women who have disposable income. The age group may vary depending on the type of things to be sold. Part of a website might be targeted towards teenagers (18 – 29) and a different part may be targeted towards older women (29-55).
Audience targeting and analysis is either one of the best things or the scariest things about the Internet. 50 years ago, the United States barely had three national networks providing commercial programming. The preferences of people were recorded by a diary that a select few were chosen to fill out. This tiny sample became the method that was used to determine the behavior of media use for the entire nation.
Today, with hundreds of channels of television and millions of websites connected to personal data, advertisers and media people have a very clear picture of what various audiences do based on different stimuli. All of it can be measured and analyzed in almost real time. Based on the analysis, advertisers can tweak and modify their messages to more accurately influence people to buy goods and services.
Some people consider this an invasion, but the fact is that the practice has been used for years, and is only now more noticeable because of the power of computers to target information to people as they request it. As a society, we seem to love the convenience while at the same time regret that we are giving up our personal information in order for the targeting of information to be more accurate. We can’t have one without the other.
The truly amazing thing is that many of the same tools used by the major corporations are either free or very cost effective for you to use when picking the audience for your message. Contact us to find out more.
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