Audience Research

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Type of audience research

Audience research will uncover very specific traits, and behaviors, and insights, and understandings of your audience. So what you want to try and uncover here are things like their age, their gender, their specific behaviors. What are they interested in? And there’s a number of tools that you can use that are actually free, that you don’t have to go in and pay for expensive tools to actually uncover this.

Facebook Audience Insights tool

The Facebook Audience Insights tool is available in the ads dashboard. It is the raw data of over one and a half billion people that you can actually manipulate and look at. What percentage are a specific age? You can check what interests them, and whether they use mobile versus desktop. How many ads do they click on per month? How many likes, comments, and shares? And you can actually see that based against the Facebook average.

So you can actually see how much more some specific audience indexes click on ads or likes or comments than another. Very effective tool as well for seeing location and device. O your research map, jot down little things, 60% of this audience are female, 40% live in the U.S, 30% who live in the U.S speak Spanish. Start to uncover specific insights and understandings into the audience, and list their interests. And what’s really interesting in the interest section is you can try and identify what types of pages they’re engaging with. Is it short-form video pages? Is it snappy pages, like the LAD Bible? Or is it pages that involve funny memes? Is it sports? Is it home interest? Is it DIY? You’ll start to actually learn quite a lot about your audience, which will actually help you define your content.

Twitter Audience Insights platform

This is not as developed, and you can currently only look at a global audience unless you’re in the U.S, and then you can go more specific. But as they begin to roll this out, you should be able to look at this for specific audiences and in specific regions. What this will give you is even more detail in their mobile carrier, and their interactions with specific topics. Again, start to note what are the differences between one platform versus another? What are the demographics of your audience? What are their interests? How are they behaving? Is it mobile, is a desktop? Are they exposed to ads? That kind of understanding is invaluable.

Google Keyword Planner

Google is a vast resource for what people are asking the Internet on a daily basis. The AdWord planning tool allows you to put in keywords surrounding your business, and what will come up are related keywords or related queries. So, if you’re selling a specific type of product, if you put that type of product in, it will start to spit out. What are the questions people ask when they’re looking at that product? And so, for example, say you’re selling TVs, and you put in UHD TV, so the Ultra-High Definition, and you see that the number one question is, what is UHD? You know straight away that your content now needs to start to debunk what UHD means. Why is it better? Why should you go UHD? Is there anything you need to know before you purchase UHD? That’s asked to inform your content, gives you an insight into your audience, and tells you exactly what you need to deliver to them.

Audience personas

Personas are so valuable because it starts to give people a visual sense about their customers. They involve writing paragraphs that describe the type of person but turns them into a character. So for example, this is Bill. Bill is 32 years old and lives in the city. He’s an accountant. Bill lives in a rented apartment with his girlfriend. They have no children. Bill like sports, mainly football. Facebook helps him keep up with his favorite players. Bill has plenty of discretionary income, so he likes to attend games when he can.

What does that tell me straight away? What would be interesting for my social media content is a sports sponsorship. Do we have a sports sponsorship? How can we use it through social media to reach Bill? So the audience persona is a clever tool for creating this story, and it allows you to kind of really easily put you and your team in the shoes of this person.

And that’s really what we as marketers need to do, is we need to start to actually think and act like the people we’re trying to target, because sometimes what we do is we act like marketers, and we tell people what we think they need to like and do, and then reality, they just won’t do.