Get Simplicated is a web log by Simplicate Interactive
about finding simple and elegant solutions to interesting web development and interactive marketing challenges.
Fast and Cheap Audience Research and Analysis for Business to Business (B2B) Web Site Planning
| Feb 15
Audience profiling and analysis is an important planning step for any web site. Unfortunately, researching and collecting the information needed to develop accurate audience profiles can be a time-consuming and mysterious process.
Luckily, I've got a really easy tip that will let you race through most of your research if you are developing audience profiles for a business-to-business web site. That way, you can spend more time analyzing your audiences and gaining insight into how you should be speaking to them.
In this article, I will explain how using job posting and resume sites (like Monster.com) will help you answer a number of important questions about you potential site visitors and influence how you speak to them.
By the end of this exercise, you will gain insight into the following factors that will affect how you speak to your site visitors:
- Which keywords and phrases to use when speaking to them
- What motivational factors would lead them to purchase your product or service
- Whether or not they are decision-makers and are able to purchase your product / service
- Various demographic information such as: age, education and salary
- What their level of familiarity with technology is
This article will not help you identify your target audience—that’s your job—but it will help you research information about them, once you have already determined (or guessed) who they are.
Step 1 - Define Your Audience
Before you can create a profile of your site visitors, you must first figure out who they are (or at least, who you think and hope your web site target audience is going to be).
If you've been in business for a while, you should already have a good idea who your target audience is. Pull information from data that have you already collected through forms, registrations, orders, surveys, business cards, etc., and make use of that wealth of contact information.
If you're developing a new site or product, you might not know who your exact audience is going to be. In this case, you should resort to brainstorming and researching businesses that sell products similar to yours in order to determine who your target audience might be.
At this stage, the three most important characteristics that you should be looking for when trying to determine a very general target audience for a business-to-business web site are:
- Industry / market
- Job title / position
- Size of company
Since your site will likely focus on more than one audience, you should list as many combinations of the above that make sense for your business.
Step 2 - Learn About Your Audience
Once you have prepared a list of target audiences from Step 1, it's time to get started with your research, using job posting & resume sites.
Most job posting sites like Monster, Workopolis and Dice will let you browse job postings for free. Start by looking for job positions that match exactly with the criteria you developed in the first step, and widen your net incrementally if you are having trouble finding enough matches.
You might notice as you search that the industries you are targeting use slightly different names for some of their job positions than you originally thought. This is fine, as long as the job descriptions closely match what you had in mind as you were defining your target audiences. This is the first of many opportunities that you will have to refine your target audience profiles.
Collect 5-7 of the most detailed job postings for each of your target audience profiles. You should be looking for well defined and sufficiently detailed examples of:
- General job descriptions
- Lists of job responsibilities
- Knowledge, skills, abilities required
- Desired qualifications / education
Other important fields to keep an eye out for that are not always listed but can still provide valuable insight, include:
- Whom the position reports to
- Whether they are part of a team or work independently
- What the salary expectations are
- Whether the position is part-time or full-time
- Whether the applicant can always or sometimes work from home
You can always resort to searching through more industry-specific job posting sites or browsing through the "Now Hiring" sections of individual companies if you are having trouble finding enough job postings.
Step 3 - Gain Insight into Your Audience
Now that you've collected a wealth of information about each of your target audiences, you're going to want to read over the files a number of times. You will quickly start to see patterns and trends emerging for each of the individual audience groups.
Here are the some of important pieces of information you will want to keep an eye out for, where you can find each of them and why they are useful:
- Keywords and Phrases: As you read many of the job postings (especially in the descriptions and responsibilities), you will start to notice similar phrases and industry terms specific to each target audience. Mirroring this language when you speak to that audience will assist in building your credibility and getting them to trust that you understand their industry.
- Motivational Factors: Most job description and roles & responsibilities sections are very clear about what the expectations of the candidate are. Knowing the criteria that job candidates are being measured against within their own companies will help you to promote your products and services to align with those measurements.
- Decision-making: Again, this is usually alluded to in the Job Description / Roles & Responsibilities section. It will help you determine if this target audience group is able to purchase your product without authorization or if they will only be able to recommend it to their boss for purchase later.
- Familiarity with Technology: This information is easily teased out of job postings from the "Skills Required" section when they explain the proficiency required with certain software programs. Phrasing such as: "basic knowledge", "working knowledge" or "advanced user", will give you clues to the expected technical proficiencies. This information is important when building web sites to determine how tech-savvy your average user will be and knowing what phrases they will be familiar with.
- Education: Almost all job postings will list a required or preferred level of education. This will help you determine the readability level you should be targeting your writing at as well as to help guess at some of the topics that your readers might be knowledgeable about.
- Salary: Not all postings will list an expected salary, but enough of them might for you to get at least an idea of what each audience type will be earning.
- Age: This one can be a little tricky, but if you compare the education required with the number of years of experience and the general seniority of the position, you can usually determine the average age range.
Armed with a better understanding of each of your target audiences, you should be able to build a more detailed profile for each of them. These profiles will help guide you through many tough decisions that will need to be made over the course of planning, designing and deploying your web site.
Extra Credit
If you want to go a step further than just searching for job listings, you can search as though you were an employer looking to hire an employee and start browsing through potential candidate resumes. Keep in mind, though, that most sites will not let you browse through individual resumes unless you want to pay a monthly fee.
Including this technique in your research will be much more time-consuming and will require a larger sample size before you can start seeing trends amongst many individual employee demographics and skill sets. Resumes can also be helpful if you want to create detailed single user profiles or to help you determine target audience average age and gender.