Audience analysis
article summary
Audience analysis helps define your strategy, positioning, and storylines. Use this process to understand your audience and how they view your product.
You must build for your audience & market today, not someone else’s. You must do this to figure out how you stand out and are differentiated. This may reveal who can help you drive growth, not just your competitors.
- Audience analysis is very helpful for shaping what you do on the fuel side: content, messaging, content types, etc.
- Audience analysis is also helpful to use as targeting in your growth aka “engine” efforts and to know what channels your audience uses.
Audience analysis falls under the first driver (product marketing research) in the 3 drivers of marketing strategy.
To learn more about the 3 drivers of marketing strategy, read this article.
How to analyze your audience
The process below shows how you can understand your audience with a 2-pronged approach.
Step 1: Data-driven analysis
- Define the firmographic & demographic criteria for your target your audience.
- E.g. what you will put into ad platforms & contact research tools like Apollo.
Step 2: Qualitative analysis
- Understand everything about your audience’s workday using this audience analysis template.
- Do this for both companies and individuals at companies.
- Fill it in by talking to as many people in your target audience or what you think is your target audience as you can.
- Update this on a 3-6 month cadence.
Make sure you know:
- The audience’s goals and problems, well beyond the scope of what your product solves.
- What other tools the audience uses, or is looking for.
- Where the audience goes for information.
- How your product fits into the audiences’ lives or workflows.
- If and how your product meets your audience's needs.
- How competitive and complementary products meet your audience's needs.
To conduct your own qualitative audience analysis, use this template.
Examples of audience analysis driving marketing activities
Challenge: We track all of our funnel metrics in a spreadsheet
Content idea: Funnel report spreadsheet template
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Tools: I spend all day in Hubspot
Content idea: How to use Hubspot and [our product] to increase leads
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Behavior: I want to talk to more peers
Content idea: Run one-off events to test community idea