<img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-9660" src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/target-1024x682.jpg" alt="target audience" width="1024" height="682" />

It's hard to forget about your target audience. After all, they're the reason you do business and their wants and needs are at the forefront of every decision you make for your company. But sometimes, when we're creating content for our business and marketing it, we lose sight of the big picture and start to get stuck in ruts. We write a lot of self-promotional content because we've seen others do it on their blogs. Those blogs don't get much engagement, and aren't well-known, but who knows? Maybe they're getting tons of leads from promotional posts.

Maybe not.

Your target audience was around before your business existed, living a real life and having a wide range of experiences that left them with certain preferences. The problem we see many businesses struggling with is trying to drive traffic to their blog, newsletter, or social media posts by writing about the business--what it does, who it's for, the many features of every product, you get it--instead of writing about the content their target audience already cares about. That's a mistake!

It would be wonderful if customers got online for the sole purpose of coming to our website, checking out the blog, and reading about our newest product and what it does. But this just doesn't happen often enough to justify writing posts or updates of an overly promotional nature.

<img class="alignleft" src="http://coschedule.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/find-your-target-audience-content-core.png" alt="find-your-target-audience-content-core" width="312" height="312" />Instead, take a birds' eye view of the situation and what your consumer really wants. Does he really want to read the 9th post this month about why we should choose your company for X service? No! Write about the content your target audience is already interested in <em>and</em> that relates to your business. This is how you will drive more traffic to your website while creating the opportunity to link to other internal posts and pages on your topic, generate more leads, and become more visible in your industry.

I like the way <a href="http://coschedule.com/blog/find-your-target-audience/" target="_blank">CoSchedule</a> demonstrated this concept with the idea of the Content Core: You should post about your business a little, and post about what your customer is interested in (other than your business) a lot. And in order to do that, you have to know what your target customer is interested in, bringing us to the next section: defining your audience's interests.
<h2>Defining your audience's interests</h2>
<ul>
	<li>Check with Google Analytics</li>
</ul>
What pages do your visitors spend the most time on? Which ones continue to send pretty steady amounts of traffic to you over time? Find your most valuable, best posts and focus on what makes them different. Then move in that direction. Use GA to find out what other interests your visitors have, including those in other industries for your future reference (for example, a company I worked with learned that their visitors were really into Comedies, so when a new comedy would be released, we'd always post about it on social media and get great responses!).
<ul>
	<li>Send out surveys</li>
</ul>
Send your email subscribers, blog subscribers, or social media fans a quick survey about your content. Include multiple choice questions as well as open-ended answer questions so you can get some freeform opinions from your audience while getting answers to the questions you have.
<ul>
	<li>Try Facebook or Twitter analytics</li>
</ul>
You can do some pretty cool audience tracking and focusing on Facebook and Twitter analytics. Facebook recently added a feature so you can see the amount of audience overlap between your business and a competitor. You can find out the location you get the most engagement from, the gender, age, and internet use habits. If you create ads with Facebook, you can find out what your audiences ' interests are like once you've run a successful campaign and have results to compare.