How We Conduct an Audience Analysis

Who is your target audience? It’s a question we ask every brand we work with. Because your marketing strategy should always start with your audience.

Audience insights lead everything we do – from the stories we tell in the media to the content we create for brand’s own websites. We believe that all marketing and comms should be audience-led. It should reach the people that matter to your brand, in the places they look for information. And audience analysis is how we find this out.

Here’s an insight into how we do it:

We always begin with the who. Who exactly are they?

We start broad – identifying their core demographics and characteristics. How old are they? What’s their job title? What are their interests? Do they have any defining features? We gather all the information we can find, building a bank of useful insights.

Some agencies stop here. But demographics and interests should just be the starting point. Take Ozzy Osborne and King Charles as an example. In a demographic-led analysis, they look similar. Both born in 1948, wealthy, spend a lot of time in London, love dogs and are interested in sports cars. But in reality? They really couldn’t be any more different.

So demographics aren’t enough. While helpful, these top-level insights are only the start.

Top tip: We’d recommend targeting up to 5 different audiences. Any more than this and the lines between your personas will start to blur. While your audiences will always share some similarities, you need to be able to distinguish between them clearly. It’s virtually impossible to tailor your marketing messaging and approach if you have hundreds of very similar groups to target.

Audience-first marketing means being visible wherever your audience is. Are they active on LinkedIn, or do they prefer Reddit? Do they get their news from local media or influencers on TikTok? Wherever they’re spending their time – that’s where your brand needs to be.

To get these insights, we’ll investigate things like:

• Which social platforms do they use?
• Where do they get their news and information? Do they read any media titles?
• Which organisations do they follow? Which websites do they visit?
• Which influencers and industry figures do they engage with?
• Which podcasts do they listen to?

Getting these answers requires a lot of digging. But there are some great tools that help us streamline the process. Our favourite? SparkToro. It’s simply the best audience research tool out there.

Businesses have target audiences for a reason: they have needs that our products/services can help with. But simply meeting these needs isn’t enough. Our clients could have created the perfect product that solves all of their audience’s challenges. But if they can’t actually engage with these people, the product will never succeed.

So to convert target audiences into customers, we also need to understand their psychology. How do they make their purchasing decisions? What concerns do they have? What wider challenges are they struggling with? We’ll find out how they think, how they communicate and how they act.

To do this, we analyse their online conversation and search behaviour, asking questions like:

• What are they searching for? What questions are they asking? What information are they seeking?
• How are they deciding what to buy? What solutions are they after? What’s influencing their decision-making process?
• What are they posting about on social media? What topics are they commenting on, and what are they saying?
• What reviews are they leaving? What are they complaining about?

Again, sourcing this information requires a lot of digging. We’ll fully immerse ourselves in our audience’s shoes – using tactics like social listening and keyword research to better understand how they think. Check out our audience research toolkit for more on this.

Top tip: ‘Day in the life’ content is a treasure trove of audience insights. It’s a form of blog/video content where people share exactly what they do every day. And it’s a great way of working out what makes target audiences tick. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and company websites are our go-to sources of day-in-the-life info.

This final step is crucial in every audience analysis.

We could have spent weeks getting under the skin of our target audience. We could have pages and pages of insights that describe them in incredible detail. But if we can’t relate to it – if it doesn’t feel real – then it’s not particularly useful. It’s just words on a page.

So we personify them. We give the persona a name, a picture and a quote that offers an insight into their mind. We pull our audience insights together into something tangible that feels real. The result? We have a persona that we can actually use. We can refer back to them and instantly be transported into their world.

Whether we’re developing a digital PR strategy, planning social media posts, or creating onsite content – giving our audience a clear identity will mean they’re always front-of-mind. So we know we’re always telling the stories that matter to them.

Need to better understand your target customers? Our audience analysis experts can help. Get in touch with susannah@energypr.co.uk.