How to become an expert on your target audience

If you’re just getting started developing your business’ marketing strategy, one of the first items on your to-do list should be creating a plan for how you will develop a deeper understanding of your target audience over time - one of the most important goals of marketing.

This can be a great technique to implement immediately after selecting a primary target audience for your small health or wellbeing business, as it means you can get started collecting information on your audience right away, before moving on to other marketing techniques that work best when you already have some existing audience research to work with.  

What is Audience Research?

Audience research (also known as market research) is a term used to describe the information a business collects on the members of its target audience. Businesses of all sizes can do this in order to help them learn about their audience on a deeper, more personal level, which greatly increases their ability to tailor their marketing content and materials to their audience, dramatically increasing its effectiveness.

Creating an Audience Research routine

An audience research routine outlines the techniques your business will use to learn about its target audience over time, and describes how often each technique will be used.  

By creating a routine around your audience research, your business will develop healthy, awareness-building habits that allow you to continue to build upon your existing knowledge of your target audience over time, little by little, as new customer insights come to hand.

Planning out exactly how your business will gather information about it’s target audience will help you integrate audience research into your team’s daily, weekly and monthly business tasks – a healthy marketing habit that will help you stay ahead of the curve when it comes to delivering products, services, and a customer experience that resonates.

What we're trying to find out

To keep things simple, I encourage my clients to focus on collecting six different types of information about their target audience:

• Opinions: What pre-existing opinions do they have in relation to your product/service?
• Desires: What do they desire in relation to your product/service (short term and long term goals)?
• Challenges: What challenges do they face in their life that your product/service can help with?
• Questions: What are the most frequently asked questions in relation to your product/service?
• Use of language: Are there any common phrases or terms they use, especially in relation to your product/service?
• Use of media: Which marketing channels are they exposed to most frequently?
  

The first five types of information can be incredibly useful when it comes to crafting marketing content that is tailored to your audience, and the last type, ‘use of media’, helps you to understand which media channels you should be using to distribute your marketing materials.

By directly referencing these insights, including prioritising marketing and advertising via the marketing channels your audience uses most frequently, you’re ensuring your content is relevant and your marketing budget is being used efficiently.

Conducting your own research

A healthy audience research routine usually incorporates a mixture of qualitative (or quality-focused) techniques, and quantitative (or quantity-focused) techniques. This way you get a healthy range of insights about your audience; some insights will be highly individual and personal in nature, while others will be more general and recurrent.

So for example, a one-to-one conversation over the phone with a member of your target audience is an example of a qualitative audience research method, whilst a survey or questionnaire sent to your entire mailing list is an example of a quantitative audience research technique.  

Qualitative Techniques

Every customer interaction with a member of your target audience is an opportunity to learn more about your audience, and discover new ways to better serve them. The more personal and natural the interaction, the better, as these kinds of interactions tend to encourage people to open up and express themselves more emotionally, yielding more useful insights.

It’s also a great idea to encourage direct, personal responses to emails sent to your mailing list, which can quickly become important one-to-one conversations allowing you to collect feedback on your latest offers, campaigns, events, or business updates.

Quantitative Techniques

Modern technology has made it much easier for small businesses to implement quantitative audience research techniques into their marketing routines, and there are plenty of options at your disposal, including creating surveys, requesting testimonials and reviews, or any form of social media marketing which allows for direct feedback, to name just a few ways.

Summary

Understanding your audience is a matter of actively listening and requesting feedback from them as you build one of your business’ most important marketing tools - your target audience knowledge base.

By approaching the task of conducting audience research as a regular marketing activity, and collecting and recording information about your audience consistently over time, you’ll be able to develop a comprehensive knowledge base on your audience - something that every aspect of your marketing will benefit from.

For more detail on this technique check out my ‘Marketing Strategy For Beginners’ guide, or to have me help you set up an audience research process for your business, you can book a time for my ‘Understanding Your Audience’ marketing workshop via Calendly here.