A great team of employees can be an excellent source for business ideas and marketing strategies. But relying only on your team can lead to an insular mindset—even groupthink. To avoid an unintentional echo chamber, it’s important to regularly take the pulse of your target customers, the specific audience that you’re advertising to.
This is why market research is such a key part of sales. You have to truly know your audience in order to address their pain points, provide desirable products, and stand out from other brands.
Here’s how to build meaningful connections with your target audience and address their specific needs.
Why should you know your audience?
Whether you’re a public speaker trying to communicate effectively to your audience members or an ecommerce brand owner trying to market a new coffee maker to customers, it’s essential to establish an authentic connection. This starts with truly understanding an audience’s preferences, pain points, and motivators.
As a business owner or marketer, you’ll begin this process by conducting market research. This research, and the insights and knowledge that it will glean, can help you:
Create relevant products and services
Thorough market research gives you the tools to brainstorm and develop products that your target customers will want to use—because you’ve taken the time to understand their needs.
Develop an effective marketing message
Market research teaches you about your audience’s values, motivations, vernacular (e.g., slang, formal language, specific words and terminology), and preferred marketing channels. This helps you tailor your marketing efforts to connect with them on an authentic level.
Build relationships with your clients
When customers feel that a brand “gets them,” it creates trust and brand loyalty. You can foster this feeling by creating products and marketing campaigns that resonate with their interests and needs.
Identify new opportunities and mitigate risks
Market research helps you spot emerging trends, along with unmet needs in the market. You can use this knowledge to develop specific product and service offerings that address those trends and needs. Likewise, you can steer clear of products that don’t resonate with the needs and interests of your target customers, mitigating the risk of failed endeavors.
Distinguish your company from its competitors
Your business isn’t the only one competing for customers’ money and loyalty. If you’re able to connect with prospective customers via market research, you may be able to reach them in ways that other businesses cannot. This can manifest in your product lines, your marketing messages, and your pricing.
Examples of successful audience research
Looking for tips on connecting with a target audience? You can get some ideas by studying brands that have done this successfully. Shopify merchants Lulus and Propeller Coffee both chose to spend time learning as much as they could about their target customers. They applied their insights into nearly every aspect of their businesses, from product development and marketing to designing websites. Their audience research efforts may be relevant to your own process:
Lulus
Under CEO Crystal Landsem, the fashion brand Lulus has prioritized the customer experience. It did so by soliciting customer feedback and taking action whenever possible. Lulus began in ecommerce, but over time, it heard repeatedly that customers craved an in-person shopping experience. Lulus responded by opening a bridal boutique in Los Angeles.
Lulus decided to create buyer personas to help its team understand what mattered to its customers. What Crystal found was that the typical Lulus customer was a lot like the typical Lulus employee. “We have really, really awesome customers,” Crystal says. “I think that’s part of what makes our culture so fun. She [the customer] is hysterical. She doesn’t take herself too seriously. And that’s very much how we are internally at Lulus. We’re all a little bit goofy, but we have a really great time doing our job.”
Customers always come first for Crystal and her team. It’s what helps them determine what they should and shouldn’t stock. The team has its own opinions, but it’s determined to never lose sight of what matters to the client. “It’s the same way with the products and the way that we source our merchandise,” Crystal explains. “She tells us she wants it. We buy it. So from a just purely customer experience perspective, we want to make her happy.”
Propeller Coffee
Propeller Coffee’s approach to audience understanding is rooted in customization. When Aaron Zack served as Propeller’s vice president of sales, marketing, and strategic projects, his team used their website’s customization tools to let users sort by their preferences. They did this by simplifying their site’s navigation categories, making it easier for a person to engage with the interface and find coffee that piques their interest.
Propeller extended its customization practices to its subscription service, which is a key source of the company’s overall revenue. “We were able to build a really customizable but simple-to-use interface,” Aaron says, “that basically let people create subscriptions that were tailored to what they were looking for.”
Customization lets Propeller Coffee bypass more traditional forms of audience research—like surveys and focus groups—to understand what combinations of products resonate most. Ultimately, all types of customer research can prove beneficial; embrace a diverse array of market research tactics whenever possible.
How to know your target audience
- Leverage demographic data
- Use surveys
- Host focus groups or one-on-one interviews
- Conduct social listening
- Create buyer personas
- Take note of your competitors’ audiences
Understanding your target audience is a crucial part of brand building and revenue growth. Whether you’re writing marketing copy or speaking to customers one on one, knowing who you’re talking to helps you provide more relevant and impactful messages. Here are some practical steps to help you identify your audience and gather useful consumer insights:
1. Leverage demographic data
Start your audience research process by collecting basic demographic information such as age, gender, location, education level, and income. Demographics give you context about who your potential customers are and help you group them based on shared characteristics.
For example, if you’re writing marketing copy, younger readers might respond better to casual language. Business professionals, on the other hand, might prefer a more formal tone.
2. Use surveys
Surveys are an excellent method for collecting data from a large number of people. You can easily create online surveys with survey apps like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, and Google Forms. It’s best to draw out answers about customers’ values, their pain points, and their opinions of current products on the market.
For example, if you’re starting a plus-sized clothing brand, consider surveying customers about current challenges in acquiring fashionable clothing that fits their body shape. Inquire about what they’d like to see on the market and what price they’d potentially pay for it.
3. Host focus groups or one-on-one interviews
Focus groups and one-on-one interviews let you dig deeper into your audience’s opinions and motivations. People speaking in their own words about your product may give you insights you couldn’t get from datasets alone.
For example, a consulting company selling leadership development courses might bring together mid-level managers to discuss their daily management challenges and how they currently seek solutions. They could ask the managers what they’d want to see in a training program and what they’ve thought of previous leadership training exercises.
4. Conduct social listening
The digital world offers a wealth of audience data, and this includes social media forums and comment threads. Social listening is the practice of keeping tabs on online discussions, paying close attention to comments about your industry and even your specific business.
You can assign human workers to monitor comment threads and online reviews, or you can leverage social listening tools to help streamline this endeavor.
5. Create buyer personas
Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. They typically include these customers’ demographics, motivations, goals, pain points, and even preferred communication channels. You can name these fictional buyers and craft marketing messages tailored to the context of their personal lives.
For example, a skin care business could create “Concerned Colleen:” She’s 18 years old, has a lot of friends, but feels insecure about her complexion. She doesn’t have a lot of disposable income, so while she’s open to spending money on skin care products, the price has to be right. Concerned Colleen spends a lot of time on social media, especially TikTok, and she doesn’t consume traditional print media. This detailed buyer persona can help you write marketing messages for Colleen and people like her. Even more fundamentally, it can help you develop the type of products Colleen would buy.
6. Take note of your competitors’ audiences
Look at who your competitors are targeting and how they communicate. Review their websites, social content, and customer reviews to see what’s working and what’s not.
For example, if you’re launching a direct-to-consumer (DTC) coffee company, analyze the social media followers of existing DTC coffee brands. What kind of posts do they engage with most? What common themes emerge from their customer reviews? What other brands do they follow outside of the coffee space? Learning about these real-world people will help you cultivate them as customers of your own.
Know your audience FAQ
What does it mean to know your audience?
To know your audience is to understand its demographics, interests, pain points, price sensitivity, and relationship with existing products in your industry.
Why is it important to be aware of your audience?
It’s important to be aware of your audience to develop products they would want to buy, price those products at reasonable rates, and craft marketing messages that resonate and drive conversions.
How can you research your audience?
You can learn about your audience through surveys, focus groups, one-on-one interviews, and social listening, and by purchasing access to existing datasets.
