Audience Research Dimensions

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Communities of interest

A community of interest is a group of people who share common interests, passions, and life experiences that bond them closer together. Targeting this audience is valuable to your business, as you can attempt to leverage the connection between their community with your brand equity. For example, Patagonia might target environmentalists with their products on social media. When conducting research to define your audience and discover some of their attitudes and motivators, there are multiple dimensions to consider.

Audience Research Dimensions

Needs, wants, and goals

A need is basic, whereas a want is more of a luxury and a goal is an aspiration to be achieved. You need water to survive, but you might want flavored sparkling water. And your goal might be to find the most satisfying, but healthy, brand of bottled water.

Needs, wants, and goals are not universal. In other words, different cultures have different definitions of what needs, wants, and goals are. It is important to understand the needs, wants, and goals of a particular culture and your community of interest in order to help you determine your messaging for that audience. If you can appeal to a need, want, or goal, you will capture the attention of that potential customer.

Levels of understanding

Your audience will have a certain degree of knowledge about your product. It can be beneficial for you to understand the extent of their knowledge. You want to identify whether your desired audience are likely to be novices, have a basic understanding, or advanced understanding.

If they are experts, you’ll lose their interest immediately with basic how-to and explainer content. On the other hand, if your audience are beginners, you’ll need to pitch content at a level that won’t confuse them and put them off.

Brand affinity

Another dimension to consider is brand affinity and loyalty. Your audience will have several brand affinities. For example, they might drink both Coca Cola and Pepsi, or wear both Bulgari and Dolce Gabbana. These are brands that your audience has an affinity with and can provide valuable insights into who they are, as well as providing opportunities for marketers. Typically, people tend to buy from brands that match their own beliefs and personal values. For example, the values of brands like Patagonia in terms of environmentalism really appeal to its customers who are outdoors people with a love for the natural environment. This in turn drives more sales from existing customers and helps grow the customer base as people who share the same values as the brand will be drawn towards them. Examining these will give you a better understanding of the whole person.

Similarly, discovering what other brands your audience has an affinity with can provide other ideas on how to reach them, bond with them, and build trust with them. You can note how you can create more relevant content for them, based on the content they are engaging with from other brands.

Content sharing

What motivates your audience and stirs them to share content? 

Well, different audiences respond to different types of content. Part of your role is to try and work out if there are any patterns that you can find in the content that people are sharing. This is known as social currency. 

For example, your audience might share content to appear smarter, cooler, or funnier, or to find their ‘tribe’. They may want to provoke an emotional reaction by sharing a story that they connected to, or by sharing content that reminds them of a memory, or that generates familiarity or comfort. They will also share content they found to be of practical value; perhaps they learned something and want to pass on.

By recognizing people’s motivations for sharing, you not only discover more interest, but can tap into this when creating your own content for personalizing social media messaging.

Narrowing the audience and customer-centricity

You can’t speak to everyone at once, so you need to look for ways to narrow your audience.

Everybody has their own interests and passions. So, do you speak to a specific audience whose language you understand, whose motivations you understand, or whose passions you’re on board with? Or do you create generic messages that may or may not hit their mark with anyone?

Narrowing your audience evolves through your research and is a fundamental task in the increasingly popular practice of customer-centricity. If you already have an established customer base, you have an advantage. You can cross-reference their tastes, desires, their movements between channels, and their motivations using social intelligence tools.

So how do you find out how dense a community is? Some signals of density are:

• The number of people having discussions and conversations around their interests and level of activity within discussion groups.
• The number of connections between people within the group. Within each group, the number of people who are connected to each other also creates density.
• The interactions and shared interests and passions of the group. Within a group, if people share multiple passions, not just the interests of that particular group, they’re more likely to spend time together and more time discussing them.
• The presence of offline meetups. Getting to the point from being in a discussion group or a forum, to meeting up for coffee deepens relationships.

So, when conducting or justifying audience research to stakeholders, try to keep in mind that it’s about giving you the context and information you need. It is central to any digital marketing strategy. After all, if you don’t have this data, how do you know where and how you are going to communicate with your audience?