Developing your brand- Part Two: Audience Research | Heart Internet Blog – Focusing on all aspects of the web

Welcome back to part 2 in this series on developing your brand. If you missed our first post from this series, you can view it here. This time, we’ll run through the first step in developing your brand, which involves researching your audience so you can create a brand later on that will resonate strongly with them.

Who they are

The first thing to find out in your audience research is who your audience is made up of and to do this it’s important to establish some key details about them.

These can include the following:

  • Size: Micro (<10 employees) and Small Businesses (10-50 employees)
  • Size of project: Small-Medium (1-10 weeks work)
  • Type of project: E-commerce integration, responsive websites, content management sites
  • Decision makers’ roles: Managing Director, Marketing Manager
  • How they find you/you find them: People you know, referrals, Search Engine results, Twitter, content

What they want

Once you know who you’re targeting, the next stage is to simply figure out what they want. The best way to do this is to compose a list of questions that you’ll ask your audiences in relation to your products and/or services and what you can provide beyond these areas.

An example list might look something like this:

Products and/or services

What problems do they want solving?

Why do they want them solving?

What are their common objections?

Both

Why would they pick you?

What makes them want to work with you again?

What do they think you can do better?

How to get this research

Now we’ve covered what research it’s important to find out, it’s time to think about how you’re going to go about getting it. There are a variety of different methods for researching your audience, but I believe the following amongst the most effective:

  • Asking your clients
  • Set up a call
  • Set up a meeting/lunch
  • Ask in current meetings/comms
  • First meetings with new clients
  • Email poll
  • Social Media poll

When you’re asking these questions to your audience, it’s important to collate the answers that are related to your products and/or services and what you provide beyond these areas.

Online tools

There are a variety of different online tools that can help you find out the information listed above at a very low price or even at no price at all.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a fantastic free tool that allows you to gain a range of insights regarding the activity and behaviours that are being exhibited on your website.

Here’s a list of just a few of the things you can measure with this tool to help you with your audience research:

  • Keywords used to discover your site
  • Location of site visitors
  • How they found your site
  • Which pages are of most interest
  • Industries they work in

Google Consumer Surveys

If you’re happy to pay a very small price for your audience research, Google Consumer Surveys is definitely a tool you should consider. It allows you to create questions, define who you want to answer them and receive the results is as little as 24 hours. The cost for Google Consumer Survyes is really worth it for the detailed research you can get in return. They charge 10¢ for one question and $3.50 for up to ten.

Ask your team

Once you’ve got your research together, it’s also worth looking over and expanding it with your team. If you’re an army of one, this is still a really worthwhile exercise because it’s likely that you’ve been working in your industry for some time and this means that you will have spotted certain patterns in customer behaviour due to this experience. If, however, you work with others, it’s really useful to get them involved too because this is only going to lead to a broader understanding of how your audiences view your company and industry.

In the next post from this series, we’ll be looking at how you take this research and use it to form some tangible brand values for your business so you can solidify how you want to be perceived as a brand.

Do you have any top tips on branding? Feel free to share them in the comments below.

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