I'm traveling in China at the moment and have noticed something about customer service I thought I would share with you.

As a European in China, you get targeted a lot by hawkers and hustlers trying to sell anything and everything. As you walk down the street they spot you and make their way over. They tap you on the shoulder or pull out a card and ask you what you are looking for or like to buy.
In some ways these hawkers and hustlers are doing a great job because they know exactly who their target audience is and they don't waste time on those who aren't it. But they have missed a key ingredient; they don't know what their customer is thinking. The hawkers and hustlers don't seem to understand how intimidating they are, or how uncomfortable they make their target audience feel. I'm also not sure they care, in fact they may even prey on it and push people to make purchases they don't want.

The same could be said of many businesses who have an online presence. They may know who their target audience is, and they may even be able to find them, but do they don't have a clue how they make their target audience feel or what they want online.

Organisations need to listen to their target audience and find out what they want, need, feel, love, hate etc about the product or service they are about to buy. Understanding the target audience is the most important thing to do before setting out to develop and online communication strategy. how else will you get the design right?

Here are a few quick ways to help you figure out what your target audience want from you online:

• Set up a feedback loop on EVERY piece of content. Do it for pages but mostly for content. Find out exactly what content they like and don't, and find out what they want that you haven't thought of.
• Act on the feedback you get. If they want to know something, then get it written and updated, then let that user know.
• Help your target audience out by letting them know what info you do have, and what you don't. Save them time looking for content you don't have and don't intend to have. You can't have all the info in the world and you don't need to pretend you do.
• Let your users drive what content you have on your site. Keep what they love and remove what they don't use. Stale content hurts your search engine relevance score so get rid of it.
• Keep track of what pages people are visiting on your site and work hardest on them. Get that content right and then see what else people are looking for and go work on that next.
• Track external search results. What keywords did people use to find your site and what content did they view. Did they convert from that keyword or did they just get annoyed and leave? not all traffic is good traffic. People who find your site for the wrong reasons will be annoyed; that hurts your brand.
• Track internal search results. When people use internal searches, it's often because they can't find what they are looking for on your site. Do something about those internal searches. Either tell them early the content doesn't exist on your site, or write it and make it easy to find for them.

Finding out what your target audience likes and wants isn't hard and can have big benefits. Many organisations just write the content they want people to know and never take the small amount of time needed to learn what their target audience actually wants. By taking the time, you will get the jump or most of you competitors.