Knowing Your Audience: Communications Research Masterclass
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This document provides an overview of how to get to know your audience through internal and external research. It discusses defining your audience and personas, questioning them to understand their needs and interests, researching them through internal reports, interviews, and external sources like social data and media trends. The toolkit section lists various tools that can help with this research. Creating personas involves synthesizing this research into fictional character profiles. Finally, the document advises developing a strategy centered around your personas' needs, using channels and topics they engage with to generate new leads and meaningful relationships.
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Knowing Your Audience: Communications Research Masterclass
- 1. Masterclass: Getting to know your audience
- 2. Overview • Introduction • What is an audience? • How to question • Internal research • External research • Toolkit • Creating personas • Starting a strategy • Recap & final questions
- 3. Introduction John Brown Head of Engagement, Hotwire john.brown@hotwirepr.com
- 4. What is an audience?
- 5. “The assembled spectators or listeners at a public event such as a play, film, concert, or meeting” - Wikipedia What is an audience? “The assembled spectators or listeners at a public event such as a play, film, concert, or meeting” - Wikipedia “My customers” - -Grumpy CEO People you want to talk or listen to - Hotwire Labs
- 6. Where can we listen to an audience?
- 7. So, what’s missing here? YOU!
- 9. Questions to ask What channels do you use? Why do you love/hate us? Who do you think our competition is? What do you do before you like a brand? What marketing activity really annoys you? Who’s a figurehead in the business? What is the experience like? How do you ‘discover’ the business? What emotions do you get from the brand? What do you want to talk about? What have you read about us? Who influences you? What does ‘new’ mean to you? What’s our purpose? What do you think customers think we stand for? What do you think we stand for?
- 11. Internal research Reports Staff interviews Customer interviews
- 12. Internal research Reports Staff interviews Customer interviews
- 13. Internal research Website and owned social channel data
- 14. Internal research Website and owned social channel data
- 17. External research MediatrendsSurveys SearchtrendsSocialdata Can identify • Who has covered them before • Who is organically interested • Who is writing similar articles • Who is interested but not aware • Who the competitors are • How the competitors fare • When coverage appears • Which journalists are most interested • Which publications to target • The angle to take • Content ideas • Direction for messaging • Events to have a presence at
- 18. External research MediatrendsSurveys SearchtrendsSocialdata Can identify • How people find the client’s site • What search terms they use • What search terms are being used generally • How the client ranks against these terms • Who is performing best in search • Where the client ranks against competitors • How search changes across the year • Which topics to use on site • Keywords to be using in online content
- 19. External research MediatrendsSurveys SearchtrendsSocialdata Can identify • Volume of online discussion • Sentiment of conversations • Social channels people use • Keyword clouds • Top topics among the online community • How keywords are connected to each other • Performance of client online • Benchmarking against competitors • Who the influencers are • What influencers talk about • When to post content • What content to post and where
- 20. External research MediatrendsSurveys SearchtrendsSocialdata Can identify • Answers to question you have • Statistically sound results • High volume of results at low cost (from $0.10 per response) • Ability to slice and dice results • Region • Age • Gender • Phone OS • Parent / non-parent • Etc.
- 21. Toolkit
- 22. Toolkit
- 24. boardreader.com
- 25. echosec.net
- 30. followerwonk.com
- 31. iconosquare.com
- 33. notey.com
- 34. topsy.com
- 35. Toolkit
- 36. radian6.com
- 38. lp.hotwirepr.com
- 40. trendkite.com
- 42. Use your data What channels do they have? Who do they want as their audience? What audience do they currently have? What channels are their audience on? What are their competitors doing? Who are their competitors? What are their business goals? What other marketing activity are they doing? Who are the spokespeople? What is their website like? How are they ranking on Google? What does their audience think of them? What does their audience talk about? What coverage are they getting? Who are their influencers? What are their influencers talking about? What do their influencers think of them? What negatives surround them? Are their specific job roles or demographics that matter to them?
- 43. Personas, you’re doing it wrong Samantha is 30, married with 2 kids, has a dog called Colin and likes to drink white wine on Saturdays while watching the X Factor.
- 44. The right way to create personas Characters Needs Interests Experience Objectives
- 56. Put your learning at the centre Personas Channels Topics Journeys Goals
- 57. Generate new leads by creating meaningful relationships with potential customers online, through content on Twitter and LinkedIn. Measured with link tracking and Salesforce. Summarise Generate new leads by creating meaningful relationships with potential customers online, through content on Twitter and LinkedIn. Measured with link tracking and Salesforce.
- 58. Roll with it
- 60. Recap & questions • What is an audience? • How to question • Internal research • External research • Toolkit • Creating personas • Starting a strategy
Editor's Notes
- Welcome slide as people arrive.
- Today, I want to be able to provide you all with a bit of a foundation in identifying, understanding and actioning an audience. This isn’t a one stop shop of everything you need to know, but it will give you the structure to be able to go and discover more for yourself and hopefully influence the way you approach your next communications challenge and strategy. So what will you leave with today? Well other than a smile on your face, I hope to leave you with an understanding into: What an audience is What questions we should all be asking ourselves Where to go for answers both internally and externally What tools we can use to help us What to do with the data And how to begin implementing this into a strategy
- But first, let me introduce myself… (introduce yourself, experience, expertise etc.) Any questions before we start?
- BREAK FOR FIVE MINUTES AS WE PUT THIS QUESTION FORWARD TO THE CLASS: THE IDEA HERE IS THAT THEY ALL COME BACK WITH BUSINESS ORIENTATED RESPONSES – I.E – THEY ARE CUSTOMERS, CONSUMERS, TARGET MARKET, ETC. REMIND THEM THAT IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT POUNDS AND PENCE – AN AUDIENCE IS ALSO YOUR NUMBER ONE SOUNDING BOARD, YOU CREATIVE BRAINSTORM, YOUR MESSAGE GENERATOR. YOUR AUDIENCE IS YOUR NUMBER ONE MARKETING RESOURCE
- Traditionally, an audience is a group of people who gather together to watch or listen to something. What we are talking about today is the reverse. By it’s definition they’re passive and there to observe and absorb. That’s just not fit for purpose in this comms age. Our audiences are not passive recipients. They’re active members of your brand ecosystem. They may never spend a penny with you, but they may provide you with the basis of a campaign or a tactic that delivers real organisational and business change.
- Name a social network. You can probably listen to your audience there. Some are completely open and public – Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr are all largely open, with over 90% of users hosting freely available content. Others are more locked down, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. But you can still find your audience, either through their advertising platforms (and remember, for research you won’t even need to run an ad) or through the tools we have at our disposal. More on this later. ASK THE AUDIENCE – ANYTHING MISSING HERE? THEN ASK THEM – OK SO FIND OUT AN INTERESTING FACT ABOUT THE PERSON NEXT TO YOU. THEN SEE HOW MANY OF THEM GO TO TWITTER FIRST – THE POINT HERE IS TO SHOW THAT BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE – START WITH ACTUAL CONVERSATIONS FYI – the symbols are Vimeo, Flickr, RSS (blogs), LinkedIn, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook & YouTube.
- As an industry we have put waaaaaaay too much emphasis on going outside our organisation to see what Twitter tells us. Twitter and other social media assets are an ingredient to the wider picture, in fact, before we even think about going outside a business, we always recommend we start inside an organisation. There is a janitor waiting to tell you what the culture is like. A sales rep who is begging for a conversation around a an absolute gem of information a customer has shared with them. Before we start with Tweets and likes, get up, get talking to your organisation. Have real conversations. You’ll uncover a lot, but you’ll also begin to get an idea of the most important part of doing effective audience research – understanding what questions to ask!
- We can find out a hell of a lot. Just taking one tool as an example, Pulsar, we can find: Volume of mentions, volume of reach, volume of visibility (how many people actually see something, versus how many potentially can, which is reach), sentiment, sentiment by reach, sentiment by visibility, top posts, by reach, by visibility (in fact, just remember everything can be by volume, reach or visibility from now on), density of content over different times and dates, channels used, keywords, key phrases, connections between words and phrases, top posters, top engaged contributors, top topics, specific items of content and their social imprint, specific sites and their social imprint, specific influencers and their social imprint, and locations, either globally or to even street level – like Google maps with a live Twitter feed. That’s a lot. And just through one tool. Today I’ll provide you with a full toolkit of services to use to gather a huge amount of data on your audience.
- As we have seen. You’re going to be able to generate a huge amount of data. Too much in fact. So, you need to learn to question properly.
- BEFORE REVEALING THIS – ASK THE QUESTION TO THE AUDIENCE FIRST There’s a myriad of questions you can use, and make sure you use as many as possible. Question everything.. But then focus on those with the most valuable responses. Here are some sample questions. Collectively they tell us a great deal about a brand, where it sits in the lifecycle and what people believe it stands for.
- Questions drive our research. They give it purpose. Let’s move on to look at the types of research you can use, starting with internal research.
- Internal research is the discovery you can do in-house. It can be the most accessible to you, although the scale of office politics will certainly have something to say about that. Internal research most commonly means reports you have previously commissioned or have access to. Staff are another resource available to you – interview them, question them and get their opinions and responses to the questions you have laid out. This may be a survey, through focus groups or during one on one sessions. Like staff, you are also best placed to speak to your customers. Their opinions are incredibly valuable. These are the audience that you’ve managed to convert. They bought into you. Why? Ask them.
- Here’s an example of internal research we’ve helped with. We have been helping Darwinex with their messaging. We created a discover report which included staff and customer interviews, aiming to identify why people choose to use Darwinex (a trading platform) and work out how to find more people that would convert. BREAKOUT – AND SHOW THE CLASS THE POST IT NOTE SESSION ALSO SHOW THE CLASS THE PROBLEM VS SOLUTION SESSION
- If asking questions to your staff or customers sounds pretty simple, then you’re going to be blown away by this next set of internal research. If you have a website or social channels, you’ve probably been collecting data for a very long time. Now’s the time to look at it.
- On your website, you probably have Google Analytics (or something similar). Your site analytics will tell you who is visiting and what they’re doing on your site. The top right graphic shows Facebook insights – these tell you who your Facebook fans are – gender, age, location. All of it. Moving clockwise, we see Twitter analytics. This provides similar information to Facebook, and provides insight into what interests your audience have. Maybe you sell IT software, and they dig it, but they’re also into baking – potentially of use (maybe). And lastly, we can see LinkedIn analytics. Most social networks have analytics, so look at all the platforms you’re using and analyse the data.
- Let’s move on to external research.
- External research is the data you need to go on the hunt for. It isn’t readily available to you, but it doesn’t have to be a chore. I’m going to run through 4 ways if sourcing data for which you can build audience profiles against. These are media trends, search trends, social data and surveys.
- Researching media trends helps you understand how journalists and media sites are talking about your brand. Remember, the media is an audience too. They may not be customers, but they sure as hell influence them. The symbol is actually that of a tool called Trendkite, one we use for analysing media discussion. With this tool you can go broad or specific, searching on volume, share of voice or sentiment, or diving in to specific items of coverage that reached your customer-base.
- Search trends tell you how your website is performing, with data that isn’t available to you directly through Google analytics or similar tools. With search trends, you can see what keywords people use to find your site, and how you rank against competitors. So if you’re selling bespoke Italian leather shoes, but not appearing until the 7th page on Google, you’ll know you have some work to do.
- Social data uses the power of the social web – a vast network of various channels where individuals post their thoughts in an unfiltered, open and accessible manner. It makes you wonder why, but we don’t mind so much as it creates the world’s largest focus group for our research. By searching for groups of people based on the key terms they use, you can identify an online audience, look at the channels they use, the topics they discuss and the people they are influenced by. This is all valuable information when it comes to building a strategy.
- And surveys, these give you unique and original data that no one else can provide. It costs money, but there are tools out there to reduce the cost – and it’s incredibly worthwhile. We are fans of Google consumer surveys. When you think about it, Google has the greatest reach when it comes to presenting people with a survey. In fact, sites such as the FT allow people to bypass their paywall by taking a survey powered by Google. The results are statistically accurate too, as shown by analysis undertaken by Nate Silver, who accurately predicted the latest Presidential election with the service. You can ask whatever you want, so the things you can identify are endless. Essentially, you can get real, honest opinions on any topic.
- Let’s move on to how you can perform the research, using a variety of different tools. I’m going to show you over 15 tools to add to your toolkit. We will run through these, so just note down the URL and give them a try at your leisure.
- First, let’s take a look at the free tools, since you can get started with these right away.
- Answer The Public will show you how people search for things. So, here, we see how people ask questions around ‘xbox’. Why is this useful? It tells you that people are looking for certain information. The fact they have to search for it isn’t ideal. If I was Xbox, I’d be building a lot of my content around these types of questions.
- Boardread is a forum search tool. You can find specific discussions and forums for a set topic, but most importantly you can see the trend and volume – in the graph you can see on the right hand side. This helps you understand if forums are important to your audience. What kind of person is engaging in forums and when they get used most. We often find the most engaged audience are on forums, and they can swing one way or the other – complete evangelists or extreme critiques.
- Echosec is a tool best used for events. If you know your audience will all be in London for social media week, but you don’t have access to the data to show which session was most poular, Echosec will tell you. The tool shows tweets based on location. So, in our example, you’d be able to identify the venue and time at which people were tweeting most. Maybe the Pepsi-Cola marketing session was most popular – if you’re a marketing solutions brand, then perhaps start blogging about Pepsi’s strategy to capture your audiences attention.
- Google analytics is one of the most powerful free tools there is. Integrate this into your website and you’ll be able to see rich information about your visitors and how they interact with your website. Using the data, you can see what pages perform best, which don’t, which blog posts are of most interest, which aren’t. You can even see which social networks drive the most traffic and whether your audience are iPhone or Android users. Plus, lots more data. You’ll be like Alice going through the rabbit hole.
- Adwords by Google is how you buy ads that show up on the search engine. And their keyword planner helps you find which words and phrases people are using most when search for products or services such as yours. You don’t need to be using Google ads yourself to access adwords either, anyone with a Google account can use the planner. So use it to find out which key phrases you should be using in all of your content, especially if that content is going online.
- Another great service by Google is the Consumer Barometer. If you’ve ever wanted to know the shopping habits or mobile usage habits of the UK population, this is the tool for you. Since Google has more data on us than the Government. So long as your audience is covered by the metrics the site covers (and as normal people, they’ll be covered), you’ll be able to understand, on a broad scale, how they interact with certain things – such as social media, or online recommendations.
- Just like Google Analytics helps you measure statistics on your own website, most social networks have analytics pages helping you understand how people find your account, which content they prefer and who they are, through demographic data. Generally, type analytics. Before the URL, or put /analytics after the URL and you’ll find the analytics page for the social network. Otherwise, a quick Google search will find the link for you in no time. We use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn analytics all the time for our clients, to help understand what is working for them, what isn’t, and whether our strategic recommendations are improving the stats on the sites.
- Followerwonk allows you to search through people’s bios on Twitter. It is the quickest way to find people by job role on the network, which even Twitter’s own analytics don’t even provide. So, let’s say you want to find CTOs, because you’re selling new computer software, and want people in the UK, you could use followerwonk for just this. Remember, all these tools do not need to be used independently. Once you have a list of the audience, you could analyse their conversations with another service.
- Iconosquare is another platform specific tool, this time for Instagram. Remember, Instagram is bigger than Twitter, so its certainly not one to dismiss. Instagram is driven by hashtags, so beyond using the tool to analyse your own Instagram performance, it can also be used to find the most popular hashtags for the audience you’re identifying. So, if you work for Xbox and want your instagrams to be seen, you’d use #xbox, #xboxone and #xboxlive. All quite obvious, but you can quite often be surprised.
- YouGov’s profiler tool is one of our favourites, not just because it displays the information in an incredibly accessible manner. Profiler allows you to find out key behaviours for the audience you’re looking at. So, if you want to find people who are into food and drink, YouGov will use all of its survey results (and that’s a lot) to bring togther a detailed profile of that audience. Brands are welcome too, so why not search your own to find if you’re audience expectations match the real thing.
- Blogs are huge. Social media gets all the praise nowadays but blogs were the original dominators of the Internet and they will often have much more influence than a single Twitter account or Facebook Page. In fact, some blogs have more reach than mainstream titles such as The Guardian. So in order to find which blogs are important to your audience, use Notey. Type in a keyword and it will provide you with all the latest blogs on the topic, so you can quickly skim read summaries to identify which are positive and most prolific.
- Topsy is so good Apple decided to buy it. Thankfully, they didn’t shut it down. The service is a free social analytics too, providing data that you’ll pay thousands for on other services. We use it for volume searches and in comparing different topics. In the graph shown you’ll see we have searched to see which brand was mentioned most when Activision Blizzard bought King Digital, owners of Candy Crush Saga. You can see that up until the day it was announced, no one really cared about King Digital.
- Let’s now take a look at the paid services you can use. Like free services, there are plenty out there, but unlike free services, you need to shell out a lot of money to find out which are the best. We’ve used them all. So we’re presenting our favorites – the only ones we recommend investing in.
- Radian 6 is a social listening service by Salesforce. It’s not changed much in over 5 years, but it’s a powerful beast that you can guarantee will find each and every mention of your brand online. It’s not cheap, nor does it have the greatest customer service in the world, but if you’re looking to search the web, Radian6 is more powerful than Google.
- Pulsar is similar to Radian6, but much more modern and user friendly, especially in displaying the data. You don’t need the data skills required with Radian6 so it’s a good option for anyone new to this. Pulsar will find volume, visibility, sentiment, topics and influencers. It tracks a number of social channels, so gives a great view of the entire web and where your audience lies.
- Listening Post is a tool we built and run ourselves. You can’t sign up online, but if you’re interested in using it, speak to me after the session. Listening Post will find influencers using Twitter. It maps a social graph together and identifies who is influenced by whom. You can find who the most important people are within your audience, and set a strategy to win them over – with everyone else following in their footsteps.
- Search metrics allows you to measure how well you, or any other website, performs in search rankings. It will tell you the keywords you rank for, and where you rank in comparison to other sites and keywords. Since search is a major factor in how people discover new companies and services, have a website that ranks highly is essential for any modern business, and search metrics will tell you what you need to do.
- Lastly, trend kite is a tool that measures news stories online. Put in your brand, or a keyword of a campaign you ran, and you will find the volume of coverage, share of voice, sentiment and message pull-through from online news. Best of all, trend kite is simple to use and can generate beautiful reports automatically, saving you time. Your PR team will thank you a thousand times for using it.
- A persona is a way to model, summarize and communicate research about people who have been observed or researched in some way.
- Remember, use the date you have gathered when you asked all of these questions. Bring it all together and segment the audience you found into different characters.
- Before we get into personas, let’s just clear something up. The purpose of a persona is to guide everyone when aiming to reach the audience. They should help with messaging, branding, web design and content creation. The majority of personas you see will give someone a name, an age, they’ll give them a family and say they’re interested in X, Y and Z. I’ve even seen personas go into such detail to state the person was looking into buying a new Ford to replace their Vauxhall. For a B2B software brand. This sort of information is non-essential and diverts attention. The worst case is that someone uses the persona and only targets people searching for Fords who have been shown to own Vauxhalls. If you’re selling security software to IT managers, the car they drive has nothing to do with the decision.
- So, how should you write a persona? Keep it simple. Seriously simple. Too much depth just allows for irrelevant detail. There is a theory that the mind fills in the gaps and you get bias from the person reading the persona, so remember to keep that in check, but don’t solve the problem by creating another. We recommend creating a character. They’re nameless, but they have needs, interests, a desired experience and objectives. Focus on these areas rather than what their wife is called or their zodiac sign.
- Here’s an example. This is a persona matrix. There are no names, only key behaviors. The entire thing can be summarised in one page, or as a poster in the office. This means it isn’t just concise, but people will probably read it too!
- Flick through these personas quickly. Briefly running through the points.
- Highlight the fact they have no names or genders. These are too specific. If you created an ad, would you really want to target just men because the persona says so? Probably not, at least for gender-neutral roles, products or services.
- Point out the ‘why and audience’ section which helps the person reading the persona build a picture of why this person matters, and understands the use cases of this persona.
- Flag that internet literacy is specific to this particular client and project, as it is for a web build. It doesn’t need to a section in all personas, but related topics should be included. If you’re in the business of sat navs, then ability to use technology, touch screens or maybe even likelihood or journeying somewhere new, may be a section.
- Point out that these are built on data. In this example we have used website data to build the personas out, with usage patterns and device usage clearly defining different use cases.
- In this example browsing predictions helps us understand how this persona may interact with our client’s site, and give clues for ways to change it – it will help designers create better pages.
- And the experience is vitally important. It tells us of what is expected of the persona. Never forget to include this and make this a priority to answer when building your strategy.
- Once you have built personas and understand the experience they’re after, you’re extremely close to knowing your audience.
- So, to recap. Make characters, but nameless ones. Give them needs, interests, a desired experience and objectives. Simple, straightforward and useful. Congratulations, you’ve now defined your audience.
- So what is the next step? You’ve got to know your audience. Masterclass complete! But it doesn’t stop there. The entire purpose of finding an audience is to do something with them. Usually – sell. Let’s take a look at the process of building a strategy from what you have learned.
- In the discovery stage you learned a lot about your audience. From there, you were able to build personas. Put these personas at the heart of your strategy. Never forget the audience you’re going after. Now, consider the audience, but also what channels they use, the goals they have (and you – find a balance), the topics they discuss and the journeys they take. Pull this all together into a single statement for how you will reach them and make that sale.
- Here’s a strategy. It’s for no one in particular, but fits well with strategies we have created in the past. It’s short. Concise. And tells you everything you need to go on and develop a campaign. (CLICK) Generate new leads is the goal. Creating meaningful relationships with potential customers online is the process, the how. Through content on Twitter and LinkedIn is where. It specifies where you will do this. And link tracking with Salesforce is the measurement. This is a typical strategy, built on insight. Leads – they’re what the client wants, but creating meaningful relationships, that’s something the discovery would show – research may have shown people have loyalty in this industry, and Twitter and LinkedIn were the channels used most by the audience. The measurement stage should be in each and every strategy – without it, how do you know it worked?
- Strategies evolve into campaigns, jam packed full of tactics. When Microsoft came to us asking for helping in launching Office 365, we didn’t immediately think ‘band in front of bus’ and neither would you. But our strategy, built on insight, led us to targeting office influencers, the people who understand flexible working and are able to sell in the idea to major corporations around the UK. We took the influencers on a road trip around London, in the 365 bus. On-board, we proved flexible working is possible anywhere, even on a bus. We did this through Ignite presentations, performed live on the bus as it moved around London, live streamed to the world through a ‘Catch the 365 microsite’ – which drove over 4,000 downloads of Office 365 alone, from our target audience. Office 365 has since been sold into many organisations and even most personal users use the subscription model over the pay-once model. And why the band? We needed press too. Crowds always help a photo opp.
- Move quickly on to the next slide for the recap.
- Recap by running through bullets. Ask for questions. Move to next slide to push Labs offering.
- Need more help? Speak to Labs.
- End.