Audience Research: Best Practices and Tools That Help

Staff WritersPredictive MarketingSales & MarketingSales Engagement

By STS Staff Writer On Feb 16, 2024

A wide range of individuals, listeners, viewers, readers, visitors, subscribers, or users may be included in any target audience research. While though thorough audience research can yield a wealth of data, for many years, the two main components that businesses were most interested in the ones that are consistently delivered:

Measuring the size of the audience
Identifying the tastes of the audience

Over the years, audience surveys and research have undergone significant change.

It used to be too expensive to perform this kind of useful research, especially for small and medium-sized organisations. It used to be necessary to employ an outside source to carry out these surveys, investigate, and evaluate the data, and it could take weeks or months for those interpretive reports to appear.

The good news is that there are a number of platforms that may support your inbound marketing efforts by figuring out where and how your audience is interacting online—as well as where your rivals are. Some of the best tools available online are:

1. Sparktoro

Your clients may be using one of the many billions of websites, social media profiles, podcasts, or other online platforms. Sparktoro searches through more than 80 million profiles to learn about its users’ identities, the channels they frequent, and their online activities. With the help of Sparktoro’s insights, you’ll learn about shared influences among your target market so you can concentrate on the appropriate channels. You’ll find information on things like habits like what people read or watch, demographics like job titles and education, and text data like hashtags and language. You’ll learn some truly astounding things about your customers’ online behaviour.

2. Social Media Analytics

Both Facebook business pages and Instagram business accounts feature tools you can utilise to learn more about who your audience is and what they like if you’ve already established a social media following. You can go to your company page on Facebook and select “Insights” from the “More” drop-down menu. When you click “People” on the left side of the screen, you may see basic demographic data about your fans, followers, audience, and individuals who are interacting with you, such as age group, gender, and geography.

3. AYTM (Ask Your Target Market)

As their name implies, AYTM enables business users to quickly and easily produce surveys that can be delivered to their client list or used with their panel of more than 20 million respondents. They provide ten-question surveys with short turnaround times, often between 24 and 72 hours, and affordable prices starting at 95 cents in the US and 75 cents for a global audience. Costs rise when targeting a more specific audience and when there are more queries.

4. Gut Check

Together with many other tools, Gut Check provides a unique, more visual approach through the use of webinars and infographics. Some of their techniques provide immediate outcomes while obtaining information about certain customers based on their region, age, language, and other segmented ways.

5. Audiense

With Audiense, one of the top audience intelligence platforms according to G2, learn more about your audience. The tool will gather “various and useful insights of any target audience” in only a few hours. That might be a significant time saver given that your marketing staff may have to spend weeks learning about the preferences of your audience. You can acquire data from Audiense and incorporate them into your present process. It also separates social channels and assists in identifying influences within your target group.

6. Buzzsumo

More than only audience research tools are available on BuzzSumo. Additionally, they aid in the discovery of fresh keywords, backlink analysis, content brainstorming, and thorough competitor analysis. A cloud-based app eliminates the need for software downloads and time-consuming settings. You may execute influencer analysis, consumer keyword research, and more with its audience research tools. BuzzSumo is a powerful competitor despite having fewer websites and social media networks that it can crawl than Sparktoro because of its combination of extra features and technologies.

7. Survey Monkey

This well-known platform was originally well-known for communicating with existing clients, but it now provides additional alternatives for engaging with a respectable audience using a variety of targeting options and over twenty various types of criteria. Platforms with pricing starting at $100 are available for surveys with ten questions and 100 replies from the general US population. Like rivals, rates rise as you add queries and targeting options.

You may find out more about your target market’s competitors in your sector outside of social media. Explore case studies, psychological evaluations from marketers in your niche, and illustrations from other successful companies to advance your market research. You may utilise this knowledge as you go into the specifics of your customer data to get a comprehensive understanding of your audience insights. Whether you conduct your research using free or expensive technologies, you can find a wealth of information that could completely change the course of your company.