Social Media
Use social media to find out about your audience. Look at the individual profiles of the people who follow your brand. The best site for doing this is Facebook since it has fairly robust profiles. Profiles can tell you:
⦁ Who they are
⦁ What they like
⦁ Their jobs, locations, ages, and family
⦁ General opinions
There is a goldmine of information available on social media. You can also look at people’s posts to see what they’re interested in and what questions they ask. This can give you greater insights into their needs.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is the current version of the old Google Webmaster Tools. You can sign up for this free service from Google and it presents a wide variety of metrics about your website and the behavior of your visitors.
Google Search Console tells you what keyword searches bring people to your site, how much time they’re spending on each page, what links they click on, and trends over time. This shows you how people are interacting with your website. For example, if people spend a great deal of time on a particular page, you know that this is the type of content they’re looking for.
Conduct Online Surveys
The oldest and most effective method for collecting data about a target market is to conduct surveys and interviews. This used to be a costly endeavor for companies, which had to physically get focus groups together or convince people to talk to them over the phone. But it’s extremely easy to do now online.
You can conduct surveys any way you have contact with your audience. They can be conducted through social media or email. You can approach people on online forums to see if they’d answer some questions. If you make your surveys short, only asking a few questions, you’re more likely to get responses. If you offer an incentive such as a free piece of content, you can get people to do longer surveys.
Monitor Your Content’s Performance
The best way to learn about your audience is to start presenting them with free content and see how they interact with it. You’ll quickly see which pieces are most popular and which drive the most engagement. For each piece that’s successful, try to determine what it was about the piece that people liked, and try to repeat that. When your audience ignores a piece, try to figure out why and don’t do it again.
Creating a Persona
Take the data you gather and create a persona. This is a single person to whom you’ll aim all of your marketing efforts. You may have more than one, but it helps to stay focused on a single type for the best results.