One of the most important aspects of conversion rate optimisation is understanding your audience. If you don’t have a very clear picture of who your target market is, it will be very difficult to convert them into customers. In this blog post, we will discuss what a thorough audience analysis entails, and how to use that information to improve your conversion rates.
By understanding who your customers are, what they want, and what motivates them, you can develop customer-centric business strategies that attract and keep the right kind of business.
After reading this blog, you’ll be better positioned to:
- Source meaningful data from your customers,
- Use that data to understand your target market,
- Segment your audience by meaningful metrics,
- Create realistic buyer personas,
- Boost conversion rates with targeted messaging.
What is Audience Analysis?
Audience analysis is the process of investigating the characteristics of an audience. The goal of audience analysis is to develop a thorough understanding of the market so that you can create marketing strategies and campaigns that appeal directly to them.
Types audience analysis
Within these broad definitions there are also several types of audience analysis. Here are a few of the most common:
- Branded audience analysis looks at the characteristics of a specific brand’s current audience. You would conduct a branded audience analysis on your own brand, or that of a main competitor.
- Product audience analysis is conducted to better understand the audience for a specific product. This can be done before launching a new product, or to understand why an existing product is not selling well.
- Target audience analysis explores the characteristics of your ideal customer base. Target audience analysis is a broader investigation of the market, and can extend to the audiences of your peers, competitors and untapped markets. The goal of target audience analysis is to identify new opportunities for marketing and growth.
- Competitor audience analysis looks at your audience in relation to that of your competitors. This analysis can help you benchmark your performance and identify areas where you can improve.
- Social audience analysis is focussed on your audience’s social media habits, including the platforms they use and how often they engage.
- Demographic audience analysis is the investigation of your audience’s age, gender, race, income, education level, etc.
- Psychographic audience analysis looks at your audience’s lifestyle choices, values, attitudes and personality traits. Psychographic audience analysis is useful for understanding what motivates audience’s decisions.
- Behavioural audience analysis investigates your audience’s purchase decisions, online activity, and media consumption habits. Behavioural audience analysis can help you track trends in an audience’s purchasing preferences.
What Are Audience Analysis Data Sources?
The data needed to conduct an audience analysis is available from a variety of sources, including:
- Website analytics (e.g. Google Analytics),
- CRM data,
- Social media listening (including review sites and forums),
- Customer surveys,
- Interviews and focus groups,
- Sales data,
- Census data.
Audience analysis can be conducted on your existing audience or a potential audience that you are trying to reach. For example, you may want to investigate the audience of a close competitor or explore a rising niche market.
Historically, if you wanted deep and meaningful data, you would need to spend time and resources interviewing and surveying your audience. To get an accurate representation of your target market, you would need to interview a large number of people.
Nowadays, audience analysis is easier, with many software platforms allowing you to gather highly valuable data without having to directly engage with your target audience. With the advancement of natural language processing (NLP) technology, it’s now possible to analyse huge amounts of consumer-generated content online and mine valuable insights from places such as social media channels and review sites.
What is Audience Analysis Used For And How Can It Improve Conversion Rates?
The better you know your audience, the better you can communicate with them. By understanding their needs, wants, and motivations, you can create messages that resonate and convert.
Once you’ve run one or several audience anayses, you’ll want to take action on the insights you’ve gleaned. Here are a few ways you can use audience analysis to improve your conversion rates:
1. Segment your audience
Audience analysis enables you to group different subsets (known as segments) of your market so that you can more effectively target them with specific messages. For example, if you sell a product that appeals to both men and women, you will want to create separate marketing campaigns for each gender.
But segmentation can also go a lot deeper than that. For example, after running a psychographic audience analysis you can use different messaging to appeal to people who are introverted vs extroverted or people who are risk-averse vs risk-tolerant. The more you know about your audience, the more specific and targeted your messaging can be.
2. Create a buyer persona
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional character that represents your ideal customer. Creating a buyer persona helps by giving your marketing, sales and product development teams a clear picture of who you are aiming your marketing efforts at.
With the insights you’ve gathered, your aim is to give a well-rounded, three-dimensional view of the people you are trying to connect with. The more detailed you can be in your analysis, the better.
Example Buyer Persona
Name: Celest
Age: 28
Gender: Female
Location: Large urban city
Income: $50,000
Personality: Open, extroverted and emotionally driven. Values experience over information.
Interests: Fashion-forward, shutterbug, enjoys weekend getaways
Lifestyle: Busy, social and always on-the-go
Values: Fun, family and friends
Motivations: Being accepted and respected by her peers
Challenges: Celest is always on the go. She’s juggling work, her social life and trying to keep up with the latest trends. Celest is always looking for brands that can make her life easier. She’s drawn to brands that are convenient, efficient and fun. When she’s making a purchase, she wants to feel like she’s in the know.
3. Create targeted messaging
Once you have a good understanding of your audience, you can start targeting your messaging to them. This means creating content, ads and offers that speak to their needs, wants and motivations.
For example, if you’re marketing a gym to Celest, you might want to highlight the convenience of your location and the fun classes you offer. You could also create a social media campaign around a fitness challenge that Celest can do with her friends.
By understanding your audience and using targeted messaging, you can create campaigns that are more likely to resonate with them – and convert.
4. Test your messaging
Once you’ve created targeted messaging, it’s important to test it out to see if it’s effective. You can do this by creating a few different versions of an ad or piece of content and seeing which one performs the best. Try A/B testing different headlines, copy, calls to action, or even images to see what gets the best response.
Using Symanto for Audience Analysis
Symanto‘s advanced NLP technology gives you accurate audience insights based on publicly available data from social media channels, review sites, forums and more. You can even input your own CRM data and chat transcripts to analyse your customer base.
Discover what your existing audience values most about your brand as well as their pain points. Run a like-for-like audience analysis on your main competitors to discover possible ways to poach customer market share.
Symanto also offers two research-based psychographics models to help you get a deeper understanding of the personality traits and motivations of different segments of your audience.
Based on Carl Jung’s widely accepted personality theory, Symanto Psychographics can detect key drivers based on even short excerpts such as a Tweet or social media comment. Discover whether your audience is more likely to be influenced by logic or emotions and whether they value experience over information.
If you are looking to analyse a larger body of text, e.g. a long-form interview, then the Symanto Big Five personality model may also be useful. Symanto Big Five measures people based on five core dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (known by the acronym OCEAN).
With this information, you can get a much clearer picture of your audience and build more efficient and effective targeted marketing and sales strategies.
Get Started With Symanto
Take your audience analysis to a new level, uncover deep insights using research-based models and connect with your target customers like never before. Get in touch today.
