When redesigning a website, there are countless factors to juggle — from page layout and content types to calls-to-action and overall goals. But among all these considerations, one stands out above the rest: your audience. Today, we’ll explore why your audience is the cornerstone of any successful website redesign, how to identify your target audience, and why prioritizing them matters.
Who is your audience?
When you're creating your Iowa website, you may not realize that you are building it for a specific group of people that you are trying to reach. It’s something that can be easy to overlook. But who exactly is your audience? Your audience is the group of people your website is designed to serve. It is your audience that is reading your web content, interacting with your site, and using it to find the information or services they need—whether that’s prospective students learning about the University of Iowa, current students accessing resources, or others.
As your site works to communicate with your audience, you may find that it serves more than one. This can be very common, and it is important to keep your multiple audiences in mind throughout your project. When we think about audience layers there are usually primary and secondary audiences.
- Primary audience: Your primary audience is the main group of people you want to reach.
- Secondary audience: Your secondary audience are an additional group (or groups) of people you want to reach who also use your site but in a different way.
For example, housing.uiowa.edu serves two audiences: prospective students as the primary audience and parents and current students as the secondary audience. Prospective students could be visiting to learn about living on campus and residence halls, while the secondary audience could be visiting to submit a maintenance request, mailing packages, or reloading their Hawk Dollar account to do laundry. The same thought process can also apply to campus healthcare web properties. Their primary audience might be prospective or current patients seeking treatment, while staff, faculty, and research fellows also could use the site to host content relating to clinical trials and latest research on various health conditions. When your website serves multiple audiences, it's important to ensure that the majority of your core content is tailored to your primary audience. While content for secondary audiences should still be included, it should take up less space and not overshadow the main focus of the site.
How to identify your target audience
Sometimes, your audience is already clear. For instance, if your site provides financial aid information, you will likely know your audience includes current and prospective students and possibly their families. If you’re unsure, Google Analytics or Google Search Console are other tools that you can use to provide insights into visitor demographics and behavior. You can also use Google Search Console to see search queries that users are typing into search engines to get to your site, giving you more insight to what terminology users are searching for. Then, you can combine this approach with another Google product, Google Analytics (GA4) to use on-site search to see what users are looking for via the search functionality while on the site itself. We’ve included more information on setting up your GA4 property in this article.
Additionally, using a survey method could be another way to identify users, the information they are looking for, and their demographics. The most important thing to remember as you work to identify your target audience (or audiences) is that your website should always prioritize serving your audience first. Keep in mind that your site visitors will not know your internal organizational structure and they will want clear and straightforward access to the information they are seeking. If you choose to design your site around your organizational structure rather than your audience needs, you could end up confusing and frustrating your visitors.
Why does serving your audience matter?
You might be wondering, “So what? Does this really matter? Can’t I just design the website the way I want?” Technically, yes. But there’s a risk in doing so, because in reality your audience’s perspective is what matters most. The reason is that the primary purpose of your website is to communicate with them. If your site doesn’t meet their needs or expectations, they’re likely to get frustrated and could potentially leave or click away to another site that does meet their needs. Understanding this concept is now more vital than ever with the projected trends towards the upcoming higher education enrollment cliff. Furthermore, it is important to understand that your site also serves as not only a communication tool, but as a resource to help your audience achieve a specific goal. For example, various Iowa web properties such as: apply.admissions.uiowa.edu, myui.uiowa.edu, maps.uiowa.edu, uihc.org and more, exist to provide their audience with the information they need to achieve an objective such as: registering for classes, locating campus buildings, or finding a medical provider to name a few.
Ultimately, your website exists to serve your audience, whether that is providing information, assisting your audience in achieving a goal, telling the Iowa story, your site exists to serve the distinct and diverse needs of your audience(s). By centering your content around your audience, your University of Iowa website won’t just look great—it will be a meaningful, useful resource for everyone who visits.