After you take care of the human dimension and the technical online factors, you need to adapt your messages to your target audience. Unless you want to have a blog that is all about you and your own ideas regardless of whether anyone out there should care, you need to work to make people care. In short, you need to adapt your messages to your intended audience.
If you are trying to persuade Hispanic people with your blog, you better write your blog for them. You could write in Spanish, but writing in English about Hispanic people and Hispanic issues is perfectly acceptable, too. (I started off with a simple, obvious thing and will work up to the more nuanced matters.)
If you are trying to persuade medical professionals with your blog, you better have someone who can write and adapt the blog posts for medical professionals. Merely naming your blog “Medical Professionals Blog” won’t cut it. Everything posted on that blog must specifically be adapted to the specific audience of medical professionals.
There are but two examples–an easy, obvious example, and one with more nuances. The bottom line is this: Persuasion only works when you know who your target audience is and you can adapt what you convey to them in a blog accordingly. This is a crucial fact of life that many people never, ever get. Those who don’t “get it” are those who fail to be persuasive.
If you don’t care about ever persuading your audience–in other words you are writing online just to see your stuff on the Internet–then you don’t need to adapt all. Just do whatever you want, and write whatever you want.
You can get away with writing long blog posts that span 45 paragraphs about the cute things your dog did after his bath yesterday, and the world will go on nicely as if you never mattered at all. The same holds true in business. You may think what your organization does and believes in are crucial to the whole planet. Fine. But, if you don’t adapt your messages specifically to your target audience, you may as well blog about your dog.
Blogging on Target
Absolutely the most important starting point in blog targeting is to know your audience. There are many ways to accomplish this.
Nobody can tell you the best way to learn about your particular audience. Sometimes you can only gain this knowledge by going there and being physically with your audience in person.
This is why politicians go out in public to meet and greet, shake hands, and kiss babies.
It is possible to learn about your audience from afar. You can research their demographic characteristics even though you are not there among them, for instance. However, no matter what else is true, you must discover how your audience feels about the subjects that you intend to cover.
Only when you reach the point that you truly understand confidently how your target audience feels in their hearts about the subjects that you intend to cover will you be able to target them successfully. Your goal should be to reach as close as you can to a strongly confident understanding about how your audience feels when it comes to the subjects you intend to cover in your blog.
How to Adapt to Your Target Audience
This is fundamental knowledge that you need to succeed in business. It is a skill set that dates back to ancient Greece and Rome. Yet, it is highly relevant in the 21st century.
The most successful politicians, preachers and performers are those who have attained the professional skill of adapting to their target audience. It is a skill that has intrigued humanity over the centuries.
Simply put, this skill involves knowing what to say (or in this case, what to write) and knowing how to get it across in the most likely ways to win over a specific target audience.
Missing the Target
Even after you know your audience, you need to be careful to aim for persuading that specific audience. If you miss your target, you are wasting your time and theirs.
No matter how well-written or clever or witty something may be, if it is mistargeted, it is essentially useless. If you fail to persuade your audience, you have missed your target.
