Audience Mapping: Part 2

Welcome back for part two of the Audience Mapping blog post. As previously discussed in Audience Mapping part one, assessing and understanding your audience is crucial to enhancing traffic and driving leads to your site. Where are they coming from? What sites do they use, and how did they stumble across your page, blog, or forum? Do these unique visitors have something in common, such as a certain profession or hobby? If you want to successfully and thoroughly map your audience, these are some of the questions you should be working to answer. Once you uncover this information, you’ll be on your way to not only understanding your audience better, but also driving more interested users to your site and perhaps improving business as well. Consider these suggestions to discover what makes your audience tick:

5. Do they embrace social media? If so, what social networking sites do they spend the most time on? Are they interested in these sites for business or personal purposes? Where and when do they begin to interact vs. simply digesting information? Some of the larger social media websites offer follower/member demographic information that can help you determine whether or not your specific audience spends time on their site. If your audience is more professional, consider starting with LinkedIn, whereas if you are staffing within the marketing/PR space, you may consider launching a blog and broadcasting your content through Twitter.

6. Who are their influencers? Every industry has influential leaders. Learn who those individuals are within each of the markets you service. What value do they provide to your audience? How can you provide similar value? Is there an opportunity to partner with an influencer? If you are considering launching a blog and are not sure if you will be able to provide content on an ongoing basis, find out if any industry influencers would be interested in cross posting or contributing to your blog.

7. Are there common denominators? If you have multiple audiences with different behaviors, sometimes you can identify a common denominator that ties them together. As unique as their behaviors may appear from the outside, many audience groups have similar professional objectives. I am not suggesting that you group together all of your audiences, but if there is an opportunity to create a campaign that can be mirrored across each service segment, you will do less recreating and rather focus your efforts on scaling the campaign.

8. What can web analytics tell you? Spend some time analyzing the backend activity on your website. First, this will provide you with details relating to existing high volume search terms, referring websites, search engine traffic and unique navigation patterns. Second, once you finalize your digital marketing strategy, you can use web analytics to set up specific campaign goals, enabling you to easily track inbound activity and results from the start.

Some great web analytics tools include: Google Analytics, Yahoo Analytics, and Hubspot. More helpful resources on “Audience Mapping” Social Media Examiner: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/3-simple-steps-for-creating-social-media-visibility/