Identify your target market

Before spending time and money on developing a company website, you need to know who your target market is and focus your efforts in creating quality content for them. Unfortunately not every person is a good fit for your products and services, so the job of your website is to help you identify who is a good fit and more importantly who is more likely to convert. Regardless of what stage you are in the web development cycle, being able to answer the following 3 questions will help you better understand the specific needs of the people that will benefit most from your product or service while improving your chance of converting lookers into action takers.

3 Questions

Being able to answer the following questions about your website will help you better identify who your target market is.

Question 1: Who will visit my website?

First think about who will benefit most from the information on your website, is it your current customer, potential customer, employees, suppliers, competitors, students, information seekers, etc,. Does your current content meet their needs?

Second, is the information on your site targeted to meet the needs of those users. You may even have multiple target audiences. Once you understand who the target is and what their needs are, it will become easier for you to address those specific areas of interest. If you are able to meet a visitor’s needs you have a better chance for a conversion to happen.

Question 2: Why would someone want to visit to my site?

People search the internet with a purpose and goal in mind. According to a study, regarding what people searched for on the web, 75 percent of the people surveyed said that they went online to search for information. If you consider that Google process about 10 million searches per hour, 75% is a huge number of potential visitors to your site.

So to answer the above question, chances are it is for information about your company, products, or services; but keep in mind that if a visitor cannot find the information or solution he is looking for, he will bounce and look somewhere else. This is why it is imperative to make sure that the content on your site be relevant, targeted and easy to find.

Question 3: Does my site provide the solution(s) that the searcher is looking for?

Regardless of what business you are in, above all you are a problem solver. Some people visit your site by accident and some come with a specific problem or need. If the landing page someone lands on is not relevant to their search (i.e. providing a specific solution they are looking for) a visitor will bounce and look somewhere else for the answer. This is why it is imperative to make sure that your site addresses the specific need and provide a relevant solution.

Finding your niche

Unfortunately your business is not unique, you have many competitors in the market pimping various versions of your product and service. In essence you and your competitors are all competing for revenue share. What differentiates you from your competitors? You need to define your focus.

Once you have defined your focus, you can then define your niche. What do you do well that your competitors do not.

For example, we differentiate our web services by placing a focus on helping small business owners create an optimized interactive web presence that extends beyond a basic company website. Web designers are dime a dozen. Most designers place their focus on design and aesthetics, where as we focus on optimization, functionality and clean design. When people make a search query, they don’t search for fancy web graphics, they search for meaningful web content. We help a small business owner become an option at the moment someone searches for them.