Audience Research

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Your target audience

Audience research is a huge part of what we do. We need to know who we want to talk to, but we also need to know what they are interested in. We need to know the best way to approach them, and when we finally do make that connection, what we want to say.

Quantitative perspective

We can look at this from a quantitative perspective, specifically in terms of paid search and display. What those quantitative elements can allow us to do is target with increasing accuracy. That is us reaching out to the audience, and it may be us responding to the audience in something like a paid search strategy.

Qualitative perspective

But if we look at this from a content marketing perspective it’s slightly more qualitative. We know which demographics we want to speak to, but your audience research will be based on things like surveys and the data that your company has collected. This is a good starting point, and we can build on this with the data that we get from the likes of Google and Facebook. It’s also worth having a roundtable discussion about who your audience is, where they hang out digitally, and what message will resonate with them.

Brand personas

A great way to do this, is to create brand personas or brand profiles. The benefit here is that every time that you go to create a piece of content, you can map it against one of your brand personas.

Let’s say you have Jessica, a 21-year-old student who lives in a rural setting and likes sports. These persona points are things that we can target, in a lot of detail, when it comes to paid search. That’s a great benefit for us as paid search strategists, but what we depend on there is a stimulus. We’re depending on Jessica to search for something and then we can be there to respond. And although we can’t have a guaranteed ROI off the back of that, we have a good idea that we’re reaching the audience that we want, and we can generate more demand.

Once that demand comes through in the form of a search query, we can retarget that same person. All of these channels work together, both the quantitative and the qualitative.

Rating different audiences

By this stage, we have a clear idea of what our overarching strategy is. We know what our objectives are, and we know what we need to achieve them. What we want to do next is decide which channels will help us deliver on each part of our activity. This means identifying the value of different audiences to your business, and then considering how reachable they are through different search marketing channels. Is SEO the best approach, for example, or you do need a short-term PPC boost?

SEO

Within SEO it’s a truism that ranking for competitive keywords is a long-term strategy. Based on the search volume for queries relevant to you, try to assess how your ranking can realistically improve within a three, six or 12-month timeframe. That will be based both on the competition that’s out there and the assets at your disposal. Do you have the budget to try and take on some of those bigger players?

Paid search

Within paid search, the search volume for relevant queries will allow you to analyze the opportunity for your business, but you will be constrained by your budget. So again, be realistic about what you can achieve. And if you’re thinking of SEO and PPC together, a nice way to approach this is to use PPC to take the heavy load where SEO rankings aren’t able to.

Combining SEO and PPC

Consider this example. You’re ranking in position 125 for credit cards and you want to get on page one of the served results. It won’t happen overnight with SEO. It’s a six to 12-month strategy. So you might want to use PPC in those first six months. But once those SEO positions start to improve, you can lighten the load on paid search and have your traffic coming through thanks to an improved, long-term SEO strategy.

It’s a fine balance to strike but it can be quite a profitable one. And remember, as your SEO performance improves, you can redirect your paid search or display budget, which allows you to prospect a lot more.

Display

Prospecting with display is difficult to define in terms of ROI. For example, attribution becomes difficult when you’re dealing with post-click or post-impression considerations. But there is a lot of value in display advertising. This channel can drive more demand, so if you use a brand awareness campaign you can monitor the branded search volume that you see both in paid search and SEO. And that can be a nice way of framing the benefits of display.

Why do consumers use search engines?

Whichever vertical your business operates in, it’s highly likely that your consumers use search engines for pretty much everything they do online. That could be product research and comparison, contributing to community forums, providing feedback, seeking support, or making that all-important purchase.

That means that you need to tailor your message. Again, the stimulus here is what the user puts into the search engine. We need to make sure that we always understand the intent of that stimulus:

• Is it informational?
• Is it navigational?
• Is it commercial?

If your audience is using search for informational purposes, you may want to focus on increasing your site’s presence via quick answers. You’ll most likely have seen these. They’re in position zero, as it’s come to be known within the industry, which appear above all the other SEO rankings that we typically see. You can rank within that position zero if you’re anywhere between positions 1 and 10, and the content is fed programmatically by Google. In other words, as long as you’re matching that intent on what Google deems to be that search intent, you can rank in those positions. That’s a much more sensible strategy if your product or your company is based around informational searches.

What you shouldn’t do is tie an ROI target to that strategy. Instead, you may want to track that user and see if, after four more interactions, they make a purchase. Or, you may want to cookie that user after they come into your website, and then re-market to them via paid search.