Your organization can have a sleek, modern website with all the bells and whistles, but if you don’t understand your audience, it won’t perform well. You have to know WHAT makes them tick and WHY, and HOW they respond to different situations to create a more engaging and impactful website.
Here are six tactics to better define and target your audience for improved website engagement:
Send out “web engagement surveys” to better understand your current user and member base, what they think about your website, and their perceived engagement on your site.
Surveys include a series of multiple-choice or open-ended questions that collect specific information based on your website engagement goals. Today, you can easily develop a range of surveys using online tools such as Survey Monkey and Google Forms. These surveys can then be sent via email or traditional post, or conducted virtually, in-person, or over the phone.
The feedback you gain from web engagement surveys or questionnaires can provide valuable insights from your most engaged users. Their participation in your survey is proof of their level of engagement in your organization. Use these insights to make your website more engaging for your entire membership base and new web visitors.
Beyond key demographic data and how they may describe themselves, you can also find out how helpful your content is to your members’ careers, opinions and ratings of your website on specific factors, what prompts or motivates users to visit your website, and much more.
Who is your competition? What is their website strategy? And how does your website compare? By checking out the competition, you can figure out how to provide more value to your niche audience base.
Some basic competitive analysis (also called comparative analysis) is one of the first things you should do when optimizing your website for increased engagement. It’s also something you should do on an ongoing basis to help you better target and engage your web visitors.
A good place to start is with a Website SWOT Analysis. A website SWOT analysis helps you develop a winning website engagement strategy by uncovering all of your internal website strengths and weaknesses, as well as external Threats and Opportunities based on your competition and user base. Go into as much detail as possible.
Another visual you should create when researching your competition is a competitive diagram (comparative diagram). These diagrams can help you develop high-level strategies to provide more value to your web visitors.
Here’s how to accomplish this:
Depending on the goal of your competitive diagram, you could look at things like content types, blog elements, navigation, site categorization, images, or filters. Here’s a short competitive diagram on website usability.
5. Use your competitive diagram to identify differences between your site and your competitors.
6. Identify specific recommendations to gain a competition advantage and increase usability scores.
Focus groups and user interviews are two powerful ways to discover what your members want on your site and what would keep them interested.
If done right, they can allow you to dig into the minds of your audience and form conclusions about their psychographics (e.g. attitudes and aspirations). Use these insights to speak to their needs and pain points on your website to improve user engagement.
Focus groups are somewhat informal approaches to assess user needs and feelings. They work by bringing together a small group of six to eight of your web users to discuss the content and structural and design features of your site that they like and don’t like. Focus groups are moderated and typically last about two hours.
The focus-group session should ideally feel open and free-flowing for participants, but the moderator should maintain the focus. It’s best if he or she follows a pre-planned structure and script of specific issues and sets goals for the type of information you want to collect.
User interviews require the interviewer to be a skilled active listener, which takes quite a bit of experience. When done right, interviews can supply a goldmine of insight into the thoughts, motivations, and pain points that guide user decision-making and behavior.
To get the most out of your user interviews, the interviewer must:
Personas are semi-fictional characters that represent the different segments of your target users and their different archetypes such as their patterns of thought, behavior, and language.
Personas allow you to identify and harness your audience’s passion to create meaningful engagements on your website and across their digital experiences with your organization.
Here’s a persona template that you could customize for each of your audience groups.
Personas are created and refined based on what you "know" about your audience, user interviews, surveys, focus groups, web/behavioral analytics, and journey maps.
Journey maps show you how current and potential users move through your website(s) and marketing channels or “funnels,” from point A to point B.
With journey maps, you can see how people engage with your digital interfaces at every touchpoint, allowing you to visualize their mindset, behavior, and frustrations so you can tweak your website to keep your audience happy and engaged.
Here are tips and best practices for creating a user journey map:
Use these journey maps as well as your web engagement surveys, competitive analysis, site surveys, and personas to better address your audience and web visitors challenges, goals, and expectations.
Incorporate the language that they use and make it easier for your users to get the information they’re looking for or complete what they’re trying to do. Better targeting your website users in these ways will lead to better experiences and more engagement.
At Brightfind, we help our clients conduct meaningful user research and use those insights to improve engagement with their website and ultimately, user satisfaction.
Check out our Ultimate Guide to Websites for Associations to learn more about how we can help you engage and convert users to members using your website.