Why Understanding Your Audience Is Crucial To Boosting Traffic
If you don’t know who is reading your blog or using your product, then how can you expect to get more of that kind of person to come back?
Understanding your audience or user personas is integral to acquiring high-quality traffic to your site. By conducting research, you can become more aware of exactly what kind of people are interested in what you have to say.
So what is the process for understanding exactly who is engaging with your content? This section will cover five very important points that will help you gain a better sense of who your audience is, and how to create compelling content for them.
Those points are:
- How to figure out who your optimal audience is,
- Using online forums and groups to grow your audience,
- Understanding what your audience is struggling with,
- Planning out content to address audience struggles,
- and Producing that content consistently
How To Figure Out Who Your Optimal Audience Is
You likely have a general idea of the type of people reading your content. Are they marketers? Educators? Are they predominantly men or women? Old people or young people? Trump supporters? Not Trump supporters?
How can you better understand the demographics of your user base?
Along with the rest of the marketing team at Venngage, we developed a process for answering all of these questions…and more!
First:
Create a spreadsheet where you can track the top readers of your blog. These are the individuals that are consistently clicking the content you send out.
So when you take a look at your campaign reports, export this list:
Give yourself a pat on the back. You’re one step closer to identifying the demographics that are actually looking at your content!
Second:
Now that you have your list of top readers, it’s time to identify exactly who they are.
Import their names and email addresses into that handy spreadsheet you just created. Once that’s done, you’re going to add a few more columns to track the following:
- Gender
- Age (if possible)
- Job Title
- Industry
- Subject line of the email they clicked
You might be wondering,
“But Nadya, how will I possibly find all of this information?”
Well, my dear, this is the part where you harness your deep-rooted P.I. skills and go Jessica Jones on these readers.
I use LinkedIn to track down who my readers are because it provides me with all of the information I need.
Just install the Chrome extension Rapportive and begin typing their email addresses into Gmail.
And just like magic, you will have access to everything you need to know about your reader. Isn’t that both awesome and terrifying?
Use Rapportive to stalk track down as many of your readers as possible. There’s no need to go overboard, but you should aim to fill out this information for at least 100 different people. This will give you a decent sample size so that you can get a general idea of exactly who is clicking on your emails.
Here is a ready to use spreadsheet you can download in case you are too lazy to make your own, like me. Except I did make this one, so I am not lazy.
Download Spreadsheet
Third:
Once you’ve identified a significant sample of your top readers, you can document this information as a chart or an infographic.
Use a filter in your spreadsheet to quantify the variation in gender, job title, age and industry. You can upload this information directly into one of the charts on Venngage, or use Beam if you’re looking for something a bit more simple. Create a different chart for each category.
You should end up with something looking like this:
According to this chart, I can conclude that 40% of my blog’s readers are between the ages of 21 and 33.
After creating a chart for each category, I might conclude that in addition to being between the ages of 21 and 33, the majority of my readers are women, who work in the Marketing and Advertising industry as Social Media Managers. Great! Now I know exactly who to target if I hope to increase my blog traffic and conversions.
“But Nadya, why do I need to document this information into a chart?”
Well, my young grasshoppers, the reason is not only to make the data easier to reference in the future and share with your teammates, but it gives you some solid content so you can write a blog post about your experiences later. Duh!
Although the method for identifying your top readers is an important one, you still need to be able to acquire more of them. Don’t worry! We’ll get to that right away.
Using Online Forums And Groups To Grow Your Audience
I now know that the hypothetical top persona for my blog is a woman between the ages of 21 and 33, who works as a Social Media Manager in the Marketing and Advertising industry. Lucky for me, this is a kind of person who is very vocal in the online space. After all, it is her job.
But where do I specifically go to find her? And how do I build and foster a relationship with this individual?
I’ma tell you right now.
Forums:
Sure, it may seem like lurking the forums is on par with taking a trip back to the 90s, but they are still very widely used to get advice on almost any topic. Think of the last time your iPod stopped working, or perhaps you wanted some more insight on a new restaurant that opened on your street. One of the first places you might look to is a forum online. They are an ideal place to understand what your top personas are in search for, and to share your expertise. Reddit is basically a massive online forum, so consider that a starting point if you are really lost.
Quora:
Quora is like if two forums were to get together and have a baby, and that baby ended up being the ultimate forum. This is a great community and there is always plenty of opportunity to provide value to potential users of your product, and readers of your blog.
Slack:
Another option for you is to create a Slack group and invite your existing top users to participate in conversations with each other and with you. Urge them to invite their colleagues and other individuals they think might be interested in the content you are creating. Chances are that if they are already invested in your content, they will not be opposed to advocating for you.
Social Media Communities:
Twitter chats, LinkedIn groups and Facebook groups are excellent ways to find your top readers. Almost everyone has a Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn account, and in many cases, they have more than one. Social media provides plenty of methods to access smaller and more focused groups. Hootsuite has weekly Twitter chats and has mastered the process for setting one up. Brian Fanzo has even prepared a calendar of multiple Twitter chats taking place on a weekly basis. Thank you, Brian, for your wonderful contribution to the world of digital marketing.
There even exist LinkedIn groups designated to specific interests, conferences and events. You can join the groups that are relevant to your community in order to better understand what struggles your potential community members are facing, and what type of content they are reading and sharing.
Facebook groups are one of the most common means of building relationships within the community. Whether it’s a group sharing their favorite pictures of dogs around the city (yes this group exists), or a group of digital marketers helping to answer each other’s questions, there certainly exists a group for the niche you are hoping to get in touch with. Seriously, there is a group dedicated specifically to Irish bloggers.
It can be overwhelming to keep track of all of the above sources. Even though your audience might be frequenting each one, try to focus on a single channel at a time. It will not only make your life easier, but will allow you to focus more on a smaller group of personas and establish a relationship with them. In the long run, quality is way more important than quantity.
Understanding What Your Audience Is Struggling With
A very important part about growing your audience, is understanding what your existing audience is struggling with. What we did at Venngage was to email our top users and ask them two important questions:
- What are you struggling with?
- What do you do for a living?
This method not only gave us direct insight into the problems our users were facing, but it also strengthened our initial persona research and validated that our little stalking experiment was actually useful.
Naturally, some people did not quite understand the initial question, but for the most part we learned some interesting nuggets and got a lot of new ideas for content.
Thank you, odd stranger, for sharing your struggles.
Although not entirely helpful, we still gained a sense of what this person does for a living.
Planning Out Content To Address Audience Struggles
Despite some of the responses we received after emailing our users, a large percentage of them were in fact useful. They provided us with a huge list of struggles that we would then be able to transform into new high value content. So really, we got them to do all the work for us!
Joking! I’m always working.
But how do you plan out content suggestions from about 5,000 responses and figure out what to write? Naturally, you’re going to want to make sure the content you are writing addresses more than just one person’s problems.
YOU GUESSED IT! I’m going to tell you what to do:
Go back to that spreadsheet you created with your top users. Open up another sheet within your initial spreadsheet and label it “Content Tracking Sheet”.
Now for the exciting part!
Just kidding, it’s not that exciting.
Add the following column headers:
- First Name
- Last Name
- Industry
- Struggle
Categorize your struggle column into five to 10 reoccurring issues your readers are having. This might relate to marketing questions, concerns about your product or tool, pricing and payment issues, or concerns with creating specific content. Try to be specific if you can.
Seems relatively straightforward, right? Once you’ve seen some consistency in the struggles your users are facing,create a drop down menu of those 5 to 10 struggles and then continue adding name after name. What this does is ensure that you maintain the same wording throughout, instead of switching between various terms for referring to the same subject.
I would recommend hiring a VA to do all the data entry for you, especially if you’re planning on documenting responses in the thousands. It’s a relatively menial task and quite frankly, your time can be put to better use. Am I right? I’m right.
Once all your 100 to 5,000+ struggles are entered into your spreadsheet, you can easily filter your list to see which concerns are most prominent among your users. Again, don’t feel like it’s necessary to list every single person’s struggle into your list. You can add a sample portion of about 100 to 200 responses and that will still give you a general idea of the issues your users and readers are facing.
So to summarize:
- Plot name, email, industry and struggles into a spreadsheet
- Filter the “struggles” column to see most common struggles
- Start writing content to address those struggles
Producing That Content Consistently
After you’ve noticed some commonalities in the struggle column, you can start creating content. This is the part where your organization skills kick into gear.
First:
Decide how often you plan on releasing a new blog post. Once a week? Twice a week? Daily?
I’d recommend starting out with once a week. This will keep your tips coming consistently, but you won’t burn through your list of topics too quickly. It will also give you more time to produce really good content.
Second:
It’s not enough to just plot out all your deadlines on a calendar. As Nat Eliason stated in an article on the SumoMe blog, you’ve got to stick to it and lock it in.
If a calendar isn’t your thing, try using Trello or Asana to schedule your posts. But make sure you do stick to that schedule.
Third:
Make sure your blog post follows the rules of P.E.A.C. content. This stands for Practical, Educational, Awe-Inspiring and Credible. When you produce content that provides value for your audience, they will keep coming back for more. By making it entertaining and awe-inspiring, you keep them engaged and excited. And by linking to relevant sources throughout your article, you show that you’ve done your research, and that your content is credible and relevant.
As you get more comfortable with producing the content in your calendar, and you get faster at it, you can start repurposing that information into different forms. Try creating a powerpoint template that you can upload to SlideShare, or use an infographic maker to create a data visualization. Try to expand the reach of your content by catering to the tastes of different people. Besides, some individuals in your audience may prefer visuals over posts that are written.
Personas Are People Too
Getting to know your audience plays a huge part in finding blog traffic success. When you understand who you are writing for, it becomes much easier to produce relevant content. After all, you wouldn’t try to sell chicken to a vegan, right? So stop writing content that doesn’t appeal to your readers.
This is only the first step of many, but a very important one. So I leave you with this information for now, young Padawan.
This article is 1 of 6 parts on increasing blog traffic.
