Target groups
A website is helpful for users when it helps them to achieve their goals quickly and smoothly. Therefore, you must focus on the needs of your target audience and start with the users.
What is a target group?
A target group or audience includes one or more specific users visiting the website to find a specific content or service.
Target audiences can include various factors, such as:
- age
- gender
- geographical location
- interests
- behaviours
- demographic data.
This means different audiences have various characteristics that can affect how they perceive and interact with content.
Focus on the target group
The user has come to the website based on their need; they have one or more goals with their visit. For the communication to be meaningful and effective, it's important to adapt the website's content to the target group's needs. This increases the chances of getting the message through and producing the desired results.
Relevant content also improves search engine results.
Always start from the users' needs and requirements when working with the web!
KTH's target groups
KTH's websites should make it easier for target groups to access relevant information and build and strengthen our brand. Understanding our audience makes it possible to create effective and customised content that appeals to the visitors.
Our websites should represent KTH, and the content should meet the needs of several target groups, for example:
- employees (existing, potential employees and affiliates)
- students (prospective and current students, alums)
- societal actors and businesses (for example, media, researchers from other higher education institutions, funders, partners, and global organisations)
- the general public (for example, study participants, donors, and technically interested persons)
- authorities and decision-makers (for example, politicians, other educational institutions, research councils).
Target groups for our websites
All KTH websites are bilingual and have users who communicate in both Swedish and English. Some target groups communicate only in Swedish, while others communicate only in English.
How to work with your target groups
1. Identifying and defining your target audiences
You start by deciding who the target audience is for your content and what the audience is expected to want to do on your pages.
If your content has multiple target audiences and purposes, the content may need various pages, or there may be other places on the web where the content should be integrated instead. It's essential to dare to prioritise your most important target audience.
2. Needs and purpose
Remember that the content on the KTH websites needs to be useful for the different target groups. By knowing your audience's interests and needs, you can create content that is relevant to them. If they get answers to their questions, they are more likely to engage with your content and return to your website regularly.
To investigate and understand the needs and behaviours of your target audiences, it's appropriate to conduct a so-called needs analysis. It may be challenging to do yourself, and you may need help from an expert. If you don't have the resources for formal analysis, you can:
- look at visitor behaviour through web analytics, which measures visitor statistics
- use feedback and questions you have received from your users
- look at how other higher education institutions have organised their content
- ask your users what is most important to them.3.
3. Clear objectives
The content on the web can have different objectives. Therefore, the content must be adapted to fit the website's purpose. Here are some examples:
- Instruction pages: They need to be short and precise. We sometimes use images and films to make the visitor's understanding easier.
- Research news: We want to evoke emotions and inspire the readers. They may also be interested in exploring more in the same field or contacting the researchers with questions through links to profile pages.
- Events pages: They have clear objectives - we want visitors to click the link to sign up for an event.
4. Language and word selection
By knowing the linguistic level of your target audience, you can choose words and phrases that visitors will recognise and understand. It's also important to use a simple and understandable language to fulfil the requirements of the Language Act.
5. Optimising for search engines
By creating content relevant to your target audience, you also increase the chances of your content ranking higher in search engine results when your target audience searches for related topics.