Along with the COVID-19 pandemic came the rapid growth of online shopping habits, which continue to dominate global purchasing habits. Nowadays, over 73% of UAE consumers shop exclusively online, with the most popular products being groceries, clothing, and health goods. 

Yet, many eCommerce businesses mistakenly attempt to appeal to everyone all at once, casting too wide a net to make effective returns.

When you fail to understand your target audience, conversions become impossible. Fortunately, SEO is a versatile marketing channel that can help you develop impenetrable audience profiles that positively impact your bottom line.

Armed with the right information, you can promote your products and services to the most appropriate target audiences. In this guide, you’ll learn the advantages of a clearly-defined target audience and how you can leverage SEO strategies to reach them.

What is a Target Audience?

Target audiences pertain to groups of people your business intends to attract to its website. From an SEO agency perspective, target audiences are potential customers who use search engines to discover brands like yours.

There are several ways you can segregate your target audience: 

• Demographic profile: Consider your audience’s gender, age range, income level and what language is most appropriate to use.

• Geographical profile: Find ways to connect with your audience locally—consider how far you’ll have to ship or travel to offer your services.

• Personality-driven profile: These profiles prioritize consumer values and help skew your language according to what customers care about most.

While some use the terms “target audience” and “buyer persona,” interchangeably, they are not the same things. Buyer personas are a depiction of your target audience founded upon quantitative and qualitative data and competitor research.

Buyer personas enumerate your target audiences’ purchasing habits, demographics, and interests.

Why it’s Important to Develop Target Audiences

Developing target audiences can make your marketing efforts more effective and efficient. After all, a high-quality product is all for naught if you aren’t advertising it to the right people. Audience analysis is also advantageous in the following ways.

Define Your Value Proposition

Getting to know your target audience helps to better define your unique selling point and value proposition. Analyzing potential customers enables you to predict purchasing habits and identify issues within your sales funnel.

Ask questions like: what consumer needs are your competitors failing to satisfy? How can you alleviate these pain points more effectively?

Maximize Time and Resources

Your message isn’t going to resonate with everyone. While not entirely obsolete, traditional advertising methods are dipping in popularity—they are expensive and don’t provide accurate, measurable results. As such, narrowing your focus is more productive and rewarding. 

Instead of focusing your efforts towards reaching as many consumers as possible, you can spend more time—and money—on scalable marketing materials.

Not to mention, client needs are ever-changing. If you have too many audience segments to keep up with, you’ll always end up lagging behind. 

Direct Your Marketing Strategies

81% of buyers review brands and products online before making a definitive purchase. As such, getting them to convert means providing valuable and digestible information.

Spending time with potential consumers on their preferred social marketing channel provides an opportunity to adapt to their language and determine their preferences, down to visual elements and hashtags.

Your messaging has to address buyer concerns and how your product can remedy these issues.

How to Use SEO to Determine Your UAE Target Audience

Below are a few approaches you can take to target in Dubai and shape your SEO strategy.

Review Existing Customer Information 

Naturally, the best place to start when developing your target audience is to observe your existing one. Note how many people are visiting your website and from where.

Consider how much time customers spend on your website, what pages aren’t gaining traction, and potential reasons for cart abandonment.

Another way to gain insight into your target audience is to review their posts. Pinpoint overlaps in your content and theirs, tailoring your marketing strategy accordingly. 

Alternatively, you can communicate with your existing consumer base directly through feedback forms and surveys. Use these results to identify trends.

Demographics Vs. Psychographics

When developing target audiences and buyer personas, you’ll likely hear the terms “demographics” and “psychographics.” Demographics pertain to basic information like geographical location, gender, income, occupation, and similar factors. 

On the other hand, psychographics focus more on how your consumer base behaves. For instance, if you sell shoes and notice that your running shoes sell out faster than your leisure shoes, it might be safe to assume that most of your customers are athletic or interested in physical health. 

While demographics are more useful for filtering out who your target audience isn’t, studying psychographics can further refine your consumer base.

Study Your Competitors

Another great place to determine your target audience is through competitor research. First, you’ll want to consider your “money keywords,” or keywords that deliver the highest number of visits and conversions. Then, identify how your competitors rank for them.

Spend time analyzing SERPs and whether your content is more transactional than it is informational. Determining search intent enables you to optimize content pages and keywords.

Consider your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and compare strategies—pinpoint techniques that deliver better outcomes.

Use Social Media Audience Insights

In today’s digital landscape, businesses without a social media presence are likely to fall behind competitors. In the UAE alone, 98.99% of people are active on social media. As such, the best channels for gathering information regarding your target audience are Facebook, Instagram, and other related sites.

Nowadays, most social media platforms come equipped with native insights. For instance, Facebook’s Audience Insights can curate unique audience demographic profiles and identify similar social media pages that also draw consumer interest.

If you have multiple social media pages, use insights to determine where they are most active. Cross-reference your existing demographics with usage statistics. For instance, retail brands might fare best on Instagram, which hosts over 1 billion daily active users—83% of whom use the platform to shop.

If selling to B2B brands, you’ll likely find your target audience on LinkedIn. 40% of its marketers deem it the most effective marketing channel for obtaining high-quality leads.

Perform Keyword Research

An obvious but critical step towards understanding your target audience is performing keyword research. Consider the following keyword types.

• Short-tail keywords: These keywords contain three words or fewer. These keywords are highly competitive and garner a significant amount of search volume. However, they lack specificity in search intent and don’t necessarily lead to high conversion rates.

• Long-tail keywords: These keywords consist of more than three words and are typically less competitive. It’s easy to pinpoint search intent and is most appropriate for use on targeted pages (like blogs).

• Short-term fresh keywords: As its title suggests, a short-term fresh keyword pertains to keywords that have received recent hype. These keywords attract significant organic views but fall quickly when a trend passes.

• Long-term evergreen keywords: Evergreen keywords are always relevant, though may not garner explosive views. Use evergreen keywords to age your content gracefully and informatively.

• Product-defining keywords: These keywords describe your products and services. They are most relevant during the early stages of purchasing and can make the difference between a guaranteed sale and cart abandonment. Using product-defining keywords is an excellent way to match user intent and increase sales.

• Consumer-defining keywords: These keywords enable you to address your audience clearly and focus on their pain points.

• Geo-targeted keywords: These keywords are particularly useful for local startups, as they enable businesses to attract the most relevant customers. Simply insert your location into these keywords to increase conversion rates.

• LSI keywords: Latent Semantic Indexing keywords are thematic and relate closely to your main keyword. You can determine LSI keywords using related searches—this will boost ranking signals for your main keyword and is ideal for all forms of content creation.
• Intent-targeting keywords: Consumers use keywords in three ways. First, they might seek general information on a specific product or service. Users who look up factors like expiration dates, shipping fees, and more specific information are more serious about making a purchase. Finally, consumers who use transactional keywords (best price, best quality, sale) are guaranteed to make a sale.

These keywords can enhance your SEO efforts depending on how you use them. They can also provide deeper insights into your target audience.

Use the Right Tools

As we mentioned, most social media platforms come equipped with built-in insights. If you’re on a budget, these basic tools may suffice for gathering the appropriate information. However, investing in in-depth analytics tools can be worth the investment. 

Readily available software like Google Analytics can tell you everything you need to know about your audience and even generate shareable reports.  

The Bottom Line

Strongly defining your target audience is critical for brand survival. Developing a high-quality product or service is only useful when advertised to the right people. Target audiences help you create unique and enjoyable experiences that help your business profit and your customers resolve their problems.

If you’re looking for a more effective way to engage with consumers, book a consultation with our branding experts today. At Igloo, we offer superior lead generation and analytics services that direct your marketing efforts.