While setting up my blog, one of the first parts of my content strategy included doing audience research.
What is audience research? In a nutshell, it’s all the information you gather about the attitudes, behaviors, and desires of the people you want to sell a product or service to. Whether you’re an aspiring content creator or a business owner, you need to perform some kind of audience research to get a clear picture of how to reach your target.
There are a lot of tools out there designed to help with this process, but they’re often geared toward mid to large-sized companies that can afford to drop thousands of dollars on reports and research studies.
Now, if you do happen to have the money to spare, check out some of these audience research tools. Otherwise, if you’re like me and are just starting out with zero budget, here’s how you can get started:
Reddit is a gold mine for understanding the pain points for your prospective customers when you don’t have a budget. According to Statista, a prominent data aggregation site, Reddit has 1.22 billion global monthly active users as of January 2024. Reddit’s purpose is to allow its users to create community discussions based on shared interests, which are called subreddits. Use the site’s search bar to find potential subreddits.
Effective ways to filter through Subreddits
Search for communities that match the goals of your business. For example – since my background is in content, I like to explore subreddits dedicated to creating social media posts, blogging, and selling products.
When searching for a good subreddit to follow, be sure to join an active community. Let’s say you’re an aspiring beauty influencer who wants to start a Youtube channel. Because of this, you want to learn more about what beauty enthusiasts care about to plan what to cover.
You type “beauty” into the search bar and click over to the “communities” tab. There are several options on the list, so we’ll look at two examples.
The first subreddit, r/beautyaddiction has a good number of members. If you scroll through the posts, though, you’ll notice that they’ve been made days apart. Many of them also have little to no comments. This doesn’t look like a good place to start researching.
The second community, r/beautyguruchatter has a lot of members. A cursory scroll through shows that this subreddit is quite active: several posts have been made in the last day, and they all have at least 10 replies. This would be a much better place to start.
Note: Subreddits with millions of members don’t always translate to an active community. Check how many of them are online and more importantly, their post activity.
Another effective way to use Reddit for consumer research is to field surveys. Although there is a science involved to designing surveys that yield more accurate predictions, small-scale surveys are still helpful. That’s because it’s infinitely better to get the specific answers you need directly from the people you’re targeting. Just make sure to read the rules of the subreddit you’re in before you create a survey post.
Social Media
Apps like Facebook and X are also good places to start audience research with no budget. Like Reddit, you can join Facebook groups related to your field of interest. On X, you can try searching for a topic to see what people are tweeting about it.
If you’re targeting other businesses or professionals, join a LinkedIn group. You can field surveys here too. As always, make sure to read the rules before posting in a group. Alternatively, connect and start building relationships with your target audience. You can then post the survey directly to your feed once you’ve built a large enough network.
Product Reviews
Selling a product? Check out product reviews staring on Amazon. According eMarketer, Amazon is the first place people start their product search.
Effective ways to use reviews for audience research
Scroll past the sponsored results and look for the first item with a “bestseller” badge. On the product page, scroll to the section that shows the item’s bestseller rank.
Click on the category to see what the top 10 products are, then use those for your research. Be sure to sort reviews by most recent and pull both 5-star and 1-star reviews. I recommend copying them to an Excel doc or Google sheets so you can easily refer to them as needed.
Google Trends
Google Trends is a free tool that lets you explore search trends. While its focus is on keywords instead of specific attitudes or behaviors, you can still use it to research what terms and topics people are interested in.
The main trends page gives you an overview of what people are searching for around the world. You can also review some popular events that the Google team has created special reports for.
How to use Google Trends for your audience research
To see what’s happening in search for your niche, type the keyword you’d like to explore into the search bar. Let’s use “beauty” as an example again. When you type this in, you’ll notice that the top two results on the dropdown have the sub headers search term and topic.
What’s the difference between a topic and a search term in Google Trends?
Google defines a topic as a group of search terms that’s related to your keyword. In other words, clicking on the Topic sub header for beauty will show you all interest in that keyword, plus related terms like “beauty brands”, “beauty products”, etc.
Search term will show you the interest for the specific keyword you entered in the Google Trends search bar.
Once you decide whether you want to explore a topic or a specific term, you’ll see a new page that shows you the interest over time, interest by region, plus related topics and keywords.
Google uses a scale of 0-100 to represent the interest over time, where 100 means the term was extremely popular in a given time period, and 0 means that there were not enough searches (if any) for Google to collect data on.
Google trends displays data from the past day by default, but you can use the drop down underneath the keyword to change the time frame.
I recommend clicking on custom time range, then choosing a range of 3 years from the end of last year. This can help you understand how interest in the keyword has changed over time, including any recurring spikes in popularity during specific months or seasons each year.
You can go back even further if you like, but I prefer the 3-year method for audience research since the data is more likely to be a good predictor of near-future behavior. From our beauty example, I see that interest in the keyword seemed to have consistently spiked around November. I can also see that the popularity has grown around that time over the last 3 years.
Since we know November is typically a big month for holiday shopping and sales, these two insights tell me that it’ll probably be a great time for beauty influencers to create gift guides and other content related to sales going on this November.
Consumer Research Blogs and Reports
Though a lot of the content is geared toward larger businesses, consumer research companies like GWI offer useful blog posts on general consumer trends and insights. These usually cover the attitudes and behaviors of specific age groups or categories like food, technology, and beauty.
They also offer downloadable audience research reports periodically. Unfortunately, many won’t let you access them unless you have your own website with an email set up to your domain name (that means no @gmail or @outlook email addresses).
Pinterest publishes an annual trend forecast based on its user trends, which is a great alternative if you can’t access any others.
Conclusion
As you can see, conducting audience research doesn’t always require a huge budget. Use these free tools to get the insights you need to create a great content strategy. And as you start to grow and earn, you can circle back to make the investment in some great audience research programs!
Have any questions or suggestions? Leave a comment below or send me an email!
