Audience research is a vital part of marketing and advertising. By understanding the needs and pain points of the people who interact with your brand, you can improve your messaging, SEO, and most importantly – client acquisition.
What is Audience Research?
Audience research aims to understand your target market in order to better know their needs, goals and challenges. Conducting audience research requires looking at the size, composition, and defining criteria of your audience.
As a result of your research, you will be able to separate your audiences into groups called segments. These individuals share certain characteristics – for example, their age, interests or how often they use a product.
From there, you can make your marketing campaigns, content, and ads more relatable to your audience.
What Are the Benefits of Audience Research?
Carrying out target audience research provides insights that can help your business achieve its goals faster and more efficiently. That can translate to improved customer acquisition, customer retention, and revenue.
Audience research also helps marketers stay in touch with the people that matter most. Knowing a group of people’s average age, pain points, and preferences will allow marketing teams to see their audience as real people, instead of just an abstract concept. Most importantly, it allows marketers to connect with audiences more deeply because they understand how they think, behave, and live.
At the same time, audience research can highlight opportunities and obstacles for your brand.
For example, if your competitors are trying to communicate with your desired audience but aren’t succeeding, audience research can reveal why and how you could create content that resonates more successfully. Your brand can then develop more relevant campaigns for audiences and stay ahead of the competition.
When conducting audience research, most companies opt to create a buyer persona, which describes the ideal customer in terms of their preferred channels, messaging, and what their motivations are. Buyer personas humanize audience research and ensure that you speak to the right customers in the right way.