Conducting clear and effective audience research is crucial to marketing research. Proper research will help you shape everything from the tone and messaging of your brand to the style of your content and distribution.
Understanding your audience is not as simple as you might think. Customers have different preferences and tastes and making the wrong choices can cost your brand. To understand the customers better you should conduct careful research for your target audience, which includes internal information and analytics.
The insights you make helps you reach your prospective customers easily and improve marketing. Here are ways you can research your audience.
Understand your audiences
First, you need to learn more about your existing audience. Your existing customers provide a perfect audience for you to research how your target audience should look. Give them customer satisfaction surveys to know more about their experience with your products or services. Send the surveys through email or publish them on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This enables you to comprehend your audience and how they perceive or think about your products or services.
Besides, you use the sales team to collect data from customers. Sales teams interact directly with customers and can be a crucial source for developing customer data. Ask your sales representatives to give customers a survey to get instant responses to your research. To take this a step further, consider leveraging reverse ETL tools to push customer data from your data warehouse into operational systems like CRM or marketing platforms. This enables real-time insights and more personalized engagement strategies.
Use Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a great source of information about your audience. Take advantage of the platform by logging into your Google Analytics account. On the left-hand column, you will see a section named ‘Audience’. This section has different subgroups including, interests, geography, demographics, and more. These subgroups give you more information about your target audience.
Check the competition
It is worth checking what your competitors are doing to benefit from the lessons they have learned. Inquire how they are positioning themselves and the segments they are approaching. Check for patterns and what channels and formats are working great for your competitors.
Create a customer persona
After collecting adequate objective data you can work with, it is time to create a customer persona. This is a fictional character that exhibits all the characteristics an average potential customer you expect your target audience to have. Make sure you include hard factors like income, educational level, sex, and age, as well as disposition factors like curiosity, sensitivity, temperament.
Social Media
Social media is very revealing. At times people are not willing to share details during face-to-face interviews. After understanding your target audience, figure out where they are hanging out online. Research if your audience is on a separate social media platform. For instance, Facebook appeals to the older generations while Twitter appeals to the younger generations. Figuring out the platform your audience is using helps you prioritize which platforms you want to focus on.
If your target audience is using Facebook, try to find them in Facebook groups which are becoming popular among social media users and they are a good place to research your target audience.
