How to Discover What Your Target Audience Wants

As an author, it helps to know what your target audience wants from you.

This may apply somewhat to the books you write, but even more so to the content you post on your author platform.

What kind of material is likely to get your readers to pay attention?

Are You Ignoring What Your Target Audience Wants?

It’s amazing how easily we writers can get this wrong. But we’re not the only ones.

I went to one of my favorite pizza buffets a few weeks ago. As usual, I took my laptop with me to get some work done while I was there. I headed for one of the joint’s convenient little cubbies to work and had gotten all settled when the young hostess came over and asked me to move.

“We’re cleaning up this section,” she explained. “Can you move over to that side?”

She pointed to the opposite side of the restaurant where there were no private cubbies, only large tables and open-ended booths. I wasn’t happy about it, but I moved as she requested.

She obviously didn’t care about what I wanted.

Later I was standing looking over the vast varieties of pizzas available when she came by, took a quick look at me, and said, “Oh, are you looking for the cookie dough?” Without waiting for me to answer, she said, “It will be out in a minute!” then smiled wide and hurried off.

Again, she had no idea what I wanted. Cookie dough was the last flavor on my mind. I chose my pizza and went back to my table.

A few minutes later she came beaming over and said, “That cookie dough is ready now!” I nodded and smiled and kept working and hoped she’d stay away.

When I left the café a while later, I was thinking about how we writers can be just like that hostess—cheery and perhaps wanting to please our readers (at least some of the time), but completely clueless about what they really want.

It’s Important to Determine What Your Target Audience Wants

Whether you are a seasoned author platform-builder or just getting started, you need to know what your readers want if you hope to deliver it to them.

I’m not saying you should “write to the market” where your books are concerned, but when it comes to your blog posts, social media posts, videos, and other platform-building content, it can help to have a good understanding of what your target audience wants and needs.

Discovering the answer to that question isn’t easy. It requires a lot of research and action, but over time, you can gain a better idea of what your target audience responds to, and with that information, do a better job of delivering it to them.

The more you can give your audience what they want, the more loyal they are likely to be to you and your work. In the end, we all hope that means increased book sales.

7 Ways to Find Out What Your Target Audience Wants

There are many different ways to find out what your readers are looking for. Experiment with several methods and you’ll find those that work particularly well for you.

1. Examine Your Google Analytics to Determine What Content is Performing Well

If you don’t have Google Analytics on your website, fix that immediately. (There are several articles online that tell you how to do it—it’s not difficult. Here’s a good one.)

Once you have it set up, you can check it as often as you like to see how your content is doing. It will tell you which blog posts are most popular, how many people are visiting your site, how long they typically stay, and more.

I like to use Google Analytics to find my top-performing blog posts. The figures tell me what my audience is interested in, but they also show me whether I’m attracting the type of readers I want to attract via Google searches. If not, I know I have some work to do with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If that sounds like Greek to you, check out this article on SEO for beginners.

2. Survey Your Readers and Ask Them What They Want

There’s no better way to find out what your readers are interested in than to simply ask them. You can run different types of surveys to gather your information. I like using Survey Monkey as it’s free and simple, but there are other options too.

Survey your email subscribers via Mailchimp or whatever newsletter provider you use, ask them a question on your social media platform, or put up a poll on Twitter or Instagram. You can set up a five-question survey, or even ask your readers outright, “Hey, do you have a burning question for me? I’m listening!” It helps if you do this regularly, like every six months or so, so you can begin to see trends in the data.

In my Writing and Wellness survey this year, for example, I saw a definite uptick in people interested in posts about book marketing and platform-building. This is the sort of information I can then use to turn around and create my editorial calendar for the year.

To sweeten the pot and get more responses, offer your responders a chance to win a prize of some sort. This also helps them stay engaged throughout the survey.

3. Check Your Newsletter Analytics to See What Your Audience Responds To

Which of your e-newsletters got the most “opens” and “clicks” last year? Do you know? If not, it’s time to start checking.

Since I use Mailchimp, I’ll talk about that one, but you can find similar information on any of the email programs. If I go to my campaigns, for instance, I can see how many people opened a particular newsletter, how many clicked on links, and what particular links they opened.

If you upgrade to Pro, you can also get reports comparing your various campaigns, which can be helpful but isn’t required. By simply scanning your campaigns, you can see which ones performed better for you, and use that information when creating future campaigns.

4. If You’re On Twitter, Look at Your Twitter Analytics

Those who are on Twitter have another tool for reader research: Twitter Analytics. Simply enter your user name and it will give you a month-by-month report showing your profile visits, impressions, mentions, and followers, along with your top-performing tweet of the month, top mention, top media tweet, and top follower.

By reviewing this data month after month, you can begin to get an idea of a) which of your posts are performing the best, and b) who in your network is helping you out the most (with mentions).

If you hit the “Tweets” button at the top (next to “Home,”) you’ll be presented with a page of charts showing you when you got the most tweet impressions, your top-performing tweet and the numbers to go with it (impressions, engagement, etc.), and a full list of all your tweets listed in order of which performed the best (and worst, toward the bottom of the list).

Look to the right sidebar to find out how many people clicked on your links and how many retweeted your posts. You can also select a different time frame—see two months of tweets rather than one, for instance—and export the data for further examination.

Facebook has a similar analytics tool called “Facebook Insights.” I’m not on Facebook so I’ll leave it to you to check that out, but it’s similar to Twitter Analytics and can help you see where your audience is most engaged.

5. Hang out on Quora to Find Out What Questions Your Audience is Asking

Quora is a question-and-answer website where you can find what questions are plaguing your target audience. You can sign up for a free account if you want to get involved, or simply type in a question you think your readers might have into a Google search, add “Quora” at the end of it, and see what comes up.

A romance writer, for instance, might Google, “what is the best date quora,” and find these questions:

• What has been your best date to date?
• What is the best free online dating site?
• What do I wear on a first date?

Go to the quora page for any of these results and you’ll find more related questions on the right of the page. For the last one above, for instance, the following additional questions are listed:

• What is the best first date outfit for women?
• What should you not wear on a date?
• What should I wear for a casual first date?

You can use this information to create new content or to better see what questions your audience might have on any particular topic.

6. Try a YouTube Search to Get Content Ideas for Your Audience

Just as you might use a Google search to see what comes up, you can do the same on YouTube to see what your audience may be looking for.

If I go and input, “motivation for writers,” for instance, I see the following videos listed:

• Stop Getting Stuck in Fear
• How to Motivate Yourself to Write Every Day
• How to Get Instantly in the Writing Mood

Already my brain is humming about how I might approach these types of topics, and I can rest easy knowing that they will interest my audience. You can put in whatever terms may fit your niche to gain ideas for new blog posts or videos you might produce.

7. Find Out What Your Competitors Are Doing

Whatever your niche is, it’s likely that you have some competition already killing it out there.

Let’s say you write about turtles as pets, so you Google “turtles as pets” and find some of the top-performing sites on that topic. You can see that “All Turtles,” for example, is showing up pretty early in the Google search results.

A good question to ask yourself: “What keywords are they targeting?” Go to a free keyword tracking site like Wordtracker, past the site’s URL into the search spot, and the site will tell you the top keywords on the page.

For All Turtles, for instance, we see the following keywords listed first:

• Turtles
• Sea
• Turtle
• Sea turtles
• Turtle species
• Tortoise

Wordtracker will also give you “keyword opportunities not on the page,” which lets you know which keyword phrases may be particularly important for you to use in your upcoming blog posts. In this case, we have:

• Baby sea turtles
• Green-sea turtles
• Sea turtles endangered
• Sea turtles facts
• Box turtle species

This can help you determine what keywords to target in your content so that you, too, can draw readers to your site who may be looking for information related to those keywords.

Of course, you can also just review your competitors’ websites and see the type of content they’re producing. If they’re ranking high on Google, their content is likely attracting readers and you can learn from what they’re doing.

The key is to know your niche (for more help on that, see Writer Get Noticed!), then research other sites in that niche to get ideas.

How do you determine what your target audience wants?

_{Featured image by Marten Newhall on Unsplash.}