3 Tools and Smart Tactics to Understand Your Audience

When marketing any business you have to first and foremost understand your audience. Not just their demographics like age, gender, and location although important, to effectively market you need to know their psychographics as well.

As trends come and go, and your audience grows, your audience demographics and psychographics will continue to change as well.

It’s important to keep audience research as an ongoing part of your marketing tasks so you can stay dialed in on who your audience is even as they grow and change.

By knowing our audience we can create content that speaks to them, and leaves them feeling like your brand really understands what is important to them.

So here are the 3 tools and tactics you can use right now to understand your audience!

1. Social Listening

Social listening is the basic practice of tracking when users mention or talk about your brand on social media. You can keep track of this through “mentions” on any platform, and also search your brand name on the platform to see what comes up.

I like to take social listening one step further and apply it to not only seeing what my audience is saying about my brand but what they are saying in general.

The first way I like to do this is by reviewing the comments and questions we get on our social media posts, and ads. What questions are they asking? What are they commenting on? Are they agreeing, disagreeing? Make notes of what you find.

Second I join groups or go check out profiles popular with my audience. Again I make note of what they are asking, what content they like, what content they don’t like, what questions are they asking.

For the final step, I go through and randomly choose a handful of followers from each platform and check out their profile. I quickly view their profile and take a couple of key notes to learn more about them and see if I can draw any correlations.

The key thing I look at when viewing social media profiles is their bio. Who do they say they are, and what is important to them? Family? Job? Hobby? Religion?

Viewing a social media bio is the fastest way to learn more about WHO your audience is based on what they say about themselves.

Then through continued observation find out what do they talk about, what their values are, and what do they find funny, what are they passionate about.

Key Observations to Make:

• What do they post about?

  • Their family? Work? Business? Advocacy for a specific topic?

• What imagery do they use?

  • For example, if my audience includes farmers and ranchers, so whenever I post photos of cattle I get a lot more engagement. When I look at their profiles cattle are in most of their content as well.

  • By seeing what they post you can mirror any trends you see to increase engagement.

• What content do they share?

  • Humorous memes and videos?

  • Inspirational Content?

  • Heartwarming stories?

  • Recipes and helpful tips?

You can spend a long or short time on this step. It’s best to make sure you have enough info so you can find trends and see correlations between the values, interests, and content they like to not only post but also share on social media.

By doing this you will be able to create content confidently understanding what it is that your audience values, and what they like to see.

Maybe they post and share recipes often. Great! Incorporate this into your content. Or maybe they’re like my audience and post a lot of photos of their cattle. That’s great too! Now you know to post more photos of cattle.

2. Google Analytics

Next, you’ll want to dive into your Google Analytics, or social media analytics if you don’t have Google Analytics set up.

At this point, you're looking at key demographics of your audience to understand what age groups, locations, and genders your brand is most popular with.

Using your Google Analytics or Website Analytics to find out key demographics about your audience including:

Gender and Age

Find out what ages and genders are most popular with your audience. This will help you identify what social media platforms you should be on and general trends/life events that apply to your audience.

For example, if your audience is on average 60+ a relevant topic might be retirement and grandkids. If your audience is 18-22 college is going to often be the life stage they are in. So content relevant to where they are currently at will gain their interest.

Location

Location is also an important demographic to understand. When natural disasters, pandemics, and other regional issues arise you can know if it’s relevant to your audience or not. It’s also important to know where your audience is and what time zone they are in to know when it’s best to post and host online events.

Location can also help you understand a little more about your audience's culture so you can be mindful of holidays, celebrations, and key cultural norms for their region if they are different from yours.

Interests

Social media platform analytics will give you detailed insights into what topics your audience is interested in. For example, Facebook will give you a list of the top pages they follow. Twitter will give you the top subjects they are interested in, and Pinterest will show you what their top interest topics are.

Acquisition

Lastly, Google Analytics or your Website will show your top referral sites. So you can see if most of your traffic comes from Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc. This is very useful to see which social media platforms or search engines are working best for your business.

3. Audience Survey

Last but not least you can use audience surveys to gain a better understanding of your audience.

Through a survey or social media poll, there are several key things you want to find out about your audience in the survey. Including…

• What do they think of your brand/business?

• Key facts about them - favorite book, movie, TV show.

• How they like to shop (online, in-store).

• Do they usually shop/browse via their phone or desktop?

• What items or services would they like to see?

• What kind of content do they like to see from businesses on social media?

There are several ways to get survey responses, here are a few you can use:

• Send an email survey to your email list.

• Host a giveaway - fill out the survey for a chance to win.

Other common ways to get audience feedback include using social media polls, instagram story yes/no questions, or this or that, and post purchase surveys.

Regularly tracking and keeping a record of customer reviews on social media, google, and amazon, are all great ways to gain more insight into what your customers think about your brand.

By utilizing these tools you can gain an understanding of your audience. As a result, you will be able to create content that leaves your customers saying things like “it’s like you're in my head”, “I chose to work with you because I felt like you understood me”, and “it’s so nice to find a brand that gets me”.

This process is something I recommend doing regularly so you can make sure you never lose sight of understanding your audience.