How to conduct audience research for your business?
Find consumer insights that can help you deliver on your business objectives.
Audience research is the first and most important step you need to take before even starting to think about content marketing or any advertising strategies.
Why is that? Because you need to deliver your message only to people that are passionate about what you do, and they need your services or products.
If you didn’t conduct audience research before anything else, all your money and efforts might be in vain.
The goal of audience research
The purpose of audience research is to find consumer insights that will help you deliver on your business objectives. To influence them to move from the upper funnel on the buyers’ journey to the lower one, you need to understand how they think and how they behave every day.
Beat the competition
Learn from others’ mistakes and do better. You can improve your messaging and techniques by analyzing your competition. See what strategies they used and did not work. Try to understand why and avoid taking the same direction.
Read comments, reviews and see how people react to other brands that are targeting your audience. Are there any complaints? Something they would like to have, and they don’t? To what content they react positively, and what content doesn’t work? How can you apply these learnings to your benefit?
Some monitoring activities can only be done with special tools, and some can be done manually. Minimize losses and make your product and services stand out by taking as many steps from the following list:
- use SpyFu or SEMrush to discover the keywords they are targeting and target keywords they are missing
- use Buzzsumo to search for the most popular social content and make a list with subjects you can approach before your competitors.
- use Hootsuite or Zoho Social to monitor their social activity and see what topics performed well or didn’t.
- use Moz to keep track of all links your competitors got over the time and see if you can do something similar or outrank them.
- use Google Alerts to track keywords you are interested in. You can discover new competitors and monitor brand sentiment.
Define a buyer persona
Buyer personas help marketers focus their attention on the ideal customer, defined by demographics, behaviour, and how they are surfing the internet. This information will make it easier to choose the right message and achieve your business objectives.
Hootsuite teaches you the best way to define a buyer persona in their detailed article. As a bonus, you get a free template as well.
What data should we gather?
- Demographics:
The demographic factors of an audience include age, gender, religion, ethnic background, class, sexual orientation, profession, income, education, group membership, marital status, and countless other categories.
The best place to easily find this information is through social media channels. These people are already interacting with your brand. You just need to take this information and use it properly.
- Psychographics:
Psychographics helps you build a more in-depth understanding of your target audience, and it describes people’s values, desires, interests, lifestyle choices, beliefs, etc.
Marketers can use this data to get deeper insights into their target markets’ psychological and emotional motivations. Afterwards, you can tailor your messages in a way that resonates with them.
Collecting psychographic data can be time-consuming, but in the end, this information can be game-changing. You can acquire this data by interviewing your clients one-by-one or using surveys and by digging deep into your website’s analytics. What has moved people to click, call, or buy your products?
Use the information to segment your market based on psychographic characteristics. You will significantly increase your ROI by creating different campaigns and messages for every grouping of target segments. DirectiveGroup teaches us how we can execute Psychographic Market Segmentation in their detailed article.
- Behavioural:
To show people personalized content or ads that are relevant to them, start doing behavioural research. It leverages behavioural data — like what people are or are not doing on your website, with your campaigns, or social media channels.
Ask yourself the following questions:
Where do they click and why?
How long are they on my website?
What content/pages do they like the most?
When are they on my website and social channels?
What type of content brings the most engagement and why?
By observing what people do and how they behave online, using your product and social channels, you can understand the limitations of the user experience and the overall feeling about your services/products. Use this information to improve your message and overcome obstacles.
Automate your audience research
In time, marketing efforts became easier and less time consuming because a lot of useful tools were developed.
Nowadays, you can use various audience listening and monitoring tools to simplify your work and focus more on making money.
Every day, people from your target audience discuss topics that are relevant to your brand. If you don’t pay attention to what they are saying, you are missing the opportunity to improve your overall message and branding. By engaging in audience listening, you make these insights visible to the marketing and business organization.
To sum up, audience research is about getting to know your target market by giving you all the information you need to please your customers. It is the core of every successful digital marketing strategy. How can you know where to communicate or advertise and how to do it without all this information? Don’t assume you know your customers. Do your research. People are different in many ways that you don’t even know how without doing the hard work.
Thanks for reading!
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