Marketing is always a case of call and response. There is no point in pitching to a room of empty people. There is still no point in pitching to a room full of people who don’t care about the topic you’re pursuing. We need constant feedback from our audiences to give us direction and a chance to optimise our online presence. By analysing data on our website visitors, we can get a clearer idea of what will work for us. This is how we effectively gather audience insights.
Know what your customers need
Everyone likes to feel special. A business that will catch a potential buyer’s attention is one that understands their specific needs and caters to them. This includes the specificities of how the buyer’s needs change along their journey towards purchasing and loyalty.
If you can achieve a message that constantly resonates with a customer, you will stand out amongst your competition. Everything you know about your customer is useful in making their experience more customised. The more personas you observe, the more predictable customer behaviour becomes as familiar traits make connections to preferences more obvious.
It’s also important to know when your customers want you contacting them and what medium they’d like you to use. Gathering metrics on active times and mediums for different types of customers helps a business catch customers in ideal lighting.
It is also worth noting that at every step of the customer’s journey, they may need different information. For example, whilst scoping out services to use, they will need to be made aware of your brand. They will soon compare your company to others, and will they need to see proof that yours always does better.
Eventually, a selling point comes along, and customers need the information to feel confident enough to make a purchase. Hopefully, having audience insights will make this critical point a breeze as you solve every problem on their list.
Know your Audience Demographic and Behaviour
Involved heavily with this process is finding out what customers see in your brand. From this point, businesses can promote themselves using what’s known to work. Audience insights often show that sets of different customers want different things from your brand.
Thus, from this information, marketing strategies can be devised to target each set. The information that needs to be collected includes demographic and behavioural data. When looking at demographics, information on customers’ occupations, departments, location, budget and company size are all very valuable.
With this you can make very specific product and service recommendations and predict their availability and expectations. Behavioural data such as their motivations, expectations, concerns and understanding helps us cater to their reasoning and solve their problems. This is essential as it allows a business’ motive of problem solving to shine through.
Keep in mind that clients doing the purchasing are the ones having the reactions and calling the shots. This should serve to remind you that we are marketing towards the people and not the institutions they work under.
How do you use audience insights data?
The answer is through search behaviour analysis. This is observing online behaviour amongst customers, including how they search for what they want and interact. We can use a range of tools to collect and analyse data on our audience.
A lot of tools make deductions based off information from large data partners to make samples of buyer profiles on the web. It is then up to us to select the groups of online citizens that have targetable search behaviour to observe. These samples show us how much time is spent looking at what, and where conversion to customer status occurs.
Other tools are used for “Social listening”, or otherwise, looking at conversations had by customers surrounding products and brands. They ‘listen’ to public conversation on social media to gage a sense of customers’ emotional attachments to brands and products. It shows what is trending and influencing the market for certain types of products and furthers our understanding of what the customers want. This does not include interacting directly with authors of these conversations, only observing attitudes portrayed. This kind of analysis gives us much more efficient access to deeper audience insights compared to more direct methods.
As digital strategy expert Alex Walsh points out, we also take out the factors of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. In other words, observing actions can tell you more truth than directly asking your customers for their opinions and feedback. From these kinds of details we can find our target audiences’ ideals and market towards them more effectively.
In Conclusion,
To be able to really engage with audiences today means to really respect their uniqueness as customers. Over-generalised statistics rarely work, so deeper digging through a wider range of approaches is required. Be prepared to take every case at least somewhat differently; a one-size-fits-all approach is no longer a viable option. Thankfully, we do have tools to help us achieve this data and many ways to put it to use.
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