Knowing your Market

One of the biggest and most complicated issues I have found when talking to clients is understanding their userbase and target market. Some people have very distinct target demographics broken up into localised age ranges, genders and countries while other clients simply say "everyone". The problem here being, who is everyone?

Why you cant cater for 'everyone'

Sadly you cant cater to everyone and this is especially apparent on the web. You need to break down and try to say 90% of people will fit into this demographic and target those users. The problem here lies with who are your users and most people who say "well I don't know - its anyone who needs [this service]" will not be able to expand and serve their user base effectively.

This is not to say you need to have an exact idea or even a rough idea of who is using your site but it is something you need to monitor constantly. If needed, changing your site's design or content to better suit its users. Most people see a site as either finished or unfinished but its worth having a step back and looking at them as a service rather than a flyer on the web.

What needs to be stressed is a site is an evolutionary thing that should adapt to suit its users and better serve them in time. This is what popular sites do in order to get more popular. Its probably better to look on a site as if its a supermarket, you may or may not be selling things but the following example still applies.

If you look at supermarkets, they have a huge inventory and most orders are unique - everyone wants something different but you start to see trends developing with how people are shopping and then they adapt to the way people use them. Over time, things get moved around to make sure that things are not only in a logical order but they also push people down a certain path that allows the supermarkets to upsell things to you. Supermarkets try to cater for nearly every type of customer and even if they cannot find the exact thing they wanted, they will generally leave with something because 90% of the people will find exactly what they want and the other 10% will either fall in line, or just complain a lot.  With the full honesty - the complainers in that group will come up with most of the problems so catering for them is much more effort and will generally cost you more. 

So what does this have to do with my site?

Understanding your users is so important I cannot stress enough how you have to keep monitoring it. Make sure if you have an analytics package that you look at more than just "how many" visitors viewed your site and look into who they are. I dont mean stalk them but you can see trends appearing with how people use your site and if you have a lot of people from say France visiting your site, possibly consider adding a French translation of some of your content. If you run an online shop and you look into who your market is, you are actually able to increase revenue year on year.

Reacting quickly to these changes is paramount. You cannot sit back assuming that next year you will have the same visitors or if you've killed off your site altogether as it was not suiting the target audience.

Over the next couple of months, all our customers at Prompt will be recieving a free account on GoSquared which will enable them to better respond to their changing userbase. If you have yet to play around with GoSquared, I suggest you sign up for a free account.

The GoSquared Live Dashboard

On a slightly related note - its James Gill's birthday and him being one of the co-founders of GoSquared I thought I'd mention my favorite analytics company!