Miraculous face cream: designing with data to target your audience

Identifying obstacles to user engagement

Online search results can often cast fresh light on a surprisingly obvious obstacle to online engagement. Something that should have been obvious before, but somehow wasn’t until that moment. 

For example, a member of our team was once asked to help reboot the website of a women’s education charity.  

Let’s imagine this charity was called the ‘Miracle Foundation’. 

It was a great organisation, providing a platform for women around the world to get access to education and careers.  

The charity needed to attract interest, get donations and find volunteers.

But their website was failing to engage with people. Plus, it had an extraordinarily high bounce rate (people leaving the site after only viewing one page). 

For this reason, the charity’s stakeholders looked for content design support to solve the problem and reach out to potential users.

Using online search data to understand your audience

One of the first things our content designer did was a simple online search around the charity’s name and different related keywords.

Almost immediately, they saw that a lot of people searching for the phrase ‘miracle foundation’ were also visiting the website of a big cosmetics firm. This company had a very popular beauty product called… you’ve guessed it… ‘Miracle Foundation.’

When the content designer did a more detailed search, phrases like ‘miracle foundation for girls’ and ‘miracle foundation India’ appeared alongside ‘miracle foundation serum’ and ‘miracle foundation exfoliating’.

Part of the reason for the high bounce rate was now obvious. Thousands of people were clicking through to a women’s education charity’s website when they were really looking for a luxury face cream. 

Before the charity could begin to reach their target audience, their website needed to stop being clickbait for people on an entirely different online journey.

A key part of this would be making the charity more easy to recognise online.   

Targeting your audience with good content design   

The charity would need content designers to:  

• research their potential audience and identify their user needs 

• design user-centred content that could be regularly updated 

• create content user journeys across social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter 

• use search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics such as long-tail keywords (longer and more specific keyword phrases) to make the charity stand out from other competitors

The goal of good content strategy is to connect with your audience and remove all obstacles that stand in their way.

By identifying your target audience’s online journeys and using a coherent content strategy, you can increase traffic to your organisation’s product or services.

You can also make sure that the people who arrive on your site are the ones that actually need to be there. And not a bunch of people looking in the wrong place for a miraculous face cream.