Audience Research

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is audience research?

The main research that all marketers use while planning a digital marketing strategy or campaign is audience research. Both audience research and objective development work hand in hand and influence the rest of the digital strategy

Audience research is research that’s designed to establish the size, composition, and characteristics of a group of individuals that are or could be business potential customers. It allows you to find out more about your audience, or potential audience, so that you can then develop digital marketing strategies that meet their needs.

Benefits of audience research

Conducting audience research brings several benefits to an organization:

• Overcome obstacles: Audience research helps you identify obstacles between your audience and your brand. You can find out what your audience dislikes, what they avoid, what stops them from buying your brand, how they buy, and so on.
• Develop content: Using the insights gleaned from audience research, you can then develop appropriate and personalized content. If you know your target audience, you know how to address them, and in what language, tone, and style. You learn which terms better resonate with them, and what visuals, influencers, and colors they are sensitive to.
• Identify channels: Part of understanding your audience involves learning which channels they use. This can help you achieve your goals, because you can then prioritize these channels in your digital marketing strategy.
• Unearth needs: By conducting audience research, you learn their current and future needs, and you can then take steps to meet those needs. Because you are selling your product to this audience, you have to understand what needs your product is answering. What problem is it solving for them now? How do you propose to address future needs and expectations?

Goals of audience research

The goal of audience research is to find consumer insights. At this point, however, it’s important to pause and consider what we mean by ‘insights’. Research is not the same as insights. And not all data provides insights!

You’re looking for information that’s relevant and meaningful, but also accurate, reliable, and verifiable. These insights should relate to the customers, and enable you to do or say something that you couldn’t do before. You may unearth a lot of ‘interesting’ information, but you then need to dig deeper to find those insights that can drive your digital marketing campaigns.

Using these insights, your aim is to influence your target audience and achieve your business objectives. With that in mind, marketers need to connect with the audience in a meaningful way.

But how can you achieve this? This is where the insights from audience research become important. You learn:

• How your audience thinks
• How they behave
• How they engage with online channels such as search engines, email, and social media
• How they live their lives in the digital space.

You should know your audience as well as you know your best friend. To help keep you focused on this audience, when planning and managing your digital strategy, you can create buyer or audience personas to detail the characteristics of your ideal customer or bullseye target audience. Having these personas to hand helps you stay on track by reminding you who you are talking to with your content and what channels they use most often.

Example: King’s Hawaiian

For example, King’s Hawaiian, a family-owned bread brand, worked with a creative advertising agency to analyze food-related TikTok trends. It assessed the #FoodTok community and identified ways to join the conversation with its products. The brand is relatively well known, but cannot compete with the bigger brands when it comes to advertising budgets. Therefore, it realized that it would be more important to take advantage of existing trends than to try and create a new one.

Its resulting ‘Slider Sundays’ campaign, promoted with TikTok creators, took advantage of popular hashtags to deliver an 18.4% increase in brand awareness. Working with creators accelerated the company’s content production and ensured that it could promote new recipe ideas every Sunday, too.

Key data for audience research

Audience research focuses on the follow key types of data:

• Demographic: location, income, gender, age, occupation, education
• Psychographic: beliefs, life goals, opinions, musical taste, personality, lifestyle
• Behavioral: digital channel use, product use, product adoption, online activities, retail experience, product testing

Let’s explore these in a bit more detail.

Demographics

Demographics include age, generation (Gen Z, millennial, Gen X, baby boomer, and so on), gender, and location (where they live), as well as professional data such as income level, occupation, industry, and any other relevant socio-economic data.

Demographics can be useful to help define your target audience when creating campaigns on social media, and on display and video channels. However, it’s just not specific enough to individual consumers to rely on as the sole data point to build your strategy around.

Psychographics

Psychographics include lifestyle preferences, ideas, and beliefs of the audience. It is the part of data that gives you more details about your audience personality. You can then layer this over demographic data to get to know them better as individuals.

As marketers, you need to find out information about your audience, such as activities, interests, opinions, attitudes, values, lifestyle, and loyalty. This type of data enables you to plan for how the audience is likely to react to marketing content and messaging.

When your target market seems to have radically different demographics, it is good to look at segmenting this main audience into psychographic segments. This is a powerful way to market the same product to groups in a way that is most relevant to them.

Behavioral

Behavioral data looks at online activities and actions. These could cover shopping and researching, channel use, search engines, apps, social media platforms, and email, as well as website visits, product and content use, where they click, what the usual consumer path is on your site, and other relevant buying habits, brand preferences, and product usage.

This is the ‘what people do’ type of data. By observing what people do and how they behave online – when using your products or using the competition’s products – you can understand them better. You can then improve your message, optimize performance, and overcome obstacles to achieving your goals.

The role of buyer personas

To really help hone your targeting and messaging, you can create a comprehensive picture of your audience by layering demographics, psychographic, and behavioral data together in buyer personas from your audience research.