It pays to know your target audience

Having a good understanding of who your product or service is aimed at is fundamental for success in both PR and SEO. At Partners, our strategies focus on maintaining your current audience, engaging new individuals in that demographic, and identifying new niches in which your product or service may be relevant. To do this, we first need to gain an extensive understanding of the backgrounds, needs and desires of these demographics – if we didn’t, we couldn’t do an effective job.

In SEO, as far as keywords and linkbuilding go, you might think it’s as simple as trying to rank for whatever you can, even if it isn’t relevant.  After all, as long as your site is getting traffic, it doesn’t matter that you’re a nail technician trying to rank for mortgage advice, right? This has actually been shown to be completely untrue – in fact, search engines take relevance into consideration when evaluating your backlinks, meaning that your site could be penalised if not enough of your links are relevant to what you do. However, if you’re being linked to by sites appropriate to your target audience’s interests, not only will your site be looked upon favourable by search engines, but you can expect a better clickthrough rate and improved brand awareness in a relevant niche – both markers of successful public relations.

It’s well worth dedicating some time to pulling some information together about your customer segments before anyone starts work on your marketing strategy. A lot of conclusions can be drawn from your existing customer data, but if you’d like a more detailed picture try conducting a customer survey, or even use a profiling tool like Mosaic to get a sense of your clients’ backgrounds.