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Your target audience – your customer – the buyer – the person who will hand over their hard-earned dollars to you. Who are they? Market research is an essential ingredient to running a successful website and can impact your SEO efforts.

A target audience profile is a detailed assessment of your visitors characteristics, attitudes and behaviors. This information can be broken down into two main categories: demographics and psychographics.

Demographics describes who your visitor is, including their age, gender, occupation, location, marital status, income, education level, and nationality.
Psychographics describes why your visitors act the way they do. For example, you might determine that you have price-sensitive customers who choose the least expensive option. Another example is of trend-conscious customers who prefer the newest, most fashionable option. Likewise, the early adopter is someone who is open to choosing new, unproven options.

Market Research

By doing market research and profiling the people you expect to visit your website or buy the product you are selling, it’s important to understand exactly how to effectively communicate the products features, benefits and availability.

Once you know your audience, you can tailor blog posts and page titles for better click-through rates.

When you profile your audience correctly, you can save time and money by minimizing missteps stemming from inconsistent knowledge about the customer base.

Target Audience Profiling

market research

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Who is your target audience? What type of person are they? What is the purpose of their search? You may need to create multiple profiles to cover different types of demographics.

In the market research world, visitors can usually be segregated into two categories: decision-makers and influencers.

It is usually the decision-maker that will purchase your product and mostly isn’t interested in telling the world about it. Meanwhile, the influencer may share and discuss your product with their inner circle by clicking on your sharing buttons (go ahead, influencers – like and tweet this post!).

The decision-maker see’s what the influencer is enjoying and ultimately clicks through to your site to read a post or make a purchase based on the inherent recommendation from the influencer.

Let’s say, for example, we’ve decided to target the keyword phrase “homemade dog food recipes”. Who is searching for this and why?

This is all a bit of guesswork so we’ll make some bullet points to make it clearer.

WHO

More females than males.
35 – 60 years old.
Occupation: Stay-at-home.
Status: Married.
Income level: below average to average.
Education level: K12 (High School, no University).

WHY are people searching for “homemade dog food recipes”?

To save money
They enjoy cooking.
They don’t trust big brands.

Regardless of how much information you gather, it’s usually not enough. You almost always have to make some assumptions and estimates based on your experience. It’s just part of the SEO process.

In this example, I estimated the average age of females searching for “homemade dog food recipes” to be 35 – 60 years old. I’m guessing the younger crowd may be more focused on socializing, education or full-time work rather than cooking.

I am guessing they are staying at home where they have time to cook while their partner goes out to work, ie a married couple.

Don’t rush your market research and customer profiling process. The information you gather will be the foundation for many significant decisions, so it’s worth doing well the first time.

Once we have an idea of who the customer is, we can tailor our website design, graphics, colors, imagery, the copy (all the text on the page including page titles and meta tags) and how best to present offers that encourage visitors to purchase the product or just visit your website.

Targeting the right keywords in your backlinking strategy is also a vital component to market research. I use Market Samurai to analyze SEO competition and find untapped keywords.

When the targeted visitor lands on your site, they will feel like they’re in the right place and you have “captured” them.

Disclaimer: Links to 3rd party sites included within this article denoted with /go/ in the URL may result in commission being earned if you decide to make a purchase.

Tags: Search engine optimizationseotarget audiencetarget audience profile

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Personal Budgeting Tips To Get Your Money In Order

Sometimes just hearing the word ‘Personal Budgeting Tips’ is enough to make us shudder. Budgets have been given a dull reputation by overzealous financial fanatics, yet they are nothing to be scared of and neither should they be avoided. Personal budgeting is something all of us should do.

In fact, the great entrepreneur Robert Kiyosaki even said,

“It is important to create a budget and stay faithful to it. Keeping track of what you spend is the best way to avoid buying things you cannot afford.”

A personal budget is an accurate plan of how much money we have coming in and going out each week, fortnight or month, depending on the timeframe we choose to set. It lays out in black and white all income, fixed expenses and discretionary spending money we may have.

A budget is a great way of keeping track of where we are spending money. Once we know where our money is going, we are able to tweak our spending habits to gain more control over our money.

In order to create a workable budget, we first need to know and do these four personal budgeting tips:

1. What is our income?

Generally our income is our wages, but this can also include any interest from savings accounts and any social welfare benefits.

The figure that is important to note is our net income, this is the amount we have left in our hands, so to speak, after any taxes are paid.

It would be helpful to record your budget on a excel spreadsheet or notepad to make it easier to read. When doing so, place your net income dollar figure at the top of the page, as this is the amount we need to start with to create a working budget.

2. What are our fixed expenses?

Fixed expenses include payments like rent or mortgages, insurance and rates, utilities such as power, phone, internet and gas, transportation expenses such as petrol, insurances, registration or train and bus ticket costs and finally any other debts or loans like student loans, car payments or hire purchases.

Other possible fixed expenses will change depending on your circumstances, such as needing to pay for childcare or any gym or club memberships you might have.

These fixed expenses do not vary much, if any, each week/fortnight/month. This makes is easy to budget for them, or in the case of petrol, to make an accurate estimation.

Simply subtract each expense from your net income and you are left with your discretionary income.

You can create a column for each of these areas under your total income figure and this makes it easier to see the amounts of money that each area spends.

3. What is our discretionary income?

Our discretionary income is a nice name given to the money we have left after we have paid all our bills.

However, our discretionary income is not just for buying clothes, entertainment or shopping money, but also the more fundamental things such as groceries and pay for doctor appointments, for example.

So, record the dollar amount of your discretionary income underneath the fixed income expenses columns and then we move onto identifying our variable expenses.

4. What are our variable expenses?

Variable expenses include everything else we might use our money for such as groceries, entertainment, regular saving deposits, clothing, medical appointments, haircuts, vet bills, lawn mowing and any little shopping spree splurges we might have.

Everybody’s variable expenses are different, so take the time to record each item in its own column underneath the dollar figure of your discretionary income.

Then, it is time to allocate a fixed amount to each area and make an educated guess of how much you usually spend.

Now comes the fun bit, you get to add up all your estimated variable expenses and see if you have enough discretionary spending money to buy the things you want!

The goal is to have your fixed and variable expenses equal your net income. If you have spent too much, simply reduce the dollar figures you have allocated for your variable expenses. While if you have surplus money, add it to your saving deposits.

A personal budget should be seen as our friend. Yes that does sound weird, but a budget allows us to see where we are spending money and gives us the chance to change our spending behaviors.

Don’t worry if your budget does not work the first time you use it, instead tweak it until it fits. After all, one size does not fit all.

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Tags: discretionary income financial budget personal budget personal budgeting tips save money variable expenses

Why Market Research Is Vital For SEO

Why Market Research Is Vital For SEO

Market Research

Target Audience Profiling

Personal Budgeting Tips To Get Your Money In Order