When it comes to effective digital marketing for businesses, conversion rate is without a doubt the most vital metric to consider, even more so than website traffic. Below, we explore the importance of accurate audience targeting for SMBs, and how this directly impacts conversion. Read on to learn how to solidify your target audiences and bring in more traffic that converts.

Why Identify Your Target Audience?

While traffic to your website is important, funnelling the right audience to your site and increasing conversions should be the top priority for every business. Why? Because 50K of traffic may look promising from the outside, but realistically, having many visitors amounts to nothing if they are not interested in buying your product or investing in your service.

If your target audience is “everyone”, you’re making it harder for yourself! By narrowing down your focus to a specific target audience, you can:

• Know who is actually buying your product, and how you’re reaching them (through sites they visit, blogs, Google searching, etc.).
• Find out what they want and cater to that demand.
• Learn what they don’t want and remove it from your offering.
• Optimise your website accordingly to make it more relevant to them.
• Identify how customers describe the services you offer and present this in your website content, so they match.
• Identify how customers compare and choose items from your categories, and prioritise your products accordingly.
• Better describe your content to offer the benefits that customers are looking for, and meet their expectations.

Essentially, if you know who your target audience is, you’ll be able to focus on them, and not cater to an overly broad definition. Below, we explore how you can begin doing this.

Where To Start

Traditionally, businesses would define their target audience by factors such as age, gender, needs, and geographical location. Today, this approach is not obsolete, but it is less relevant. With businesses online being able to ship anywhere at the click of a button, location loses importance for many customers. Nowadays, lifestyle is more important than the demographic location, as well as the size of the market (locally and/or internationally), and average disposable income.

When determining your ideal target audience, start by answering questions such as, “Who are my target customers?”, “How would I describe their lifestyle/businesses situation?”, “What do they want and what are their pain points?”, and “What needs do they have that aren’t being satisfied?”

To determine the more personal characteristics of your target audience, consider the psychographics of your ideal customers. This can include characteristics such as:

• Personality
• Values
• Hobbies and interests
• Behaviour
• Attitudes

Think about such things as “What features of my product/service are most appealing to customers?”, “How will my product fit their lifestyle?”, “How/when will they use my product?”, “What media does my target audience rely on most for information?”

Gathering Evidence

There are a variety of ways you can gather data to determine your target audience. The first and most basic and straightforward approach is through talking to people.

1. Talk to Your Ideal Customers

Talking to customers should be a main priority of every business, especially newly established ones. Once you have an idea of what your ideal B2C customer or B2B business profile is, talk to them in person. Observe their natural behaviours and learn from them. Did your previous assumption meet expectations? If not, what can you learn from it, and how can you optimise your services/products to increase customer engagement?

2. Survey Your Current Customers

For established businesses that already have a database of paying customers, surveying them is one of the best ways you can learn more about them, discovering how they shop and why.

For more accurate survey results, narrow down your survey to include only the last 20 to 100 people who made purchases from your company. Here’s some examples of questions you might want to ask:

1. In one sentence, how would you describe yourself?
2. What is your main goal for using this product/website?
3. What, if anything, prevents you from accomplishing that goal?
4. Have you used our product or service before?
5. What do you like most about our website/product?
6. Where did you first hear about us?
7. Why did you choose to use our product or service over other options?
8. What’s the one key thing our product/website is missing for you?
9. What, if anything, is preventing you from purchasing/taking action today?
10. How would you describe your overall buying experience?
11. Do you feel our product or service is worth the cost?
12. What convinced you to buy the product?
13. What nearly stopped you from buying?
14. Did you have questions that you couldn’t find answers to?
15. What feature/option could we add to make your experience more enjoyable?
16. Any other feedback you would like to tell us?

You might also want to include some basic survey questions that cover Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES).

17. How likely are you to recommend our products? (NPS)
18. How satisfied are you with our product/services? (CSAT)
19. How easy did (organization) make it for you to solve your issue? (CES)

3. Check Your Competition

If you want to do improve your business and increase conversions but you’re not sure how, another great place to start is the competition. See what your competitors are doing right, who they are targeting, who their current customers are, and what they are offering that you can do better. Have they overlooked a potential audience that you can capture?

4. Data Gathering through Google Analytics

Google Analytics can provide a goldmine of information if used correctly (e.g., if e-commerce tracking is on and goals have been set). By measuring the quality of your website’s SEO traffic, monitoring the bounce rate, and identifying service detractors such as slow loading pages, businesses can increase their conversion rate exponentially.

With Google Analytics, you can get reports on the following:

• Content Efficiency Analysis Report: revealing the best performing content on your website
• Traffic Report: for the best converting traffic sources
• Keyword Analysis Report: on the best keywords that actually convert 
• Best Converting Landing Pages Report: revealing which landing pages are receiving the most conversions
• E-commerce Report: showing which channels perform the best

Through Google Analytics’ custom reports, you can gain insightful data that shows you which traffic coming to your site has the highest conversion rate, and which offers the lowest. This way, you can invest more effort, time, and money into sources of high-performing traffic, and narrow down your target audience to focus on those that actually convert.

Put Your Assumptions to the Test

What do you do once you have gathered your data? Put your assumptions to the test in the real world, of course! For example, if you’re looking for new ways to increase conversion, you can do so through Google Analytics’ PPC Data.

If your paid search traffic is experiencing a low click-through rate (CTR), through PPC Data, you can see exactly which keywords are underperforming and which ones offer the highest conversion rate and monetary value. With this knowledge, you can optimise your website and content to target the most appropriate keywords, such as keywords that have low-medium value, and a high CTR.

Develop an SEO Strategy that Converts Today

Improving your business’ digital analytics is one of the best ways to uunderstand the profitability of your website, and how well it aligns with the needs of the target market.

If you’re interested in consulting with some digital marketing experts to take your brand to new heights, Pure SEO’s team of specialists can help. Contact our team today to develop an SEO strategy that will increase customer conversion, and get your business ahead of the competition.