Next-Level Digital Marketing: How to Do Audience Research in 5 Steps
Every digital marketing campaign starts with understanding what the audience wants. You can create content tailored to your audience's needs when you know what they like. This is where audience research comes in.
With audience research, you can decide how to create and release content that aligns with your audience's viewing habits. It also allows you to focus on a specific target audience, what to give them, and the best ways to reach them.
Key Takeaways:
Audience research influences marketing strategies by giving information on the audience's preferences, which helps create compelling content.
The methods of gathering data in audience research may vary. Some use online forms, while others hold focus group discussions and interview others.
A handful of tools used in audience research include Google Analytics, Google Trends, and HootSuite. Each tool has its own function in pulling data and tracking your marketing campaign's performance.
How Audience Research Impacts Marketing Strategies
Audience research is the starting point of crafting a marketing campaign. It creates a huge impact on marketing strategies in these ways:
Targeted Messaging: By dividing your audience into smaller groups, you can customize your message to each group without sounding forced. With 90% of companies spending 25% of their budget on particular targets, audience research can help boost your campaign's effectiveness.
Creating Customized Offers: Customizing your offers to your audience's needs will likely increase conversion rates.
Choosing Content Format: Data from your audience research can give insights into the kind of content your audience consumes.
Picking Marketing Channels: Audience research gives you an idea of where your audience spends their time online. Choose which platform to focus on.
Getting Feedback: Audience research brings feedback to your door, citing improvement areas and innovation opportunities.
Methods of Conducting Audience Research
1. Define the problem
Take a look at your past marketing efforts and see the numbers. Ask yourself what you want to achieve and how to do it. To impact your audience, you need to make a difference in what you're already doing.
2. Ask the audience the right questions
Relevant questions will give you valuable answers. When you conduct audience research, keep your demographics in mind. These include age, religion, income, gender, and education.
You can use the following questions before going to the specifics:
What are the audience's unmet needs and pain points?
Where do they look for information?
How does the product or service serve them?
What are their experiences with a certain product or service?
What does the audience want to achieve?
3. Use audience research techniques
This is where you can begin to employ primary and secondary research. With primary research, you get information first-hand by immersing yourself in the audience. Secondary research reviews information from published sources, such as academic journals and government websites.
Here are some examples of primary research methods:
Questionnaires and Surveys: Send these out to people in person, via phone, or email. Make sure the questions in surveys and questionnaires are relevant to your business, product, and service. You'll get answers to specific questions and support claims with statistics.
Interviews: You can interview audience members in a closed setting. As you ask questions, you'll understand what motivates your customers to purchase products and services and gain insight into their buying objections. Use the interview data to pursue new marketing strategies that align with the customer's needs.
Focus Groups: Let a moderator organize a small group discussion of five to ten people. The moderator will present your product to the focus group members and gauge their reactions using actual feedback, body language, and facial expressions. You can also do virtual focus groups, but gauging non-verbal reactions might be challenging. Make sure to compensate participants through vouchers, free products, or cash.
Social Media Analytics: Review your social media accounts and your competitors'. Analyze the reactions, comments, and user-generated content to learn about trends, engagement, and people's opinions on certain products. You can even run polls on social media platforms to gauge public sentiments about your products.
Website Analytics: This method lets you know how users interact with your website, such as exploring pages or leaving within a few minutes. The data can tell where your points for improvement are.
Ethnographic Research: This kind of research combines observing how people react in a certain environment with handing out surveys for people to answer. It immerses you in the audience's environment and observes people's behaviors and cultures influencing their purchasing decisions.
4. Develop conclusions from the data
Come up with conclusions based on the data you gathered from your quantitative and qualitative research. Identify trends, patterns, and common themes that you can use for content creation in your marketing strategy.
5. Create an ideal customer
Make a customer persona from the research data. Include its interests, pain points, demographic information, and buying habits. While every part of the customer persona is semi-fictional, it's ideal for addressing a customer's concern based on what they're potentially thinking about.
Audience Research Tools
Your audience, or by extension, market research, won't go smoothly without these handy tools:
Google Analytics
This tool tracks marketing campaigns and website performance. With just a few clicks, it generates auto-generated reports on conversions and marketing campaigns. The tool also provides insights into traffic sources, monitors goal completions, and gets demographic information of site visitors.
SEMRush
SEMRush comes to mind when you talk about keyword research. But this tool is more than just looking for keywords. SEMRush can also crawl and audit websites and build links. Website crawling and auditing are essential to know where your website falls short and address any gaps in the audit right away. Backlinks, on the other hand, make your website authoritative in your niche when you link to credible websites and get high-quality links in return.
Google Trends
If you want to analyze how often search terms are used compared to the overall search volume in a given period, Google Trends is the tool for you. The data from this tool is helpful when looking for keywords you can use in your content. You can be ahead of your competitors as you target keywords others don't use as much.
Google Forms
This tool allows you to create surveys, polls, and quizzes without using any special software. You can easily make all of them in your web browser or even from your mobile phone. Once your survey is done, copy the link and send it via email. Get instant results after your respondents answer the form. Use the charts and graphs feature to summarize the results.
SproutSocial
Use this tool for engagement and analytics reporting. SproutSocial can monitor keywords and give you reports on how your campaigns are performing against competitors. It also analyzes industry trends through data so you can keep in touch with the most relevant topics in your niche.
SparkToro
This tool tracks your audience's behaviors—the content they read and watch and the websites they visit and follow. SparkToro also understands the language of the users' bios and the keywords they search for. In addition, this tool also knows the sites and platforms that are popular with users.
HootSuite
HootSuite has engagement and social media analytics tools to ensure you're always ahead of your competitors. This tool can also help you create AI content and track online conversations about your products. The insights you get from reports will help you improve your marketing efforts.
Famous Companies Who Used Audience Research
Companies should conduct audience research to gain a deep understanding of their audience. Whether a company is big or small, knowing its audience will help it a lot.
Take a look at how three of the most famous companies utilize audience and, to some extent, market research to understand their target audiences:
Starbucks
This coffee company monitors social media channels in case of customer complaints and consumer brand affinity. It has also conducted market research on dairy substitutes for its coffee.Its approach includes social media monitoring, tracking customer preferences, and in-store testing.
Apple
Apple is probably the biggest tech company in the world today because of its ubiquitous products, which include iPhones, Macbooks, iPads, and the streaming platform Apple TV+.
But despite all these products, it has a segmented target market. Let's take a look:
Demographic: Apple's target market is 18 to 45-year-olds who are single, married with no children, or married with young kids and teens. The company is more popular with 66% of females than 44% of males.
Geographic: Apple's largest share is in the US. Europe and Greater China followed suit.
Behavioral: Most iPhone users are loyal. In the first quarter of 2022 alone, 44.6 million iPhones were shipped worldwide.
Psychographic: Apple retains nearly 85% of its customer base, who, due to its ecosystem, prefer to upgrade to another iPhone than buy an entirely different smartphone brand.
McDonald’s
This fast-food chain regularly researches the most affordable prices for its customers and the products that are performing well. Its customers belong to the working class—lower to middle-class consumers who want cheap food.
Parting Words
Audience research begins with knowing the preferences of the entire audience. After getting information through your preferred audience research method, you can apply the data and insights to your content creation for effective marketing campaigns.
Continuous audience research helps you determine the products and services that work well with your audience. You can improve your marketing strategies as trends change. Keep in mind that your audience's needs come first as you develop products and create services that seek to improve their lives by miles.
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