How to Find Your Blog’s Target Audience

Blogs are an excellent way to introduce or share your insights on new products and services. What's more, they are easy to start and require little to no upfront financial investment. While you can write a blog post without spending money, you will still need to invest precious time. 

Did you know that the average blog post takes about four hours to research and write? And, out of the millions of blogs that crop up online each year, most will never find an audience or generate any sales.

Perhaps the biggest reason why blogs fail is that they don't have a clearly defined target audience.

Lots of businesses simply pick a topic and run with it without taking the time and effort needed to identify and grow an audience.

Before making the first entry on your new blog, here's a guide to help you figure out your target audience:

What’s a Target Audience?

Generally speaking, a target audience is a group of people defined by demographics or personality types and interests. They're people within your niche who are most likely to find your content relevant and helpful for them. 

Here are some of the most common target audience demographics considered by businesses:

• Age
• Gender
• Race
• Location
• Education level
• Marital status
• Occupation
• Annual income

Keep in mind that the terms "target audience" and "target market" are often interchanged, but they are actually distinct from one another. A target market is your group of potential customers, which can be quite broad. On the other hand, a target audience is a specific group within your target market. 

For example, a mountain biking blog's target market may be mountain bike enthusiasts, but their target audience could be mountain bikers ages 50 and above, like this e-biking blog for seniors. You don’t see blogs like that every day!

Why Do Target Audiences Matter? 

Helps Create a Persona

Understanding your target audience helps you develop a reader persona. The persona is a stand-in for a member of your audience — both of which share similar traits.

One example is this particular mommy blog, which doesn't give parenting tips like others do. Instead, it helps interested mothers start blogging, and connects with fellow blogger moms through their shared experiences as parents.

If you like, you can have around three personas in your blog to portray the different kinds of people in your target audience. 

Make Better Content

After finding your target audience and developing relatable personas, the process of creating high-quality content for your blog becomes simpler and takes less time. You'll  know what kind of message resonates best with your readers, making it easier to plan appropriate blog topics and figure out what kind of writing tone and visuals to use. 

Boosts Popularity, Subscriptions & Sales

The better your content, the more people will share it, subscribe to your blog, and buy your products. You'll also find that other blogs will link to your content, too. This gives you more credibility and further improves your search engine rankings, which can bring even more people to your content. 

How to Find Your Target Audience

Self-Reflect

Many people write for a niche that they love or at least know a lot about. If that's you, then you're probably a member of the audience you're trying to target. Your staff could be as well. As such, consider making a persona out of yourself. Using a list of your own interests, lifestyle habits, and even your relationship status, you can start aiming for similar folks. 

Use Analytics Tools

Tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights can help you find out what kind of people are engaging with your blog or your social media pages. They provide you with several demographic breakdowns, including age, gender, and location. You can even learn what times they're most active online, which can help you to optimize your blog post schedule. 

Make the Most Of Social Media

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are powerful mediums for attracting customers and gaining detailed analytical information about them. There are three billion people around the world using social media today, and somewhere in that huge numbers is your target audience! You can participate in groups that are in your niche and learn more about the people in them. The posts you make for social media will reveal what kind of content works and what doesn't.

Leaders in your niche are often very active on social media. You can study the type of followers they have, which probably has your target audience, too.

Check Out Other Blogs

Depending on your niche, there's a good chance other blogs have already made content on things you also want to write about. But that's not really a bad thing. You can use this as an opportunity to observe their audience, especially those who comment on content that's close to your chosen topics. It's also a chance for you to review your work and try to improve your future content's quality and uniqueness. 

Study Your Current Customers

One of the simplest ways to know your business blog's target audience is to take a look at the customers that you already have. Don't be afraid to ask them questions like why they like your products. Even just some friendly small talk can go a long way to understanding them better. Chances are you already have an idea about their lifestyle and hobbies. This way, you can write your blog posts with an existing client in mind. You could even tell an anecdote about them to help you connect better with readers. 

With these tips in mind, you'll be well on your way to finding your target audience and creating well-written, relatable content for them.

But, if you don't have the writing chops or the time to grow your blog on your own, count on MyBlogDealer to do the job for you. Schedule a consultation today, and we'll  help you build a blog content strategy tailored to your business goals.