You did your homework of understanding your audience when planning your site. You looked at the demographics and at the needs of each audience that might end up browsing your pages: existing clients, prospects, partners, and internal staff. You organized your content to match those needs and came up with a suitable navigation menu. You even paid attention to their screen resolutions and most used browser versions. Is that it?

How about finding out your audience’s online behavior? What sites are these users browsing when they are NOT on your site?

Why would you want to know? Knowing where these visitors “hang out” online can be a gold mine in terms of marketing. Let’s use some examples to make the point clear.

A) You’re a personal chef and find out a large percentage of your target market checks out the Food Network’s website consistently. They even have it as their home page in their browser. How great would it be if you could post an ad about your company on the Food Network’s site? Then, when those prospects are visiting their favorite site, they see you!

B)  You’re an event planner and learn that a significant number of the people you’re trying to reach start their day by checking updates on LinkedIn. If that’s true, you want to make sure you are on LinkedIn and start your day by posting your events in the LinkedIn Calendar and by posting each event in your profile so everyone in your network sees them.

C) You’re target market is the younger generation who spends most of its online time looking at videos on either YouTube or other popular video sites. Your product or service has nothing to do with video, but an engaging video about it would get you a lot of traffic.

But… how do you find this out?

Look at your site’s statistics. You should have Google Analytics installed. One of their reports tells you the websites where visitors came from. Visit those sites and see how you are mentioned there and then search for similar websites.

You can also ask. If you have built a database of contacts, maybe do a fun survey and offer them a prize for completing it. Make sure you don’t get greedy and ask too many questions. Keep it short and simple. Spent time on coming up with good questions that can give you insight beyond the given answers.

Look at your competition. Go to Google and search for link:www.yourcompetitor.com. You will get a list of the websites that link to each of your competitors. Should you be on those websites also?

Just like we are taught to go hang out at Starbucks during the morning rush if our target market gets a morning cup, so are we suggesting that you find these places online and have a presence there. If could be paid advertising or, if you’re lucky, a trade scenario or even a free link.