According to a study by CoSChedule, 65% of marketers never (or rarely) do audience research. This clearly states that 65% of marketers are functioning on assumptions!
I know you have the best affiliate product to sell, but all your effort will go in vain if you could not reach the right audience. So, before you launch your next affiliate campaign, it would be a good idea to hold and find people who would be interested in what you are offering.
Audience research or finding the right audience for your affiliate product does not mean selling to everyone! In marketing, a joke often goes around: If you are selling to everyone, you are selling to no one.
So how can you find an audience which is more likely to buy from you?
I hear you! I was in this situation when I began Affiliate Marketing. I used to sell to everyone and the result – No sales, only clicks!
So to help you out, I listed all the steps that you can follow to do audience research. This article is a comprehensive list of practically all the ways you can do audience research.
What Is Audience Research?
Simply put, audience research is the process of finding the challenges, pain points, interests, keywords, buying behaviours, etc. of your ideal customer.
Audience research helps to create a specific customer persona and determine their characteristics. Audience research is conducted to identify who could be the potential customers.
How To Do Audience Research?
Step 1: Social Media
Social media is one of the best places to do audience research.
Your ideal customer could be in a group related to your niche, or they might be following your competitors. All you need to do is go and search for them.
You could identify them by their activities and interests. You could find what they are doing, what they are asking, check if they are mentioning their desires in any of the groups, etc.
When I say social media, I don’t only mean Facebook. Your ideal customers could be active on LinkedIn, forums, Quora, etc. Go and explore each platform and find what your target audience is doing.
Once you identify where they are active, you start categorising them. So that’s step one: Categorise your audience.
Your target audience could be:
- Men between the ages 24 and 35
- Women between the ages 32 and 45
- Women who love sports
- Men who like business magazines
- Etc.
In step 1, you are only categorising your target audience to get a broad idea, and we will dig deeper in the following steps.
Step 2: Audience Demographics
In step 2, we will delve deeper and find their demographics. Essentially, we are talking about your target audience’s age, gender, income, occupation, whether they are married or not, whether they have kids or not, their location, etc.
All the above information will create a picture of the lives of our target audience, and this is the stage where our research in step 1 will start to take form.
Step 3: Understand Their Behaviours
In step 3, we will cover things like their favourite sports, the magazines they read, the things they love to do in their spare time (their hobbies), their favourite music, their favourite movies, their favourite food, etc.
So, in step 3, we start to paint a picture of the personality of our target audience, their characteristics and the type of people they are.
Step 4: Identify Their Goals & Desires
After we have the characteristic of our target audience, we will identify their goals. Identifying the goals of our target audience will give us an insight into their psyche.
There are two levels to this step:
Level 1: Broad Level
At level 1, identify their long-term goals. This could be their life’s ultimate goal and their mission.
Level 2: Narrow Level
At this level, you delve deeper and categorise their long-term goals into half-yearly, quarterly, and monthly goals.
Once you identify their monthly goals, determine how your affiliate product(s) will help them, how it will solve their problems, and how it will provide them value.
Step 5: Identify Their Challenges
Once you have an understanding of your target audience and their goals, uncover their obstacles. Find out what is standing in the way of your target audience’s goals, what obstacles and challenges are they facing, and the consequences of those challenges.
Look, people will always need a solution. If their challenges were easy to overcome, they would achieve their goals effortlessly. However, since those challenges are difficult to surmount, they are probably going to ask for help.
You need to identify such challenges. What is it that your target audience cannot do on their own? What is it that is keeping them stuck? Once you identify such challenges, you can easily present your product(s) as a solution.
Step 6: Identify Their Emotions
If your target audience is trying to get somewhere, if they have a goal that they want to achieve, if they have a short-term goal that they want to achieve, and something is standing in their way and blocking their route to get there, they’ll have some kind of emotion attached to it.
They will have an emotion about how achieving that goal will make them feel. They could also have emotions attached to the obstacles that are standing in the way.
Identify how the obstacles make them feel and if they can’t get rid of those obstacles and achieve that goal, what is that going to do for their lives and how is that going to make them feel.
So tapping into the goals and challenges of your target audience and the emotion attached to them is critical.
Now, if you open your browser and Google: “How to find your audience?” or look it up on YouTube, you’ll find hundreds of articles and videos that will talk about demographics and psychographics. They are a very important starting point but if you know the demographics and the psychographics, you still don’t have any real information that will help you to connect with your audience.
The only way you can deeply connect with your target audience is through understanding the emotions attached to both their goals and obstacles. So when you start audience research, don’t only look for the demographics and the psychographics. You should dig deep and understand who your audience is because when you have this information you are armed with valuable insights that you can use not only to build your brand but also to communicate with them.
If they do not connect and interact with you, share your story, share the challenges and obstacles you faced, and provide a stepwise solution in the form of blog posts, videos, webinars, infographics, etc. That way, they see value in what you offer and open up about their problems.
[BONUS] How To Do Audience Research on Facebook?
If you are a fan of Facebook and swear by its audience insights, you could watch the below video to learn audience research on your favourite social media platform, step by step:
Conclusion
Simply put, audience research is the process of finding the challenges, pain points, interests, keywords, buying behaviours, etc. of your ideal customer.
Audience research helps to create a specific customer persona and determine their characteristics. Audience research is conducted to identify who could be the potential customers.
So to help you out, I listed all the steps that you can follow to do audience research. This article is a comprehensive list of practically all the ways you can do audience research.
Step 1: Social Media: Your ideal customer could be in a group related to your niche, or they might be following your competitors. All you need to do is go and search for them.
Step 2: Audience Demographics: We are talking about your target audience’s age, gender, income, occupation, whether they are married or not, whether they have kids or not, their location, etc.
Step 3: Understand The Behaviour Of Your Target Audience: We will cover things like their favourite sports, the magazines they read, the things they love to do in their spare time (their hobbies), their favourite music, their favourite movies, their favourite food, etc.
Step 4: Identify The Goals & Desires: After we have the characteristic of our target audience, we will identify their goals. Identifying the goals of our target audience will give us an insight into their psyche.
Step 5: Identify The Challenges Of Your Target Audience: Find out what is standing in the way of your target audience’s goals, what obstacles and challenges are they facing, and the consequences of those challenges.
Step 6: Identify The Emotions: They will have an emotion about how achieving that goal will make them feel. They could also have emotions attached to the obstacles that are standing in the way.
