Identifying your audience

Before you develop your website to plan an internet marketing campaign, you need to clarify exactly who you are and what are you targeting. Although the Internet allows users to customize information for their own purposes, this information needs to be there in the first place. To know what to put online, you therefore need to know who is going to be using that information. For instance, if you are targeting audience abroad, you should consider different language options, and if you plan to sell products on your site, currency converters.

You can differentiate between your various audiences by using the following criteria:

Geography: even the Internet is global you need to plan whether you are going international because there are many different cultural and ethical differences. Your product and descriptions many want to customize accordingly. And also you need to consider about the shipping if it is a tangible product because shipping cost may sometimes exceed the price of your product and there are some countries that are not allowed to ship some products. For instance, there are some African countries that cant ship any products at all.

Gender: there are some products that are specially for men or women. For instance, if you are plan to sell ladies underwire, then you must entirely think about the desire of women and current trends.

Age: this is very important factor to consider before you design your website. Now days majority of the internet users are young peoples. But that doesn’t mean there are elderly and children surfing the net. If your products are for young people then you have to design your website accordingly and if it is for children then you must design the website with more colors as well as with big fonts, etc.

Net knowledge: you cant expect all users to have an even fair knowledge about the Internet. There are some people that doesn’t have much knowledge at all. So you have to consider about this very much. Distinguishing between net novices and veterans will help you present online material in an appropriate way.

Company awareness: if your business is based offline, you should distinguish between people who already know your business and those who will find out about you via the net. For people who don’t know about your business, you have to create the website to attract people at the very first sight. If it is not they will not trust your site until they find out about you in some other way.

Another point you need to remember is that paying customers may not be your only audience. Competitors, the media, investors, job hunters, and other information seekers may also want to use your website, and should therefore be created for.

As you see, planning and researching is very important before you start designing your website. If you don’t plan your site well, you may not get the results you expected from your website.