Adjusting to Your Target Audience

Posted by scoop on November 23rd, 2010 in Design, Technical, Tips, Writing |

Time and again advice is given to bloggers to know or identify their target audience. This is sound advice. However, you should also remember that the reason why you need to know who your target audience/readers are is to be able to adjust to their needs. Here are a several aspects you should consider when thinking of adjusting to your readers’ needs.

Technical knowhow and capabilities – Consider your readers’ technical limitations. If your target audience are techies chances are that you won’t have to consider limiting your blog design to accommodate slow internet connections. However, since they know more about technical matters they will also be more critical of such facts and will probably be using a more varied set of web browsers. If you have audience from the older generation do consider internet connection speed and possible outdated browsers and computer specs. Make sure you also consider the user interface for the sake of usability.

Tone – If you have an industry-specific blog make sure your blog has a tone suitable to the general personality of the people in that industry. For example, a law blog means formal and deep content. An entertainment blog, on the other hand, calls for a laid back writing style.

Length – The length of your blog posts will also be determined by your target audience. In general blog posts shouldn’t be long but if your audience expects in depth discussions then you have to adjust accordingly. A kids blog will obviously need consistently short posts using age-appropriate words.

These are just some of the ways knowing your audience will help you adjust to make your blog more suitable and appealing to your readers. The important thing is that, as soon as you realize that there’s an aspect of your blog you can tweak to serve your readers better, you do something to address your readers’ needs.