How to conduct audience analysis in 5 steps

Knowing everything about your target audience is critical to marketing success. Without this insight, you’re running ads based on estimates and hoping for the best, which is rarely profitable.

This is why conducting audience analysis is necessary before putting your business out there. It allows you to understand your customer and gain insight into their needs and struggles so you can create relevant copy.

But if you don’t know how to conduct audience analysis, don’t worry. Below, we’ll cover a five-step process that’ll take your marketing results to the next level.

Step 1: Identify your audience

The first part of audience analysis is knowing who you’re targeting. Consider using focus groups, interviews, and surveys to find your ideal customer.

If you’re already selling products, use transactional records and social media analytics platforms like Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics to discover what type of people are buying your products and how often they’re doing so.

This first-party data collection also helps you stay on top of trends and new behaviors that you can market toward.

Once you’ve gathered some customer data, it’s time to organize and understand it.

Step 2: Organize and understand your data

It doesn’t matter how relevant and accurate your audience data is; if it isn’t organized, it’s of little use to you and your company.

So opt for a customer data platform like Lytics that gives you a 360-degree view of customer behaviors. Lytics organizes your data points so you can easily understand and use them to improve marketing campaigns and streamline product development.

Step 3: Segment your audience

With all these easy-to-understand data points, it’s time to segment your audience into smaller groups using these factors:

• Demographics like age, job, location, and income
• Behaviors like purchasing and search behaviors
• Psychographics like lifestyle, attitude, personalities, and opinions

With these smaller audiences, you can run separate marketing campaigns for each, personalizing the customer experience. Studies show that this customization boosts conversion rates and customer retention.

And this makes sense. Various customers buy your product or service for entirely different reasons, and if you’re writing copy that only appeals to one segment, you’re neglecting a large part of your audience.

Here’s an audience analysis example: Let’s say you’re selling espresso machines, but all your ads present your machines as a way to make coffee quickly, saving time. People who buy espresso machines for the taste or status will ignore your irrelevant ads.

So if you can uncover the motivation behind customer decisions by running surveys and interviews, you can customize ad copy and appeal to these individual needs.

Step 4: Create data-backed buyer personas

Even though most businesses stop analyzing their audience after the segmentation phase, consider going one step further and creating a buyer persona for each segment. This will allow for more targeted marketing. So use a buyer persona template and fill out information like:

• Age
• Location
• Marital status
• Income
• Occupation
• Gender

For example, if you sell hiring services to companies, your first buyer persona could be the head of operations at a company with over 100 employees. Your second one can be the founder of a startup with 50 to 100 employees, while the last persona is a small mom-and-pop shop manager.

Step 5: Gather more customer feedback and improve

Once everything is set up, continue to gather feedback because it’ll allow you to understand what you’re doing wrong and how you can fix these issues.

For instance, if you run an online store and someone adds several items to their cart but leaves soon after, try sending them an email asking what caused them to abandon their cart. They could give you feedback through an audience analysis application, or if you’ve managed to get them on a video call, you can ask open-ended questions and seek constructive criticism.

The prospect might have had something urgent pop up, preventing them from completing their purchase. Or maybe your checkout process is too long causing visitors to feel frustrated and leave. Use this insight to improve your current customer journey.

By continuously gaining insight into client problems, you can keep improving and ironing out weak points, upgrading the customer experience.

Gain a 360-degree customer understanding with Lytics

Audience analysis in advertising may seem intimidating—even boring—due to the endless graphs, charts, and data points you’ll have to gather, organize, and understand.

But by following a few key principles like collecting first-party data, putting this data in a customer data platform, and using this understanding to make better marketing and business decisions, you’ll be well on your way to achieving all your business goals.