Great marketers know that everything we do should be grounded in target audience research. Every piece of advertising that reaches the consumer should be custom tailored to their demographic profile but more importantly to the way they think, feel and live.
Once upon a time, this market research was conducted in a very offline, very manual fashion. Everything from interviews to focus groups to tv meters helped us build target audience profiles and guide the marketing messages aimed at the target market. But the beauty of the digital era we now live in is the wealth of data and consumer insights we can gather just from simple online sources.
If you pay close attention to your Google Analytics you can see how consumers are interacting with your website. Where they spend the most time, what topics are most interesting to them and what format they prefer to receive information. You can check out your social media dashboards to see demographic breakdowns of your audience and take even more powerful psychographic cues from direct interactions with consumers. And before they even get to your website or your social media, you can use keyword search volumes, cookies and a wealth of other digital tools to capture data and better understand your consumer audience.
Traditional research methods still have immense value (trust me, I still love a good focus group), but don’t pass up on all the free research you can gain by simply tapping into our highly digital world. Then those insights can be applied to your marketing efforts both online and offline.
