How well do your relationships with those who buy from you look?

I will call you bullshit if you answer anything other than “not as well as I should”,

You can’t have enough knowledge of your prospects. Your top priority should be their needs, wants, and preferences.

Many CROs are focused on the small details. A red button with black text converts more than a green button with red text. Font weight can draw the eye and increase conversions. Also, squeeze pages or pop-ups are better for growing your list.

It is a constant battle to get that extra 0.01% conversion. This is how most CROs make their consulting paychecks.

What if I said it was pointless? It doesn’t matter what color your buttons are. The thickness of your text is irrelevant. Split testing your squeeze pages is a waste of time.

You need to focus on something much more important than that.

[Tweet: “You might be wasting time splitting testing your squeeze pages. Read why …”]

While optimizing for conversions doesn’t necessarily mean you should waste your time, we all know that button design matters. What I’m saying is that the color of your buttons, and any other tweaks that you make, are useless if you don’t do the crucial first step to improve conversions.

Let’s take a moment to think about the golden rule in copywriting…

It is not “Be creative.”

It’s not “Be witty.”

It is not “Be super persuasive.”

These areas are all important. However, being able to implement them effectively requires the golden rule: Know your target audience.

This is not limited to the basic information of names, addresses, and places. It is important to understand their preferences, likes, and what type of content they are interested in. You won’t have any success selling to them if you don’t have the right answers.

To understand your audience and identify the areas where they need what you offer, you must have a good understanding of them. This knowledge is crucial as you might end up selling kindergarten services to seniors or rogaine for adolescent girls (I pray there isn’t).

Understanding your audience is key to gaining more conversions.

This is why we have created this guide: How to get a better understanding of your audience’s age, gender, interests, and opinions so that you can tailor your marketing to attract the right customers.

[Tweet: “Understanding your audience will help you gain higher conversions.”]

Review Mining

We’ll start with the old-fashioned gem of review mining. This method is extremely efficient and has been around for many decades. It was once based on user surveys and questionnaires.

You can also take surveys if that’s what you prefer. There are many great services such as Survey Monkey or Google Consumer Surveys. But we don’t care about what your customers say. We want to hear what they have to say about potential and existing customers.

It’s easier than ever to find out what customers think about the product and compare it to other products with review sites such as Yelp or independent retailers such as Amazon.

Joanna Wiebe, Copyhackers, has written two amazing articles about review mining that are well worth your time. This method allowed her to gain a deeper understanding of her audience and also to lift a headline from a review, which led to a more than 400% increase in CTR.

Effective review mining can be summarized as: Read as many reviews for your product as you can and for those that are related to it. This will help you to identify common themes.

While going through reviews, you will want to note the most recurring opinions in the following three areas.

1. Memorable phrases
2. What people want
3. What people hate

After you have your table, it is time to reduce the number of options so that only the most common and shared opinions are left. You can create killer customer personas by grouping similar opinions and distilling them into simpler overviews.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics can provide some amazing reports on the type of people who visit your website, as long as they exceed certain traffic thresholds.

Analytics can be very complicated. Many people are lost in the sea of data and don’t know what to do.

Although I would love to share a comprehensive overview of Google Analytics, I will focus on the areas that I consider most important for an accurate overview of your audience. This information can be further enhanced with advanced segments and custom dashboards that monitor specifics. But that’s another story.

Gender and age

What makes up the majority of your site visitors and who are they? Are you attracting 55-64-year old males or 18-24-year-old females? These two demographics are not the same audience, so you wouldn’t market to them in the same way. Tell me why you wouldn’t.

Localization

I am taking a chance and assuming that most readers have websites or businesses aimed at English-speaking customers. While the US, UK, and Australia all have a common language, there are many cultural differences to be aware of.

While copy may work well for converting in one country, it might not be the best for converting overseas. Knowing where your primary buyers are is important so that you can tailor your copy.

Interests

This is a great feature to help you create a better picture of your audience. You should focus on In-Market Segments and Affinity Categories.

These Affinity Categories can reach new prospects and make them aware of your brand. These are broad categories such as Technophiles or TV Lovers. These prospects would be the best to start your funnel.

These people are more focused on a particular product or service and are called In-Market Categories. These people are likely to be closer to your end of the funnel and might be ready to buy.

These insights will help you to tailor your PPC advertising plan to appeal to the right audience.

Referral traffic > Acquisition

Finally, I enjoy looking into the primary sources for referral traffic. Partly, I like to see who is referring to the site (gotta feed my ego!). It tells me a lot of information about my audience.

It’s safe to assume that someone who refers to lots of traffic is doing something right. They are not only attracting high-quality traffic, but they have also been able to gain the trust from their audience.

Referring to someone is a sign that you trust them. If you don’t believe a friend is capable of doing the job, you wouldn’t recommend them for a job. Employers won’t listen if they don’t trust your recommendations. You are referring to traffic because they have seen something worth it and their traffic trusts your judgment.

I will go back to the source of the referral and take apart their website to see what our common audience likes.

You should already have an accurate picture of your customer personas at this stage. Although reviewing mining and analytics data may be sufficient to help you create accurate customer personae – I know of people who have done it entirely off analytics.

Let’s not just call it a day, but let’s pat ourselves on our backs. Let us try to flesh out the last parts of our audience using a bit of social media data.

Social Media

It would be difficult to find anyone not on social media these days. Every man and every dog has an account. It’s a wonderful place to do some audience research.

We will be looking at Twitter and Facebook as both have their analytics service, which can provide valuable insights.

Twitter Analytics

Beautiful is the Twitter Analytics dashboard. The details of your followers’ interests and hobbies are hidden behind this stunning facade.

There are many great insights and reports under the Tools, Home, Tweets, and Twitter Cards tabs. But for now, we are interested in the Followers tab.

Scroll down to see something similar to the one above.

You’ll find a list with top interests on the left, while you’ll also see a list with unique and top interests on the right. In the middle, you’ll find gender and other influential people.

I prefer using data from Google to plan future projects. However, it is worth checking out how much data Twitter has in common with Google.

The majority of users will see the same data on both platforms. However, if you notice any differences, you should adjust your Twitter activities accordingly.

Let’s suppose that a Google report shows that most of your site visitors are located in the US. However, your primary Twitter audience is located in the UK. Instead of sending links to a US-optimized landing page, it would be better to send more links to the UK audience. This same approach works for different interests on different platforms.

Once you have played with the content, you can now see if it resonates with your audience.

You’ll find reports under the Twitter tab that show how successful your tweets were.

You should measure impressions and conversions, and if you are paying for advertising on Twitter how successful your campaign has been.

Twitter Analytics is not able to provide enough comparisons or drill down into demographic data. While I believe it is an extremely useful service, I would love to see more improvements shortly. We will have to make our tables for comparison and to take a more generalized approach.

Facebook Insights

There are no prizes for guessing the Facebook Insights’ purpose!

While the primary service works the same way as Google Analytics and Twitter, there are differences in the way the data is collected. You can not only check the data provided by Facebook users (both your friends and those of others), but you can also view the information gathered from other national data collection agencies.

This amazing collection of data will give you a better idea about where to spend your money.

Facebook Insights, in my opinion, is far better than Twitter analytics. It’s also much more accessible and easy to use. Insights will be used in the same manner as Twitter Analytics. You can compare data with your Google Analytics reports. The increased functionality of Insights will allow you to concentrate on different segments and highlight areas where your Facebook audience is different from your main site.

This is my favorite way to find out when your fans are online. Although it’s not a huge service, knowing when your audience engages most is important.

What’s Next?

After you have gathered, sorted, and analyzed your audience data, you can segment your audience and personalize your copy.

While everyone in your audience is likely to be interested in the same theme, they are all very different. Nobody likes being treated as an individual in a large group. We are all individuals, and we want to be treated accordingly.

Let’s say you manage a Miami digital marketing website. Your audience will include younger people who are just starting in digital marketing in Las Vegas. They’ll also be more experienced marketers who require top-level advice.

It doesn’t just come down to your age or experience. While digital marketing in NYC might be your main focus, you will have people looking for advice on email sequences, SEO consultations, and social media management tools.

You can follow the traditional path of catering to your primary audience. Many businesses have had success doing this. You can segment your audience to create a copy that is specific to each segment. This will result in a general increase in conversions, rather than a slight increase in one particular area.

How deep will you go to get to know your audience? Are you a Google-Analytics-only marketer or do you consider your major audience-gathering platforms? You might be one of those people who prefer intuition over research.