You don’t have to be a marketer to understand the importance of correctly identifying and understanding your target audience. Arbitrageurs, like no one else, know how expensive the “oblique sight” is. Therefore, in this article we will talk about who is the target audience of the academic writing niche.

You can get acquainted with the basic characteristics of the target audience in niche analytics, and in this article we paid special attention to the psychological portrait of the client. Indeed, in our time it is important to understand the intention of the average client of essay services. We invite you to familiarize yourself with the behavior, habits and motivation of the audience of the essay niche.

Psychological portrait of target audience:

In the essay niche, the target audience is considered to be students studying in English-speaking countries. But calling all US students the target audience is not worth it. Of all the students in the US, our target audience is not numerous. Most US students prefer to study on their own and do not turn to homework writing services.

Firstly, this is due to the fact that students really want to gain knowledge, they are conscious and responsible, and more often they study not for the sake of a “crust”, but for the sake of increasing their level of professionalism, for the sake of self-development. They, like no one else, know that in conditions of high professional competition, they meet by clothes (according to a diploma), but they see off anyway according to their minds, and they won’t be able to splurge for a long time, as well as hide their own incompetence behind a brilliant diploma.

Secondly, many students are afraid of exposure. In the US and Britain, plagiarism is very strictly monitored, and this applies not only to universities. The use of someone else’s intellectual property is literally equated to the theft of movable / immovable property and is punishable by administrative and / or criminal liability. And yes, using someone else’s homework is the same plagiarism. By definition, plagiarism is not only the exact use of someone else’s text/content, but also the idea itself and/or paraphrasing it. The presence of plagiarism has long been checked at the university level with the help of special programs such as turnitin.com. This service allows you to find exact matches in the text of homework, not only in comparison with all available documents on the network, but also checks against an internal database into which professors and teachers have been uploading all their students’ homework for 10+ years. That is why using a homework writing service is a huge risk. There is no way you can check if the purchased text matches the turnitin internal database, and for using the downloaded / ordered / written off work, students face serious punishment, up to and including expulsion from the university without the right to restoration + disgrace in their personal file. It is only in the CIS countries that cheating with a dissertation does not lead to anything, but in the USA and Europe it is strict with this.

And thirdly, not all students generally know about the existence of services for writing homework. According to our internal statistics, these are the majority. So, only 30% clearly understand where they are and what they want to order. They provide clear instructions and technical assignment. 70% do not understand which site they have landed on and what they are offered to buy/order. Moreover, detailed information on the site does not solve this problem. Basically, these are “random stray birds”, they are barely warm leads that still need to be properly warmed up and turned into a regular client. It is this ignorance about the existence of services for writing homework that determines the high growth potential of the niche.

Who then are the very students who take the risk and start using such services? Most often, these are clients who have no choice. The classic situation of contacting an essay service looks like this: a student ruined a course, missed all the deadlines and delays, and now, if he does not hand in a written work right tomorrow (within a couple of days), he will be expelled from the university or, at least, will fail the course, and this means that the year of study was wasted. Orders from such clients usually come with very short deadlines (from 3 hours to 3 working days) and students are willing to pay a lot of money for them for urgency. Most of these orders come in December and May, in the months when it comes to the end of the academic semester, and the student realizes that he is not able to turn in all the necessary papers on time.

After receiving an acceptable grade for the work written for the student, the client passes into the status of “permanent”. If the student is satisfied with everything, then he stays with the service for all the years of study, and sometimes he also brings his friends. In the essay niche, one client, on average, makes from 5 to 9 orders, but sometimes you can get on the “golden lazybones” who makes dozens of orders per month. Great scheme for passive income.

Summing up the motives and needs of the essay service client, I would like to emphasize once again that the most important thing for the target audience is: 1 – the uniqueness of the text (the absence of plagiarism from the word “absolutely”); 2 – a guarantee that personal data, as well as the fact of using such services, will never leak out and reach the professor’s ears; 3 – the speed of providing the work (deadline), 4 – and the acceptable quality of the written text (most often, acceptable quality is much more in demand than a perfectly written work, but more on that below).

Gender and Geo of the target audience:

So why is an essay written moderately well better than a literary masterpiece? Have you already guessed? The thing is that from 50% to 80% of all clients are visiting students who study in the USA. Their level of English proficiency is a priori lower than that of local students. So any professor with the naked eye will determine that someone else put his talented hand to this work.

Of the visitors, the most obnoxious and demanding in service are the Chinese. This is due primarily to the fact that the English language of the Chinese leaves much to be desired. There is even such a term Chenglish – translated as “Chinese English”. For those who work with the Chinese, regardless of the niche, I advise you to familiarize yourself with this channel, where the portrait of the Chinese as a consumer is rolled out in detail, and all the difficulties of working with him.

The most pleasant and generous customers are the Arabs. Despite the fact that you don’t feed them with bread, let them bargain, they always pay, and a considerable amount. As a rule, they stay for long months or years, and spend a lot of money.

The British are the most restrained and scrupulous in choosing a service for writing homework. They will go through everything up and down before they are sure that they will work with this particular essay service and not another. Such ones do not forgive mistakes on the site page, or, inappropriately placed, a comma. But, in gratitude for your painstaking work on the content, from such a client you will receive a check that is almost 2 times the average check of a student from the United States.

With the exception of the last group, all visiting students are quite loyal to essay services, since it is important for them, first of all, to stay in the country, and not to get a good certificate or knowledge. And in order to stay in the country, the average score will do. Therefore, they are ready for long-term cooperation with essay services.

Worst of all is the case with the Indians. Most often, this segment orders absolutely nothing, but visits websites and actively communicates with support. We recommend screening out visitors to these countries immediately. Up to blocking by IP range. Some of these guys turn to the support of an essay service, imitating a client, but not in order to buy a job, and not even to get it for free, but in order to offer their services in writing homework.

A moment of statistics. The highest average check for the first order among all visiting customers can boast: Hong Kong – $260, Britain – $194, Germany – $182. The lowest check for the first order from Brazilians is $80. On the other hand, the same Brazilians have the highest average check for repeat orders among other foreigners – $ 306. One thing is bad, there are very few Brazilians among clients, less than 1% 😉

There are more men among the clients of essay services than women. The approximate ratio is 58% of men vs 42% of women.

Social status of the target audience:

In addition to students, about 10% of the target audience are working parents. Such students can study for several years, be an active client for several academic semesters, then go on maternity leave for several years, after which they can recover again and remember the good old essay service. Some partners, who have long ceased to work in the essay niche, are asking questions about where they got their statistics from, after many years of silence, orders began to appear. Working parents are the most common answer to such questions.

About 10% of customers are parents who themselves order homework for their children on a third-party resource.

Military, nurses (45+ years old), businessmen – make up about 15% of all clients. As a rule, such clients order highly specialized written works: business plans, medical studies, etc. Under these, you can immediately prepare narrowly sharpened landing pages.

The rest of the clients are just students who for some reason cannot or do not want to do their homework on their own.

What has changed in the behavior of CA

Despite the fact that, as before, the user is afraid to lose their money and stumble upon an unscrupulous performer (scammer) who will not write a paper and will not return hard-earned money, the consumer market is still growing.

Perhaps this is due to the fact that, compared to the situation 5 years ago, when essay services were not really known to anyone at all, now the topic of essay-mill services is being covered more and more often in the media. The number of lazy people may not change, but the number of lazy people who have learned about the service is growing.

Also, it should be noted that users are less likely to buy essays “at a glance”. Previously, it was enough to be in the first position for a key like “write my essay for me”, or “do my essay for me” in order to get the most out of this order.

Now the user more often moves to both 2nd and 3rd position, carefully studies the offer, reads the conditions for receiving a return, reviews, sometimes checks the location of the service with the declared contacts, and even the date of registration of the domain.

All this suggests that the user has become more competent and accurate.

Why did this happen:

Perhaps the essay services themselves have grown such caution and awareness in visitors when they leave negative reviews for their competitors on review sites.

Perhaps the Internet user, in general, has become more literate and now, at a minimum, looks at a domain name before switching to it, and studies its guarantees before buying anything.

It is possible that new services, which in recent years have grown in the essay niche like mushrooms after rain, have learned how to get first positions in Google, but have not learned how to provide the client with work of decent quality on time.

How to select the target audience so as not to overpay or waste time?

1. It is worth remembering that, first of all, it is best to focus on those users who came to buy an essay or homework. It is best to focus on transactional low-frequency queries.
   
2. According to internal data, of all payments by new customers, 93% were made using transactional, commercial keys and only 7% using informational ones (despite the fact that informational traffic is usually an order of magnitude greater than transactional).
   
3. Exclude non-target regions from your traffic. Especially India and Pakistan. A good result can be obtained if you focus on visiting students who study in the United States. For such, there is a lower requirement on the part of the teaching staff (which means higher grades, which means higher satisfaction with the service), and they are less afraid of being caught on a hot one, and therefore, they are easier to convert.

A few words about the prospects of a niche:

From year to year in the United States it is becoming more and more prestigious to have a higher education. So, according to 2018 data, about 36% of the total US population has a higher education. In 2012, this figure was only 32%. And this trend continues to grow. In the 2018-2019 school year alone, more than 80.5 million students enrolled in the US. And let our target audience among them not exceed 5%, but isn’t the average check for the first order worth trying to bring such a client and get up to 9 repeat orders from him 🙂

For all details and additional questions, please contact support.