How To Measure What Your Audience Cares About
If you don’t know who your audience is, how can you make them happy? Odds are you can’t, and you’ll waste time and money marketing without intention. So start by thinking about the questions you ask when someone is visiting from out of town. One of the first questions you generally ask when a guest walks in the door is, “How was the trip?” With the help of marketing automation software, you can apply that same question to your site visitors and methodically document the results to understand what your audience cares about.
Buyer Personas & The Ideal Customer
Before you just start marketing to the wind, take a moment to look inward. Reflect on your mission, get a little zen, and think big. What problem did you set out to solve? What pain points can you alleviate? How do you stand out from the competition? It may sound unnecessary, but taking the time to re-visit the essence of your brand can bring clarity to who it is you’re trying to reach. Define your ideal customer base and isolate specific buyer personas and use cases so that you can design proactive marketing campaigns with your target audience in mind.
That being said, the ideal customer doesn’t always materialize, and you may discover use cases that didn’t cross your mind initially. Harnessing the power of a marketing automation software and other key data points can help you gain and maintain a working knowledge of your audience. Here are a few techniques to integrate into your marketing analytics routine to build a more robust understanding of your audience.
Referral Domains and Social Channels
Understanding what happened just before someone navigated to your site lends immense context to your audience and how they found you. Make special note of your visitors’ referring domains, as you’ll probably want to adjust your paid ads towards the domains that are acting as the biggest stepping stones to your site. If you start noticing that more visitors are coming to you through Yahoo than Google, for example, then you’d probably want to recalibrate your paid ad budget to favor the more popular referring domain.
Beyond search engines, social networks are another group of major referral domains marketers pay close attention to. Since social networks link a user’s account to a wealth of demographic data, you can analyze your audience by age, gender, location, ethnic background, marital status, income, and more. Who is looking at your site, and how does that differ from who you want to be looking at your site? Are there demographic trends that are relevant to you (geographic location, industries, job titles, etc)? Track this demographic data with visitor activities — who is returning, and how frequently? Cross-referencing referring domains with length of visit, social engagement, and bounce rate can help re-allocate time and advertising budget.
Social channels also have generalized demographics of their own, and trends in social network referrals can elucidate bigger-picture audience trends. If you’re a B2B marketer, you might assume that LinkedIn would be your lead channel generator, but don’t make assumptions! Check for surges in traffic from specific social channels. If most of your visitors are actually coming from Twitter, then you may decide to add budget to more sponsored tweets, but you should also consider what it is about Twitter that entices your audience. Every social network has a niche audience and demographic of its own, so if your brand seems to resonate especially well on one social channel, then what might that indicate about how your brand is perceived?
Keep in mind that positive trends like high traffic volume from one domain are equally as useful as negative trends. If you are getting noticeably lower referrals from one search engine, social network, or industry news site compared to others, don’t just count the low-referrer out. Are there any trends among the visitors who are not progressing down the funnel? If so, could you message differently to that referring domain’s general demographic to connect with the audience in another way?
Harness the power of referral domains and social channels to build a robust picture of your audience’s demographics and the directionality of traffic towards your site. The more you know where your audience is coming from, the more you can tailor your marketing efforts at various stages of the marketing funnel.
Kara Burney is the Content Marketing Maven at TrackMaven, the Competitive Intelligence platform for Digital Marketers. Have content marketing questions or topics you'd like covered on the TrackMaven blog? Tweet her your ideas! See more of Kara's posts
