Audience research is crucial to build an effective digital marketing strategy. You need to understand the people you’re trying to sell to, otherwise you risk missing the target and wasting your marketing budget.
How can you learn more about your audience? Our Orange County digital marketing agency shares four techniques to try below.
Speak to Your Customers Directly
To market your business, products, and services to customers successfully, you should identify exactly what they need.
You can research your audience and find out what makes them tick in different ways. Here are three popular examples:
Surveys
Distributing online surveys is a simple research method. You can email these to existing customers and leads generated through your website, or you can use survey tools instead.
Surveys should ask a wide range of questions, covering age, interests, shopping habits, and opinions on products/services.
Interviews
By interviewing existing customers, you can learn about their pain points, how they perceive your business, their first encounter with it, what attracted them, and more. Interviews can be conducted in person or remotely via video chat or voice calls.
Whichever method you use, make sure that questions are open-ended (to avoid “yes” or “no” answers) and aren’t too intrusive.
Social Listening
You can use social media to discover users’ opinions about products, services, and brands in general. Social listening can help you learn more about how to make a better impact on your target audience. And with more than 302 million people using social media in America alone, there are plenty of opinions to explore!
Assess Competitor Audiences and Marketing
One of the most effective ways to research your audience is to check out your competitors’ marketing.
Ask:
- Who are they targeting and where?
- What techniques do they use to grab prospective customers and encourage them to click through to their site?
- How do they interact with users on social media?
- What types of digital marketing do they use to reach people (e.g. display ads, video ads, social ads, etc.)?
By analyzing your competitors’ audiences and their marketing strategy, you can find inspiration and opportunities to make your business stand out.
Organize Your Audience into the Right Segments
Audience segmentation is a major help when creating your marketing strategy, as it can improve the relevance and accuracy of your campaigns.
The process involves categorizing your audience into different types of segments. The most popular are:
- Demographic
- Geographic
- Behavioral
- Psychographic
Want to try it? Learn more in our blog post on the importance of audience segmentation.
Create Customer Personas
Use all the information you’ve gathered from your audience research to build customer personas. These are detailed representations of your ideal customer, spanning different ages, occupations, shopping behaviors, goals, and challenges.
Accurate customer personas will help you craft the right digital marketing campaigns for each segment of your audience. To learn more, check out our blog post on how to boost your PPC campaign success with customer personas.
Our Orange County digital marketing agency will create bespoke campaigns for your business and help you reach the right customers.
To get started, contact us today!