Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
What is audience research?
Audience research is a crucial component of any successful digital strategy. It’s essentially a way of establishing the size, composition, and characteristics of a group of individuals who are existing or potential customers of your business. These individuals make up your market. Furthermore, you can gain additional insights by evaluating the competitors within your market and their various strategies.
In today’s world, online audiences and consumers are in control. They use multiple communication channels to interact with brands and businesses every day and demand quick and easy access to information, fast response times, and simple checkout processes. At any time, they can browse your product catalog or website, read your blog, compare your service to a competitor’s, make a purchase, write a review or comment on one of your social posts. So, when creating a digital marketing strategy, it’s crucial that you place your audience at the center of your planning and build your strategy around their needs.
You can do this by conducting thorough audience research. After all, you can’t target your customers effectively unless you know who they are, what they like doing, what influences them, what problems they have, and how they like to shop. You can use various research methods – from audience and competitive research to industry trend and cultural research which can help you to learn about your customers, enter successfully into new markets, and create a solid digital marketing strategy.
Importance of audience research
The best performing digital marketing strategies are shaped by audience research and the valuable insights it generates. While it can be tempting to skip the research stage and move straight to the execution of your plan, this is usually a mistake. If you fail to carry out proper audience research, you’re likely to miss opportunities that you could have capitalized on. You’re also likely to encounter obstacles and risks that audience research could have identified at an earlier point and helped you avoid.
One of the advantages of digital marketing is that it’s agile by nature. You can quickly take the results of your audience research and adapt and optimize your strategy to drive performance. So, take the time to do your research before you begin executing any digital plans. This should help you build a more effective digital marketing strategy.
Goal of audience research
The goal of audience research is to uncover consumer insights that can help you plan and execute your digital marketing strategy. It can help you discover why consumers purchase certain brands and products instead of others, when they are most likely to buy, and how they prefer to shop. Without these insights, your strategy will be based on hunches and guesswork and is likely to underperform.
The most effective audience research allows marketers to connect their strategies with their audiences. It provides valuable data on how people think, behave, and live their lives. This information helps you focus on who you're marketing to, so you can ensure your channels, messaging, and content both align with the needs of your target audience and deliver on your marketing objectives. It also helps ensure that you don't veer off course and include irrelevant or disruptive elements into your strategy that might confuse your audience or derail your marketing efforts. Good audience research keeps you focused and reminds you who exactly you are communicating with, which is invaluable when managing any digital marketing strategy.
Benefits of audience research
Audience research offers many benefits to digital planners and strategists. For example:
Audience research helps you identify obstacles that can impede or disrupt your strategy. It provides information on what customers dislike and what they avoid doing. It explains how they do their research and highlights the reasons people don’t buy your products. Knowing the positives and negatives in relation to customer activity are equally important.
In addition, audience research helps you tailor your communications to the people who are most interested in your products and services and helps you develop appropriate and personalized content. If you know your target audience, you can address them effectively. You’re aware of the best tone and language style to use, the types of promotions that resonate with them, the imagery and colors they’re sensitive to, and the influencers that strike a chord with them. This should lead to more meaningful interactions with consumers and better customer experiences.
Finally, audience research helps you identify current and future needs. Because you’re selling your product to this audience, it’s essential that you understand what needs your product is serving and what problem it’s solving. Moreover, if you know your audience well enough today, it should be easier to predict their future needs.
Using trend reports
Trend reports allow you to analyze trends in specific markets or niches and monitor changes in performance. They help you spot patterns and make forecasts about consumer behavior. By using local, market-specific and global trend reports in your audience research, you can uncover relevant high-level consumer trends. For example, you may discover that consumers in your target market are increasingly choosing brands that align with their personal values and beliefs, or that they’re demanding hybrid shopping options. You might investigate some of these trends further in your own research to gain additional insights specific to your organization and customers.
Including insights from organizations that are recognized for undertaking reputable research and publishing accurate trend reports can help to reinforce your own conclusions. The support of additional credibility can encourage stakeholder buy-in, leading to faster sign-offs and approvals of your digital marketing strategy.
Popular trend reports
Organizations that produce popular global trend reports include:
- Econsultancy
- the Drum
- smart-insights.com
- forbes.com
- mintel.com
- Think with Google, and
- strategyand.pwc.com
Clark Boyd
Clark Boyd is CEO and founder of marketing simulations company Novela. He is also a digital strategy consultant, author, and trainer. Over the last 12 years, he has devised and implemented international marketing strategies for brands including American Express, Adidas, and General Motors.
Today, Clark works with business schools at the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and Columbia University to design and deliver their executive-education courses on data analytics and digital marketing.
Clark is a certified Google trainer and runs Google workshops across Europe and the Middle East. This year, he has delivered keynote speeches at leadership events in Latin America, Europe, and the US. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Slideshare. He writes regularly on Medium and you can subscribe to his email newsletter, hi, tech.
Bill Phillips
Bill is an international facilitator, trainer, and team coach. He has successfully coached CEOs, board members, directors, executive teams, and team leaders in public and private companies, NGOs, and UN organizations in 15 countries across four continents. He is also the creator of Future-basing®, a highly potent process for building strategy, vision, and cooperation.
Will Francis
Will Francis is a recognized authority in digital and social media, who has worked with some of the world’s most loved brands. He is the host and technical producer of the DMI podcast, Ahead of the Game and a lecturer and subject matter expert with the DMI. He appears in the media and at conferences whilst offering his own expert-led digital marketing courses where he shares his experience gained working within a social network, a global ad agency, and more recently his own digital agency.
Cathal Melinn
Cathal Melinn is a well-known Digital Marketing Director, commercial analyst, and eommerce specialist with over 15 years’ experience.
Cathal is a respected international conference speaker, course lecturer, and digital trainer. He specializes in driving complete understanding from students across a number of digital marketing disciplines including: paid and organic search (PPC and SEO), analytics, strategy and planning, social media, reporting, and optimization. Cathal works with digital professionals in over 80 countries and teaches at all levels of experience from beginner to advanced.
Alongside his training and course work, Cathal runs his own digital marketing agency and is considered an analytics and revenue-generating guru - at enterprise level. He has extensive local and international experience working with top B2B and B2C brands across multiple industries.
Over his career, Cathal has worked client-side too, with digital marketing agencies and media owners, for brands including HSBC, Amazon, Apple, Red Bull, Dell, Vodafone, Compare the Market, Aer Lingus, and Expedia.
He can be reached on LinkedIn here.
By the end of this topic, you should be able to:
- Discuss the impact of customer journey stages in a marketing strategy
- Identify the key touchpoints, channels, and tactics in an omnichannel strategy
- Assess the impact of customer experience (CX) on business performance
