Discovering what makes your audience tick

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Apr 6, 2018 / by
Discovering what makes your audience tick

Long-term business success is impossible unless you take a customer-centric perspective. This means finding out everything you can about your customers so you can serve them better with tailored content, products and services.

It’s highly recommended that you create a buyer persona document for your business. This should include information about your ideal buyer, such as his or her values, pain points, frustrations, age (approximately), and education level. Some of this will be guesswork, but other pieces of  information will be clear based on your interactions with your clients.

Marcia Riefer Johnson states:

To get value from your personas, you have to take the time to build them with enough depth and insight to enable your team to generate ideas and topics that resonate. A useful persona also informs you about tone of voice and style.

It’s question time!

Are you actively soliciting feedback from your audience or customers? If not, you should be. One of the easiest ways to do this is to create a questionnaire for your mailing list using SurveyMonkey or Google Forms. With this, you can ask them how they feel about your current product offering, what types of content they resonate with and other questions about their current frustrations.

Although there are arguments both for and against enabling blog comments, for the sake of feedback it can definitely be useful to keep blog comments enabled. Alternatively, it’s worth scanning the other blogs within your niche and looking for common problems. If your competitors are not addressing common problems with their content, then you can use this to your advantage.

Search for your buyers on Facebook

facebookThis tactic works particularly well for ecommerce businesses. Whenever you get a sale, input the buyer’s email address into Facebook to find them. If this doesn’t work, you can sometimes input their name and then check the location matches up with your order confirmation details to check you have the right person.

Next, scan their profiles so that you can get a more complete perspective of who they really are. What are their values? What do they do for fun? Are they married or single? What is their approximate age? Do they have other common interests? All of this information is essential in building comprehensive buyer personas.

You can get some excellent insights from Facebook thanks to the interests feature. Often, you learn that people within your niche have interests have common interests in other niches which could lead to a new article or product idea. For instance, perhaps people who like vegan food also like cycling, or people who like meditation are also interested in travel.

Just make sure not to store any personally identifiable information. Use this data to get a broad picture of your overall customer persona, not information about individual customers.

Data mining

Qualitative data such as questionnaire feedback is wonderful, but you can learn a lot from quantitative data too. Google Analytics can tell you a lot of valuable information, such as your most popular blog articles as well as other popular pages on your site. Heat Mapping tools such as Kissmetrics are an awesome supplement to this, since you can learn which parts of a page people are specifically engaging with the most. This can reveal valuable insights about the values and pain points of your customers.

Conclusion

Learning about your audience is incredibly useful, but only if you actually take action. It’s no use finding out about your audience’s pain points and desires, then release no new projects or blog posts thar tackle the problem. If you do take the effort to serve your audience better, you will be rewarded with engagement and profits.

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