In the ever-evolving marketing landscape, staying relevant and engaging is crucial for sustained retention and steady acquisition. One powerful strategy to achieve this is uncovering new audiences and understanding their specific needs.
In this blog post, our marketing specialists discuss the importance of audience research, why it's a continuous process, and how it can help you to uncover untapped audiences.
Why Prioritising Audience Research Is Important
To inform your proposed strategies and tactics, you need to conduct the required level of research, leveraging online studies, social analysis, primary research and industry intelligence tools.
In order to find new audiences, you need to know your existing audiences inside out.
Here’s the same process we use with our client partners to ensure all of this is captured:
- Understand the landscape including competitor organisations
- Understand the brand
Understand your existing audiences, their motivations and behaviours
- Gather a full understanding of…
Your existing audience demographics
Understand why your members joined and why they renew, or don’t
Understand your current audience’s needs and motivations
The research platforms and approaches you need to consider
Whilst the #1 recruitment tool you have is your website, google search and adwords can help with passive audience recruitment in directing the content you are planning.
Search console
This helps you see what your search visitors were actually looking for when your website was listed in results vs. what you think they want.
AdWords
Keyword Planner helps you research keywords for your Search campaigns.
You don’t have to be running paid ads to use this tool. The free keyword planner tool can help you discover new keywords related to your business, see the demand of terms/content ideas and how competitive they are.
AdWords allows you to try new areas of attracting audiences quickly by running tests to small groups of targeted visitors.
Don’t forget the Bing equivalents (found in webmaster tools)
Brandwatch
Dive deep into online conversations on social media platforms to discover who's talking about your organisation and its offer, support, or products and services. Brandwatch allows you to build detailed user personas based on real interactions and user sentiment.
This can help businesses to gain insights into customer sentiment, identify emerging trends, and monitor their brand reputation.
SparkToro
SparkToro shows who your audience is, what they talk about, and where to reach them. Similar to Brandwatch, SparkToro utilises social media to analyse your audiences, crawling over 80 million social profiles and web pages. It provides comprehensive insights into audience demographics, interests, behaviours, and text data.
Opportunities include:
Improving display and social ad targeting
Finding impactful PR opportunities
Discovering content gaps beyond SEO
Identifying ideal co-marketing partners
Spotting trends before they become mainstream
Vuelio
This platform offers comprehensive insights on media, journalists, and influencers to make your communications effective. This platform offers both real-time and historical data, allowing your organisation to track trends and changes over time in the media landscape.Vuelio helps us to understand who is important to our client partners, how best to engage them, then send content, monitor results, measure social media impact and analyse effectiveness, all in one place.
Benefits of using Vuelio:
Media database
Media monitoring
News release distribution
Media analysis
Stakeholder management
TGI (Target Group Index)
Tap into TGI from Kantar for in-depth consumer insights, providing information on consumer behaviours, preferences, and attitudes.
TGI can inform all marketing activities and enable every member of your team to understand and put your customers first.
From demographics to attitudes, leisure activities, media consumption, personal values and purchasing factors, TGI is the single source of intelligence that reveals who your consumers are, how they behave and the drivers behind decisions that they make.
GWI (GlobalWebIndex)
GWI’s research platform gives you the answers you need for your target customers. That’s why the world’s biggest brands rely on GWI to shape their thinking.
GWI (formerly known as Global Web Index) gathers data on the behaviour and perceptions of consumers across the world. Their vast, survey-led research provides brands with deep, actionable insights on their audience, easily revealed on the GWI platform.
Data Science
We use data science to leverage our client partners' existing audience data and identify future trends. We can predict website interest and key content topics before needing to react to the market, make informed decisions utilising market data at scale, allowing your organisation to stay ahead of trends.
Using Data Science our team can:
Understand your customer behaviour
Predict trends
Improve return on investment (ROI) for marketing campaigns
Provide greater visibility on your business pipeline meaning you can budget more effectively
Getting the Basics Right:
Before diving into new audience acquisition, ensure you have the following in place:
Comprehensive Data:
Gather and organise data on your audience, including demographics, preferences, and engagement history.
Clear Strategy:
Develop a clear strategy based on your research findings. Outline goals, key messaging, and the channels you'll use to reach new audiences.
Tools for Communication:
Equip your team with the necessary tools, including Brandwatch, SparkToro, Vuelio, TGI, GWI, and Data Science capabilities, to maximise insights across various aspects of research and analysis. This includes updated marketing materials, a user-friendly website, and efficient communication channels.
Time to gain a strategic advantage
The integration of research and data science into your framework elevates your organisation's ability to not only understand current audience behaviours but also anticipate future trends. By combining cutting-edge tools and predictive analytics, your organisation gains a strategic advantage in the dynamic landscape of acquisition. As you harness the power of data to guide decision-making, the proactive and informed approach facilitated by research and data science ensures that your organisation remains agile, responsive, and well-positioned for sustained business growth.
If you would like to harness the power of a research-driven approach to business growth, talk to our experts today.