Conduct Audience Research for Free to Improve Your Marketing

Gaining a better understanding of your target audience can be incredibly beneficial for internet marketing.

It helps you write more effective sales copy, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, blog posts, and find the right content to share on social media. Market research is essential to marketing. But, you don’t have the same budget as a major corporation to conduct extensive research.

Luckily, the internet provides many resources for researching your target audience for free.

Identify Your Target Audience

You first need to know who your target audience is before you can research them. Keep in mind, you may have a variety of demographics that you want to target.

If this is the case, you’ll need to conduct market research for each demographic individually. Also, each of your advertisements and landing pages should be geared toward one key demographic at a time.

Start Following Your Followers

You don’t need to follow every profile that follows you. But, you can start to learn more about your target audience by following a selection of your followers.

Look for followers that are active on social media. You should find people that follow brands and businesses that are in involved in the same niche market.

As you follow these people, you’ll see the types of posts that they share or like. This will give you better insight into the type of information they’re interested in.

Ask Your Target Audience

Of course, the best way to find out what your target audience is interested in is to ask them. There are several ways to ask your target audience about their interests, including:

• Customer surveys
• Social media posts
• Online polls
• Questionnaires

Use these methods to solicit information. You can ask specific questions to learn more about your core audience. Find out what they fear most, what they want from products, what they enjoy doing in their free time, how they spend their time online, and anything else that helps you learn more about them.

Create a Customer Persona

As you learn more about your target audience, you can begin creating a customer persona. This is a detailed set of information about a typical customer.

You should create multiple personas to represent different types of customers. The main criteria to place in this persona includes:

• Age
• Sex
• Location
• Job or profession
• Income level
• Education level
• Hobbies and interests

When you write sales copy or PPC ads, you should use these customer personas.

Open the document where you’ve created your persona and keep it open as you write your copy. Imagine that you’re talking directly to this customer.

Always Ask for Feedback

Feedback is one of the best ways to learn more about how your target audience feels. Ask for their feedback in every email related to a purchase or transaction. This includes confirmations and follow-up emails.

Don’t ignore this feedback. Use it to learn more about the needs of your customers and how you can improve your products or services to better meet their needs.

Another step that you can take is to look at your competition. When in doubt, look at the type of content that they use. For example, if you’re creating a paid advertisement, look at your competitor’s paid ads. If you’re creating a press release, look at the press releases for your competition.

Don’t copy what they do. But, you can use what you find to learn from their research.

Audience research is a necessary step in internet marketing. In addition to these tips, you can find even more advice, and a system for gaining conversion-ready internet prospect each month, by clicking here to learn about my done-for-you system.