Audience analysis is an important part of the process of creating effective targeted communication. It has many applications from marketing to technical writing to public speaking and is used by political strategists, charitable organisations and businesses alike.
Read on to discover what audience analysis is, how it is conducted, and how advancements in technology facilitate the process.
What Is Audience Analysis?
Audience analysis is the process of gathering and analysing information about the recipients of your communication. A full audience analysis includes the following information:
Socio-demographic: Age, sex, gender, language, religion, ethnicity, education level, employment status, social class.
Geographic: Geopolitical region, country, district, urban vs rural.
Psychographic: Personality traits, communication style preference, concerns, values, likes.
Behavioural: Relationship with the organisation, past interactions with the organisation, use of communication channels
The Purpose of Audience Analysis
The aim of audience analysis is to ensure that communications will have their desired impact.
For example, in technical writing, the aim is to make communications easy to understand for the end-user. In this instance, it’s important to know the level of training and subject knowledge of the audience. Will they be familiar with technical terms, for example?
NGOs commonly use audience analysis to help improve the impact of their persuasive writing. In this instance, it isn’t as relevant to understand the training and knowledge of the subject matter of the audience. Instead, they may focus on psychographic factors – such as the values and emotionality of their audience – to help them target their communications for effective persuasion.
Audience analysis enables a deep understanding of the needs, values, and behaviours of the target audience so that you can channel your communications to resonate with them.
Audience Segmentation
Large organisations have the challenge of managing wide and diverse audiences with very varied characteristics and needs. This is when audience segmentation is necessary.
Audience segmentation involves dividing your audience into subgroups according to the most relevant characteristics first. For example, a fashion business may divide its audience by gender and then by psychographics to develop more effective targeted communications.
Gathering Data for Audience Analysis
Socio-demographic and geographic information is relatively easy to obtain and analyse. For businesses, Google and Facebook analytics can give you clear and accurate data on the sex, age and location of your audience. Census data and local government data can fill in the gaps such as employment rate and education by location.
Google Analytics can also give you insights into some behavioural data, e.g. average time on site, pages visited, and percentage of returning visitors.
The benefit of this kind of data is that it’s easy to categorise and place into tables and graphs for analysis. This is known as structured data.
Gathering and analysing psychographic data on the other hand is traditionally more time-consuming and resource-intensive. Traditionally this data is gathered through market research interviews, focus groups and surveys. This data is often unstructured and takes significant time to manually process. But often, psychographic data provides the richest and most meaningful insights for audience analysis.
Our technology automates the process of gathering and analysing useful psychographic data from, in many instances, pre-existing sources. All that’s needed is a little text.
How to Gather and Analyse Psychographic Data With Symanto
Symanto’s text intelligence technology turns unstructured, qualitative data into meaningful metrics from which you can extract valuable and actionable psychographic insights. How can you gather this data? The chances are you already have it.
All that’s needed for Symanto technology to work is a sample of text. Your audience produces these texts on social media, review sites and through direct contact with your customer service agents. And you don’t need a lot of text either. Symanto’s psychographic analysis has proven to be effective on texts as short as 10-20 words.
Our technology can automatically gather and process thousands of social media comments and reviews within a matter of minutes and produce useful psychographic data.
Personality traits
The Symanto psychographic model is based on Carl Jung’s personality theory. Find out whether your audience is more emotionally or rationally driven.
Communication style preference
We have identified four dominant communication style preferences.
- Self-revealing communicators open up to discuss their personal opinions and experiences. They enjoy storytelling.
- Fact-oriented communicators talk in objective terms using facts to describe their experiences.
- Action-seeking communicators aim to trigger people into action. They like to give and receive recommendations and advice.
- Information-seeking communicators engage through questions. They wish to engage in a two-way dialogue to resolve issues. They may also be more conversational than action-seekers.
Segment your audience by communication style to refine your messaging and resonate better with each type.
Topic sentiment
Discover what your audience values about your organisation as well as their pain points. Symanto technology accurately identifies topics from within a text and their associated sentiments.
Symanto technology expedites audience analysis by providing fast and accurate psychographic insights to inform your communications strategy.
Get Started With Symanto
Find out more about how to leverage Symanto technologies across your organisation. Get in touch or book your free personalised demonstration today.
