How Can I Determine My Target Audience’s Online Behavior?

Determining your target audience’s online behavior can be understood through a series of on-line evaluation tools, marketing techniques and analysis.  The results from these elements tends to be good for determining trends in your customer base rather than exact conclusions.  Nonetheless, having a general understanding of your audience allows you to better capture the interests of certain market sectors and, in turn, use this information to predict and control your customer base, to some degree, regardless of the company size or industry.

YOU KNOW WHAT YOU KNOW

If you have had any business exposure at all, you will not be starting from zero. You probably have an inkling of what type of parts or services are needed by certain customers. Starting with what your existing experience tells you, you want to construct a number of test cases to validate what you think you know. Let’s use the example of a business that sells art supplies. Each customer should have a profile with basic information that might be an indication of the type of customer they are: age, gender, and types of art they like would be a good start. From there you can look for purchase triggers: certain holidays, birthdays, or just periodic replenishment. From here you might determine that the customer that buys a lot of clay a few months before Christmas, might be making hand-thrown mugs as gifts, for example. They might buy more clay if they got a 20% discount two months ahead of their “usual” purchase.  For an active painter, they may be continually buying new supplies (canvases, paint, brushes, etc.).

YOU KNOW WHAT YOU MEASURE

The next step in understanding the behaviors that bring your target audience is to unravel the various pathways that they travel while navigating through the Internet and through your web site as well. The number and types of software tools are seemingly endless and you can choose to track virtually any “traffic pattern” through your site including entry and exit points, as well as time on site.  If you’re looking for the best Key Performance Indicators (KPI) this would be a good list.

SAMPLE KPI LIST

Page views: entry and exit, pages, page totals and time on each page

Session duration: totals time from entry until exit include URL’s for both points

Bounce rate: entry followed directly by an exit to track mis-keys or unexpected landing page

Content engagement: How deep the prospect scrolled, time watching video, reading white paper

Conversions: actions such as form submits, downloads, sign-ups

Lead score: used in conjunction with CRMs (determine how much activity of what type leads to a seller-buyer relationship) - develop a contact lifecycle to track the duration and depth of the relationship

SEARCHING

A more sophisticated part of building the “go to” web site is to incorporate search behavior.

This reveals what problems people are actively trying to solve. Identify high-intent keywords. This creates opportunities to solving for high-intent searches. See if you can successfully anticipate those situations. Analyze “People Also Ask” (PAA: secondary and deeper searches) and related types of queries. Be creative since the searching function evolves with time. Typical analysis is through Google Search Console, keyword research platforms, and manual Search Engine Revue Pages (SERP) review. The intent of this is to develop a prioritized list of topics mapped to buying stages.

SOCIAL PRESENCE

Your audience’s online behavior also includes communities; sometimes more than on corporate sites.

Check out LinkedIn groups and comment threads, Reddit subcommunities, Industry forums, Slack/Discord groups, professional associations and online hub posts that generate engagement.

Remember in all of these cases to pay attention to data privacy and compliance issues

• Ensure you disclose tracking in your privacy policy.
• Provide opt-out and consent mechanisms where required (GDPR/CCPA).
• Prospect identification typically requires a login, form submission, or email capture.

SUMMARY

By being aware of your customers’ on-line habits, you determine your target audience’s online behavior. It is a combination of what they search for, where they gather, and how they engage. What actually converts is the validation of those insights you have gathered through controlled experimentation and research.

Picture credit: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-holding-credit-card-and-searching-on-the-internet-8937451/