Know your audience to expand your market

If someone asks "Tell me about your audience", what is the response from your research?. The best responses come from you who have spent time and money researching your audience. It shows if you know well enough your audience before marketing to them. Here is a part of the NextStage CEO's article which tells you how to keep your audience engaged with your website.

You can't market successfully to anybody until you know who they are, what they think, how they think, what they respond to and what they'll respond with. The smaller your target audience, the more you must design specifically for it. Large audiences are easy to design for, just keep it simple!

The first message must be instructions on how to build a receiver. The first message is not from you to your market, it's from your market to you and is: "This is what will get our attention, so this is what has to be in your marketing message."

Analyzing people is interesting. If you can track visitor logical processes, cognitive processes, decision styles, memorization methods, emotional cues and others (age, gender, buying styles, best branding strategies, impact ratios, touch factors, education level, income level, etc.) , it would be really great.

Knowing your audience in depth and detail is a required first step. The more richly detailed and complete your knowledge is about your audience, the more you can do to build a receiver -- a website, video, print ad, et cetera -- they will naturally and effortlessly interact with. There are two crucial elements to "receiver" design for building that receiver.

The first -- rich audience personae -- is incredibly straightforward.
The second crucial element is Audience Focused Optimization.

That is "Quantifying and Optimizing the Human Side of Online Marketing." For example, knowing how the audience thinks enabled design modifications that kept visitors engaged and returning through the redesign process. The end result of these efforts was demonstrated by visitor comments and emails.

The simple fact that Jim Sterne and his crew let visitors know ahead of time when a redesign would be online resulted in three major outcomes:

> The day the redesign went live, the site experienced huge spikes in traffic, levels of interest and navigation.

> People emailed that they'd been on the Emetrics Summit site and noted the update announcement.

> Other emails demonstrated that people had returned specifically to discover what had changed since their last visit. (The wording in that last line is intentional. People didn't return to "see," they returned to "discover." They were on the site thinking, evaluating, analyzing, interpreting. In other words, they were engaged.)

These are some generalized suggestions to make simple modifications to existing sites and also they are easily implemented directives for sites in the making.

Critical:

> Use fewer menu items
> Rename remaining menu items so that they are questions that can be answered
> Make the menu system/structure completely consistent from page to page

Important:

> Make the progression of pages tell a story so that one web page logically and thematically leads to the next web page

> Make the menu system either consistently horizontal or consistently vertical (remove top-of-page city menu and replace it with graphic links that already exist within the banner image)

Desirable:

> Create a breadcrumb trail as a navigation aide

Source/References: iMediaConnection