Putting immense efforts into product development without understanding your target audience can go in vain, no matter how amazing the product quality is. An audience survey plays a vital role in doing business and performing audience analysis can help the brands to reach their potential consumers. An audience survey provides a better understanding of the customers and what they care about. Thus, businesses can utilize the analysis to effectively communicate by crafting the right message that resonates with them. Besides developing a basic understanding of audience, brands can also set the right strategies to succeed in the long term.

The purpose of an audience survey is to know about audiences' interests, influencing factors, problems that the customers might experience with the offered product/service, or their overall perception of a specific brand. Often, marketers confuse the term audience research with market research as the terms are used interchangeably. However, the two types of research differ in a way that market research includes information about the overall market whereas audience research only involves the specific group of people to collect insights about their views, opinions, and need.

Here are some of the crucial steps to conduct an audience analytics survey.

Types of Audience Analysis

• Social Media Analysis

Social media analysis is done utilizing the extensive data of active users on the social media handles. With better actionable insights, marketers can design improved campaigns and create an enhanced social media presence. Analytics are built into most social media platforms that can help to calculate metrics like likes, shares, comments, mentions, clicks, responses, etc. Using the information, a brand can know what type of content resonates with the audience.

• Demographic Analysis

Demographic audience analysis includes studying your audiences and defining buyer personas depending on the statistical data that recognizes a particular group of people. The research involves collecting and examining factors like age, gender, location, education, and income to help reveal relevant issues and gather insights. Besides, understanding demographics can help brands create an audience perception.

• Psychographic Analysis

Psychographic audience analysis is related to the psychology or behaviour of the audience and explains the inner qualities. The analysis considers the targeted population's needs, hopes, concerns, values, emotions, personality, attitudes, and opinions. Psychographic analysis helps understand buying behaviour and touchpoints of audiences, which brands can capitalize to optimize campaigns, ads, or design copy.

• Situational Analysis

The situational analysis investigates the audience size and division according to mediums or channels, demographic factors, or other funnel stages. The analysis allows marketers to evaluate projected growth, define potential customers, assess competitors, and evaluate the current state of business.

• Behavioral Analysis

In a digital setting, behavioral analysis helps determine people's reactions when they browse a channel. Through engagement metrics, marketers can determine how your audiences reach your site, which channels bring the most traffic, are popular with the audiences, etc. Integrating demographic and behavioral analysis, brands can learn about their target audience content preferences, conduct competitive research, and find areas for improvement in their marketing campaigns.

How to do Audience Research Analysis?

• Secondary Research

Secondary research practice involves examining data compiled from third-party sources such as company white papers, academic reports, social media profiles, census data, etc. The secondary research helps achieve a baseline understanding of audience, which can be used to design future primary research strategies. Before starting secondary research, brands should define the area of research and finalize the information source to get the required data and break it down into keywords and synonyms to get concrete results.

• Primary Research

The first step of the audience survey is to gather as much information as possible without prejudices or ideas about your audiences. Primary research provides direct feedback from customers or even prospective customers about their perception of products or services. Through preliminary surveys, marketers can build a bank of unique data and knowledge, gather customer intelligence, and create a dialogue with the target audience. Customer satisfaction surveys can be done through telephonic interviews, focus groups, or email surveys. The customer satisfaction questionnaire generally includes:

1. What is your favourite feature in the offered product/service?
2. What are the problems that you faced while using the product/service?
3. What would you like to improve in your product/service?
4. Describe how you feel about the product.

• Ethnography

Ethnographic research is a qualitative method to investigate complicated and critical design challenges. In this type of analysis, a researcher studies/interacts with participants in a real-life environment via interviews, observations, or surveys. Ethnography is essential in the early stages of user-centred product design or evaluating existing design to understand the relevant domain, processes, goals, and context. The main advantage of ethnographic study is that it helps identify and analyse unexpected issues and mitigate the risks.

• Surveying 

A well-designed survey can help businesses reveal what their customers want, what motivates them to buy, and how to carve out the competition. Surveys are the most effective and efficient way to help develop a marketing strategy and attract and convert new customers. Collecting information of your target audiences can provide a lot of opportunities, such as:

• More personalized ads for the potential target audience
• Effective email marketing strategy
• Creating different messages for different visitors
• Addressing the audience's pain points
• Identify new and improved products/services

Creating targeted messages will attract visitors to your website, create more brand awareness, and generate interest. Commonly used survey questions include:

• What are your age, gender, and location?
• What are your interests?
• Which brands do you follow on social media?
• Would you like to receive related content via email?

• Focus Groups

Focus groups or focus interviews or focused group interviews capitalize on communication between research participants to generate data quickly and conveniently. Instead of the researcher asking each person to respond to a question, people are encouraged to talk to one another, asking questions to explore people's knowledge and experiences. Participants in a market research focus group are selected on predetermined criteria such as socioeconomic status, race, age, location, and more. Marketers widely use focus groups to identify consumers' feelings and thoughts about a particular product or solution. The line of questioning used in the focus groups follows a logical sequence to mimic a natural exchange and arrive at a consensus or some level of agreement. Unlike other methods that focus on collecting quantitative data, focus groups actually help gather qualitative data, providing actionable insights.

• Field Testing

Field testing involves administering an early version of a sample to a group of people in a real-world environment to test its efficacy. With field testing, survey developers are able to gather valuable information to evaluate usability or check whether the product will work in the market or not. Field testing is an inexpensive method as not a lot of money, resources, or complicated equipment is required. There are different field-testing methods such as group testing, individual testing, questionnaires, talking aloud, and site testing.

Benefits of Audience Analysis for Brands

• Targeting the right audience 

Knowing the audience can help the brands target their products to the right group of people and convert them into prospective customers. The audience analysis tool can help you determine people interested in your offered products and thus craft marketing messages as per that specific audience.

• Promote your product

Marketers cannot afford an unsuccessful marketing campaign as it involves a lot of money and resources. With audience analysis, brands can promote their product with content that resonates with audiences. Marketers need to incorporate the likes and dislikes of target customers to attract them to purchase their products. Thus, knowing the audience well can result in successful marketing campaigns and result in more revenue.

• Reach out to existing and new customers 

The way of communication has drastically changed with the rapid growth of social media over the past few decades. Email marketing and telemarketing are no longer viable solutions to send the message across audiences. Brands are utilizing social media analytics to draft marketing messages by adapting to the preferences of the customers, which provides a greater chance of engagement with the target audiences.

• Track trends and evolving customer interests

With time, people's interests and habits evolve hence marketers need to evaluate the behavioural audience analysis to create products that suit their preferences. Spotting trends can help brands stay relevant and develop a competitive advantage. If a lot of your audience complains about the same problem, try to create an innovative solution.

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