Online Tools To Strengthen Your Audience Research Initiative

Selling a product or service that people want is a big challenge. Whatever your business idea is, you have to create something that will provide value to the customer enough that they are willing to spend money on it over the offerings of competitors. 

However, any organization that wants to improve sales needs to understand its audience well. Not only will that help with creating a valuable product, but it will also inform marketing initiatives that are going to be effective with the target audience.

Audience research is a crucial step in any business plan. It should be part of your startup strategy as well as an ongoing initiative in the future. The only way to obtain the information you need to understand the audience is by using the right online tools. Here are some methods to strengthen your audience research initiative. 

Semrush Audience Analyzer

Demographic data and statistics are a great way to start your audience research. Based on the product you sell, what ages, genders, races, geographical locations, and socioeconomic classes should you be targeting for both the product and marketing? The audience analyzer tool from Semrush can help you establish these data points for simple research. You can delve into demographics, socioeconomics, and even audience behaviors with this tool. It has been used by many businesses in hundreds of industries to glean more information about the makeup of their audiences. 

Instagram Insights

Social media are powerful tools for businesses for many reasons, especially Instagram. There are many tools to help boost your audience on Instagram, but there is one function that can also help you learn more about audience behaviors. Instagram Insights are available to anyone with a business account. It is mostly used for user engagement data such as follows, likes, comments, shares, etc. The data itself is helpful, but understanding behaviors is the main purpose. You can see what types of posts people are responding to and what topics they care about. This can help guide your future marketing strategy and engagement practices. 

Usenet

Have you ever heard of Usenet? It is a platform that even predates the Internet as we know it, first coming into existence in the late 70s. Its purpose is primarily information-sharing, with an emphasis on discussion forums and downloadable user-generated content. People who engage on Usenet join “newsgroups” about subjects that they care about for open discussions and to download content quickly and easily. There is a whole audience that could be discussing topics closely related to your industry on this platform, which means you can research Usenet to gain audience insights and see what potential customers are talking about. Test the waters by using one of the many free Usenet providers before investing fully to enjoy the benefits of this discussion platform. 

Google Trends

Part of understanding your audience is knowing what they care about. Google Trends is a website that allows you to see what topics and search queries are most popular on the world’s largest search engine at any given time. You can base it on geographical location and time as well. It is completely free, and you can use it to perform keyword research as well as trending topics in the last hour on Google. Know that there may be limits to how many searches you can conduct on Google Trends, especially if you access the tool without a Google account. 

Statista

If you want to strengthen your audience research initiative with specific data, then you can’t go wrong with Statista. You can look up insights and data from any industry an unlimited number of times, but there are also useful functions to organize the data that you are looking at. Statista allows you to build customized reports for the searches you conduct so that the information is easier to break down and share with other team members while guiding product development or marketing campaigns. There is enough functionality in the free account to be incredibly helpful, but you can unlock the potential of this tool with a monthly subscription. 

You Have Many Tools At Your Disposal, So Why Not Use Them?

The Internet makes business much easier but also far more complicated. While you can eliminate a ton of busy work and useless tasks by embracing online tools, there are also shorter attention spans to contend with. That is why it is so important to understand your audience well and what they care about to grab their attention with your product and marketing.

Using some of the tools listed above for audience research can give you a better insight into the customers you are trying to attract. This data will be crucial as you develop a product that meets their needs and marketing that touches on their emotions. Strengthen your audience research initiative with the right tools, many of which are available for free or at a very low cost.