Objectives and target audiences

Objectives

The objectives of your website are what you would like your website to achieve. Try and make these as specific as possible. For example, don’t make your objective ‘have a better website’, but instead identify the aspects you would like to focus on.

Activity steps

You can do this activity online or in-person.

1. Have the meeting facilitator read out prompt questions (like the below) and have the rest of the team write down their answers.
2. Once everybody has had a chance to write down their thoughts, you can share responses as a team. If your team are on the same page, you will notice certain themes starting to appear.
3. Group these themes together and discuss whether they should be one of your core objectives. If you have too many objectives, it will be difficult to meet them all, so try to prioritise the most important ones.

Example prompt questions

• Why is this website important to our team?
• What’s the problem with what we have now?
• Why isn’t what we have now working?
• Did the existing website ever work? If so, what changed?

 

Target audiences

It is important to have a clear idea about who your target audiences are, because this will inform your website’s structure and content.

Activity steps

1. Have stakeholders write down the different target audiences you are hoping to communicate with. For this exercise to work, it is important that people are -
   

   
   Specific

   ‘Students’ or ‘staff members’ are not target audiences. The more granular you can make these audiences, the easier it is to target content. For example, you could break ‘student’ down to ‘prospective undergraduate students’, or even better ‘London-based A-level students looking to study History’. This sort of granularity isn’t always possible, but it’s an ideal you can aim towards.
   

   
   Discrete

   Rather than lumping two audiences together, it’s better to separate them into two distinct categories. This means you can create content that’s perfect for both, rather than it being just OK for either.
   

   
   Exclusive

   As well as deciding who you are trying to talk to, it can be just as useful to determine who you are not interested in speaking to. This will again help define the content you need to create.
   

   
   Considering entrance points

   Think about how your target audience(s) will likely access your website. Are you hoping people will find it via search engines, via other Queen Mary websites, or will you be signposting people from emails? It might be all of these, but it is good to bear this in mind. 
   
   
2. Start to group everybody’s responses together. Like with the objectives, if people are on the same page you will notice certain themes emerge.
3. As a team, discuss these groupings and whether they should be a core target audience. Although you will think about content later, now is also a good time to start thinking about the type of content these audiences will be looking for.