What is audience research?
Audience research refers to any form of research which is conducted into a specific sample of audience to understand their attitude, behaviour, challenges, goals and habits. The sample could be made up of any group of interest, such as age, region, gender, etc. While the definition of audience is important, it is also changeable depending on a business’s aims with research.
The purpose of audience research is to help a business answer a broad range of important questions and to gain a fuller understanding of who they are targeting. This can help them to fine-tune their proposition, marketing and conversations to better suit and target their audience. This could include their audience’s interests, what influences them and what they think of similar products or services.
Audience analysis
Audience analysis is the natural progression from conducting any audience research. It can come in many forms, such as customer discovery or insight programmes, user experience mapping, customer experience reviews, and general usability research.
It enables businesses to take research findings and utilise them in a productive and proactive way to improve their product or service.
What is market research?
Audience research and market research often get confused. The main difference between these two types of research is that audience research focuses on a specific group or segment to understand. Market research, on the other hand, is used to gather information about the market that the product or service operates in. It is not just limited to an audience, it also includes broader details on competitors and pricing, for example.
The importance of audience research and analysis
Essentially, conducting audience research and analysis enables businesses to gain a much better and in depth understanding of their audience, their goals, challenges, views, opinions, and experience with a product or service.
This helps a business to become customer-centric in their strategy, rather than product-led. Meaning that key decisions are based on the priorities of the audience.
This information can be fed into all areas of business strategy, from product development and implementation, through to sales and marketing strategy.
The overall goal is to engage with, and retain, as many relevant customers as possible.