Your business blog can be hugely influential to the growth of your company. A blog can help you accomplish numerous marketing goals, from increasing your brand's exposure and building brand authority to boosting web traffic and even increasing your sales. However, you'll need to follow basic blogging tips to give your blog a chance at reaching these goals. One of the most important blogging tips to keep in mind is to target the right audience.

The importance of targeting the right audience

One of the most popular sayings among experienced bloggers is "if you write for everyone, then you're writing for no one." What exactly does this mean? It means that when you are writing your blog, you need to have a specific audience in mind. If you're trying to write your content to please or appease everyone out there, then you're going to be unable to effectively engage with any one type of consumer.

For example, let's say that you run a shoe store. You are trying to reach absolutely everyone, so you write one blog post about how to choose baby shoes and another on different stretches that runners should perform before running. Then you follow those up with a post on different types of foot problems that senior citizens have. The blog post about baby shoes is going to be more directed towards an audience of mothers. However, out of those three articles, that's the only one specifically targeting them. The same can be said for the audiences of those other three articles.

Because you are only reaching one part of your audience in one out of those three blog posts, you'll end up losing them over the course of your other posts since they aren't directed at the same specific audience. If you are targeting a specific audience, your content will be more likely to reach them every time.

Additionally, by targeting a specific audience, you'll be able to tailor your content to them. You'll have somebody to write for, which means that your content will be more relevant to that audience, making it easier to reach, connect and engage with members of that audience.

How to target the right audience

So now you know why it's important to have a specific audience to target when writing your blog. But how do you figure out who that audience is? And how do you go about actually targeting them? As far as blogging tips go, determining your target audience is just as important as writing good content.

You are going to have to leverage the customer data that your business already has in order to create a buyer persona - which is a fictional creation of your average customer, made up of data that includes age, gender, income level, education, needs, problems, hobbies and more. The following are some of the methods for finding this information:

• Opt-in forms - When visitors choose to opt-in to your email newsletter, they'll be required to fill out a form that includes their name and email address. You can use this form to your advantage by asking a few more basic questions, such as age and gender, to help provide you with data that can be used to build your buyer persona.
• Customer questionnaires - After a purchase has been made on your e-commerce page (if you have one), ask your customers if they will fill out a brief questionnaire. This is a great way to obtain valuable information about your actual customers.
• Social media data - Most people provide enough personal information on their social media profiles to allow you to build an accurate buyer persona, which means you can use the information provided by your followers to obtain essential buyer information.

Once you have a buyer persona, there's the problem of actually reaching them with your blog. It's not just about writing content that is relevant and helpful to your target audience - it's getting your content read by them. This does require a little bit of research.

For example, certain age groups go online at certain times. You're probably not going to reach a target audience made up of senior citizens if you are posting content at midnight - however, you may be posting college-aged students at this time. Different types of demographics use different types of social media as well. If your target audience consists of 18-22 year-olds, LinkedIn is not going to be the best way to reach them since this social channel is used mostly by professionals. In this case, Twitter is a much more effective social platform on which to share your blog content.

When it comes to following blogging tips, one of the most important blogging tips that we can give you is to make sure you target the right audience to ensure that you write effective blog content.