Identify Target Users

We are nearing the end of the Website Strategy walkthrough, but there is still one very important piece left. Most the previous articles focused on thinking internally such personal goals and brainstorming — things that ‘you’ want to see on the site. Now we need to do some external thinking and consider what other people would want from our website. For this task, I’m going to break it up into two manageable pieces: first Identify Target Users and then Profile Target Users. So for today’s post, I’m going to show what I did to identify my target users and leave some thoughts about what you can do when identifying yours.

This is a post in my Building a Website Series and Case Study. This is the fourth post explaining How to Develop a Website Strategy.

Identifying Target Users for My Site

Now just think about the various types of people who should land on your website. Since my website is about Gwinnett County here is what I came up with:

My Target Users basically fell into one of two main groups, those who live in Gwinnett and those that don’t live within Gwinnett. Then I broke down the types of people from both of the groups that would visit.

After that quick bout of note taking I then expanded it a bit under each user type and did a brief profile of them:

Thoughts About Identifying Target Users

To identify your websites target users, you should look at what you have envisioned so far and ask two questions, “Who does this appeal to as it is right now?” and “Who do I want to visit my site?”. Hopefully both questions have most of the same people in it. If not, you might need to go back a few steps and start to change a few things. Be sure to bounce your questions off your monetization strategies as well. If you plan to have local business buy advertising you not only need to make sure you are attracting the same people that are likely to click on ads to local businesses, but also you have to attract local business owners to go to your site and convince them to purchase an ad spot.

Something I did when I was in this stage was to simply look at the people around me and profile them. Is the Mom carting around four kids going do find something they like on my site? Do I even care if she does or doesn’t? Is the business man in the three-piece suit going to find anything of interest on my site? Do I need people like him visiting to make my site a success?

For my county guide website, upon reflecting on these notes I realize a couple of groups I should have included so that I could better target them – the social network leaders and local politicians. I need to find some way to make my site more appealing to those in my county who have the most twitter and facebook followers to make it more likely that they will spread my site content out to their networks. Similar the benefit gained from the socially connected types ability to spread my site’s content virtually, local politicians or board seat members can spread my site via their physical networks I’ll make them down as being identified here and go on into profiling them further in my next post about Profiling Target Users for Building a Website.