How a good audience analysis will improve your website

During the planning phase of your new website, after you've done some ground work on setting clear objectives and defining the mission of your site, it is equally important that you spend some time looking at your audience and study how it will impact your site.

In the last few months, I have been involved in a few projects related to new websites or website redesigns, and I found that working with my colleagues on this particular exercise was very helpful to understand what the website was supposed to achieve and to ensure we didn't forget anyone in the equation.



Here is a table that I have been using explaining what I mean. The idea is to segment the target audience and analyze each segment separately by asking a few questions. Of course there might be some common answers across the various segments, which is fine.

• Audience segment:
  It might be that you are only addressing one audience, but in most cases, you will have two or three, or maybe more.


• Description:
  Here you should try to describe each segment as much as you can, using a full sentence, but also using characteristics like gender, age group, nationality, etc..


• Current Situation:
  This will help determine the current relationship you have with each segment and see where there is room for improvement.


• Communications objectives:
  What are you trying to do with your website? Educate people, convince them to buy a product, make connections? Try and use active verbs (educate, inform, convince, etc..)


• What they want to learn on your website:
  This will help you define the content of your site.


• What they want to do on your website:
  This will help you define the functions of your site.


• Key messages:
  What is your positioning and unique selling proposition for each segment? Write some simple messages, you can always refine them later.

To illustrate this exercise I will take as an example a car repair shop. Let's see how the audience would be divided and what we could learn from it.

[ws_table id="1"]

As you can see from the examples I have included, this little exercise is not too difficult to do but is very useful to approach your project from an outsider perspective and under various angles. I have also used a similar exercise for preparing a communication plan, and in fact it could be used for any marketing or communications project.

Do you spend some time doing this kind of exercises? What other aspects would you add in the table? Feel free to add your suggestions in the comments.