Audience Research: Everything You Need to Know

Understanding your audience is a fundamental requirement for any business aiming to succeed. Audience research involves systematically gathering insights about the people you serve. This includes what they want, need, and how they behave.

In this blog, we’ll explore everything you need to know about audience research. From simple definitions to different methods and tools you can use to conduct the research.

Let's start with the definition.

What is Audience Research?

Audience research is a systematic process aimed at understanding a specific target audience. The research provides insight into the target audience's characteristics, preferences, behavior, and more.

The key to business success is catering to customer needs. So, if you want to do that, you will have to start by understanding the target audience. This is where audience research comes into play.

Here are a few other reasons why you should consider it.

• Make your marketing efforts more concentrated and aligned to the target audience.
• Clearly understand customer pain points and create solutions to resolve them.
• Define customer expectations and implement strategies to meet them. 

Now, let’s have a look at the different types of audience research methods. 

Two Different Audience Research Methods

Audience research can be done using two main types: qualitative and quantitative methods. Read in as we break down the two types.

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is all about exploring people's thoughts, feelings, and experiences in depth. It helps researchers understand the reasons behind people's actions and opinions. 

Here are some common methods used in qualitative research:

1. Surveys with Open-Ended Questions

These are questionnaires, where participants can write their own answers instead of just choosing from options.

Open-ended questions allow respondents to express their thoughts freely, providing deeper insights. Tools like SurveySparrow can help analyze these responses effectively by organizing and summarizing the data.

The tool uses AI to analyze unstructured data to provide granular insights about customers. This includes but is not limited to customer emotions, the key drivers of your business, and the most discussed topics.

2. In-Depth Interviews

This involves talking one-on-one with someone to ask them questions about their thoughts and experiences. It allows for detailed answers and follow-up questions, helping researchers gather rich insights.

3. Focus Groups

A focus group is a small group of people who discuss a topic guided by a facilitator. It captures a variety of opinions at once, showing how people react to each other's ideas.

4. Observational Research

Researchers watch how people behave in real-life situations without interfering. This method reveals natural behaviors that might not come up in interviews or surveys.

Suggested Read: Qualitative research questions you should ask.

Quantitative Research

Quantitative research focuses on collecting numerical data to find patterns and trends. It’s more structured than qualitative research. Here are some common methods. 

1. Surveys

These are structured questionnaires that ask specific questions to gather data from a large number of people. Surveys can provide statistical information about what a larger group thinks or feels. They help businesses understand customer opinions, preferences, and experiences. 

The above given is a sample on how easy it is to create a survey (from scratch) with SurveySparrow. The AI survey feature works similarly to ChatGPT. You add in your prompt and the tool will do the rest. 

The best part? It’s available with the free version of the tool - completely free! So, if you are interested feel free to sign up and try it out. 

2. Experiments

Researchers manipulate one or more variables to see how they affect outcomes. This helps establish cause-and-effect relationships.

3. Analytics Tools

Software that tracks user behavior online, like how often they visit a website or what products they look at. These tools provide insights into audience demographics and engagement patterns.

4. A/B Testing

This involves comparing two versions of something (like an ad or webpage) to see which one performs better. It helps optimize marketing strategies based on actual user preferences.

Suggested Read: Quantitative research questions you should ask.

When to Use Audience Research

It's all about timing. Reaching out to the audience at the right time through the right channels. This is how you can make the most out of your audience research. Here are some key moments when you should consider doing the research.

1. Before Launching a New Product or Service

Understanding your audience's needs, preferences, and pain points can help you design a product that resonates with them. It ensures that your offering fills a gap in the market and meets customer expectations.

So, how can you do this? Use surveys, focus groups, or interviews to gather insights directly from potential users.

2. When Entering a New Market

If you’re expanding into a new demographic or geographic area, it’s crucial to understand the local audience’s behaviors and preferences.

Start by conducting a market analysis and demographic research. The insights you gather from there will help you to tailor your marketing strategies effectively.

3. To Improve Existing Products or Services

Your existing customers are a treasure trove of insights. Gathering feedback from them can reveal areas for improvement and help enhance customer satisfaction.

To analyze your existing customers try any of the following -

• Customer feedback surveys
• Reviews
• Customer interviews

The feedback froom these can help you identify strengths and weaknesses in your offerings.

4. During Marketing Campaign Planning

The more you know about your customers, the more targeted your approach will be. This way, you can make the marketing messages that resonate with them, increasing the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Wondering how to do this? Start by analyzing previous campaign data, this will give you an idea on how customers used to behave. Then, conduct surveys to understand what messaging works best for your audience.

5. When Developing Buyer Personas

The success of any business is understanding their target audience. The best way towards this is building a buyer persona. Having a buyer persona can help with product development and marketing efforts.

For this, start by doing qualitative research. You can leverage interviews and focus groups to gather insights on customer motivations and behaviors.

6. After Major Changes in Your Business

If you've made significant changes (like rebranding or altering product lines), it’s important to assess how these changes are perceived by your audience.

How can you do this? Conduct surveys to gather feedback on the changes you made and their impact on customer perceptions.

5 Tools to Use for Audience Research

Obviously, you will need the right audience research tools for the research. But don’t worry, we have got you covered. The following 5 tools that can help you with the research. 

1. SurveySparrow

G2 Rating: 4.4/5 (1900+ reviews)

Type: Voice of Customer Software

Being one of the best online survey tools, SurveySparrow can be a lifesaver for companies. The surveys created with SurveySparrow are conversational and engaging, improving the response rate. If you are using the right set of questions then the feedback will be relevant and reliable.

The more the response (feedback) you get, the more useful (and helpful) it will be for you.

As discussed earlier, the advanced analytics feature - CogniVue - can do in-depth analysis and find trends defining customer behavior. Here are some other features that make SurveySparrow the best tool.

• You can reach out to the customers through their preferred channels including offline and WhatsApp surveys.
• Real-time analytics and reporting allow you to track responses as they come in. And the customizable dashboard makes it easy to track every crucial data at one point.
• AI surveys to create brand-new surveys in seconds.
• Supports more than 130 languages, allowing you to reach out to a wide variety of customers across the world.

With respect to pricing, the tool offers a free version with a 14-day free trial as well. You can create up to 3 surveys and get 50 responses per month.

As for the paid plans, the starting price is $19 per month (billed annually).

2. Statista

G2 Rating: 4.2/5 (10+ reviews)

Type: Research Platform

Statista is one of the widely known and viewed platforms for research materials. It provides a vast array of statistics and research reports across various industries.

• It covers over 170 industries and 150 countries, providing a much extensive customer insights.
• The data is presented through charts and graphs, making it easier to understand.
• The data is regularly updated making sure that users have access to the latest trends and statistics.

As for the plans, there is a free version you can use. And the plaid plans start at $199 per month.

3. BrandWatch

G2 Rating: 4.4/5 (600+ reviews)

Type: Social media monitoring tool

BrandWatch is one of the best social media monitoring tools. It helps you to analyze online conversations about your brands and competitors.

• By tracking mentions across various social platforms, it provides insights on public sentiment. This can be regarding your brand or your competitors.
• It allows you to compare your performance against competitors. Not to mention the strengths and weaknesses you can learn in real-time.
• The analytics capabilities are robust and allows you to track key metrics in real-time with a custom dashboard.

They don't provide insight into their pain plans. For more details, consider contacting their sales team.

4. Meltwater

G2 Rating: 4.0/5 (2000+ reviews)

Type: SaaS media monitoring and analytics tool

Meltwater - SaaS media monitoring and analytics tool - is another tool you can try here. Its consumer intelligence can be the right feature for you to understand your audience. It focuses on understanding consumer sentiment and behavior.

Here are some key features to know about.

• It can do a comprehensive social monitoring, tracking conversation across social media platforms. Therby, it can give you a complete view of a brand perception.
• The sentiment analysis feature helps you understand the underlying emotions behind conversation.
• You can generate tailored reports that focus on specific metrics relevant to their audience research goals.

The details regarding their paid plans are available upon request.

5. Heartbeat AI

G2 Rating: 4.9/5 (5+ reviews)

Type: Sentiment analysis tool

Heartbeat AI leverages artificial intelligence to analyze qualitative feedback from customers. It goes beyond the basic analysis to clearly understand emotions and themes in the feedback. Ideal for the healthcare industry for understanding their patients better.

Its main features include the following.

• As mentioned, the main attraction of the tool is its advanced sentiment analysis.
• Real-time insights into customer opinions and preferences.
• Simple and user-friendly interface, making it easy to interpret data and make informed decisions.

For more details regarding their pricing, kindly connect with their sales team.

How to Conduct Audience Research?

The first obvious step is to understand your end goal for the research. 

Define what you are trying to do. Are you trying to understand customer satisfaction? Want to learn customer preferences for a new product? Or want to learn about market trends?

Now that you have finalized the end-goal, let’s see how you can conduct audience research. 

PS: Hope you guys already have a good idea about your target audience. If you don’t, fix on that before jumping into the steps. 

Step 1: Ask the Right Questions

This initial step is crucial as it sets the foundation for your research. Asking the right questions helps you clarify your objectives and gather relevant information. and that's not it.

Step 2: Share and Collect Feedback

Decide on the channels to reach out through and share the surveys. Make sure you reach out to them at the right time. 

We suggested surveys because it's the best way to collect both quantitative and qualitative feedback. You can also use other methods like interviews or focus groups if needed.

Step 3: Analyze Feedback & Draw Conclusions

After collecting data, analyzing feedback to identify patterns and insights is critical. This helps you understand what the data means in relation to your audience. This step is consistent with best practices in audience research. 

Analyzing data to draw actionable conclusions is a key component highlighted across various sources.

Step 4: Create Buyer Persona

Developing buyer personas based on the insights gathered allows you to better understand and segment your audience. 

Creating buyer personas is widely recognized as an effective strategy in audience research. It helps tailor marketing efforts and product development to meet specific audience needs.

Step 5: Rinse and Repeat

Audience preferences can change over time. So regularly update your research to ensure that you stay aligned with their needs. This iterative approach is supported by the idea that audience research should be continuous rather than a one-time effort. 

Regularly revisiting and refining your research helps keep your strategies relevant