When dealing with websites the audience is the most important part to having a successful site. Understanding your audience helps the content creator understand what kind of content to create, how much of it their readers want to see, and the language that their readers relate to.
The seven steps to understanding your audience are:
- List your major audiences
- Gather information about your audiences
- List major characteristics of each audience
- Gather your audiences’ questions, tasks, stories
- Use your information to create personas
- Include the persona’s goals and tasks
- Use your information to write scenarios for your site
In listing your major audiences you need to ask yourself two questions. How do viewers identify themselves in regard to your content? What about my site visitors will tell me what content the site needs and how to write that content? After asking yourself these two question it can become much easier to group and list viewers and understand their goals when they enter your site.
When dealing with gathering information about your audience you have to know them and their realities. In doing so you will have better bearings on what content they find pertinent to them, resulting the content that you need to post on your site. You can gather this information by listening to your viewers and reading comments and emails that they send you.
When listing major characteristics of each audience important factors to take into consideration are key phrases, quotes, emotions, values, technology, social and cultural environments, and demographics. Being a business major I equate this to understanding your target market.
Gathering your audiences’ questions, tasks, and stories is fairly easy to understand. If you don’t look at the feed back that you audience is giving you then how would you ever know what it is that they want to read? So by doing your homework and responding to these questions you can build bonds with readers and increase credibility.
After accumulating all of this information about your audiences’ it would be a shame to not put it to good use, right? Well one way to go about doing this is by creating personas. This is no different than creating characters like in a book or movie. This technique also allows audiences to relate more closely to the topic at large.
After you’ve gathered your information and created your personas it is finally time to put together full fledged scenarios. Scenarios are short stories that describe the events that your readers want to hear about. If you can create realistic scenarios with useful information and an end resolution than you will definitely increase your readership.
CMD Communications Blog 