Did you know Play-Doh was initially developed as a wallpaper cleaner? The idea was that 1930s homeowners could roll the pliable, non-toxic substance across their walls to collect soot from coal-burning furnaces. But by the ’50s, with cleaner heating systems and washable vinyl wallpaper emerging, the product was at risk of obsolescence.
After discovering that a nursery school teacher had been using the wallpaper cleaner for children’s art projects, the company tested its product as inexpensive modeling clay. The overall response was positive, so it rebranded the wall cleaner to Play-Doh and added bright colors to the compound.
This story shows how a low-fi form of audience analysis drove a pivotal shift: After asking around about how customers used its product, the company shifted its strategy. Here’s more on audience analysis, why it’s important for ecommerce and small businesses, and how to conduct your own.
What is audience analysis?
Audience analysis is the practice of identifying and understanding your audience’s needs, values, preferences, and characteristics. It goes beyond just identifying a target audience, because it helps you understand your audience’s behavior, motivations, and potential biases. This results in more relevant messaging, products, and content.
Audience analysis can be quantitative—based on data from sales, surveys, and more—or qualitative—based on subjective assessments of your audience’s needs.
What can audience analysis tell you?
- Customer pain points
- Preferred communication channels
- Motivation and decision-making patterns
- Demographics and psychographics
- Engagement patterns
Audience analysis can uncover clear insights to help guide your decision-making and business strategy when it comes to subjects such as:
Customer pain points
You can uncover customers’ pain points by analyzing audience data. Understanding exactly what your customers want enables you to invest more effectively in strategies that yield results, rather than risking initiatives that don’t pay off.
Lulus, a multimillion-dollar ecommerce clothing company, has mastered the art of doubling down on product decisions based on customer feedback.
“It sounds crazy, especially at our size, but we’re still looking at every single customer exit survey,” Lulus CEO Crystal Landsem says on the Shopify Masters podcast. “[The customer] tells us she wants it, we buy it. We want to make her happy.”
Preferred communication channels
Do you know where your audience lives online? Are they more responsive to email communications over SMS, or vice versa? Which social media channels do they use the most? Understanding where your customers spend their time helps focus your marketing efforts for maximum reach and engagement.
The right channels may surprise you. For example, period care company August uses Geneva, a group chat app, to connect with its audience and build community. On her episode of Shopify Masters, founder Nadya Okamoto says August needed not only a conversation platform that was financially feasible, but also a place where its audience could thrive and participate.
“Slack costs money, Discord is too known as cut out for gamers, and we also didn’t want Facebook, because none of our users were really using Facebook,” she says. Beyond Geneva, Nadya uses TikTok to connect with her four million followers and share her challenges as an entrepreneur and activist.
Motivation and decision-making patterns
Why do your customers buy? What factors influence their purchasing decisions? Knowing what your customers value can guide messaging, product enhancements, and customer experiences.
Before launching August, Nadya spent years having community conversations and asking friends, family, and volunteers questions about their period products to inform her business strategy. Post-launch, Nadya uses Geneva to poll audience members and have two-way conversations to understand what customers want, what they aren’t getting, and how August can fill the gaps.
Demographics and psychographics
You may have existing knowledge about your audience from your own experience, but that’s no substitute for hard data. Proper analysis enables you to uncover deeper psychographic and demographic information including insights on age, gender, socioeconomic status, marital status, education, interests, values, and lifestyle preferences. Gather this data through customer surveys, research groups, or web analytics to build detailed target audience profiles.
For example, you might find that your skin care company’s audience primarily consists of women in the 25 to 34 age range who value sustainability and eco-friendly practices. You could use these insights to emphasize your ethical initiatives, partner with environmental organizations, or highlight sustainability practices in marketing campaigns.
Engagement patterns
Knowing where your audience is most active (e.g., which social media channels) and which aspects of your product or service resonate the most with them (e.g., your loyalty program or customer service) can help you focus your resources and efforts on the most rewarding areas. Understanding your audience’s engagement patterns is key to crafting unique, personalized experiences that stand out against larger competitors.
For example, Lulus is an ecommerce company, but when it launched its bridal line, it uncovered an opportunity for in-person bridal boutiques, allowing brides to feel the garments and try on dresses before purchasing.
Types of audience analysis
Here are six types of audience analysis to get a comprehensive view of your audience and make better-informed business decisions.
- Demographic analysis: Basic characteristics like age, gender, income, education, and occupation.
- Psychographic analysis: Psychological attributes like values, interests, and lifestyle.
- Social media audience analysis: Performance, engagement, and impact of a brand’s social media content on users and customers.
- Needs-based analysis: Specific needs, challenges, or problems your audience wants to solve.
- Geographic analysis: Where your audience is located and patterns based on their physical location.
- Cultural analysis: Beliefs, values, and norms based on your audience’s cultures and backgrounds.
How to conduct an audience analysis
- Define your objectives
- Gather customer data
- Segment your audience
- Create personas
- Apply your insights
- Evaluate and iterate
Here’s how to conduct an effective audience analysis in six steps:
1. Define your objectives
Identify why you’re conducting an audience analysis and what you’re looking to learn. Do you want to enhance marketing messaging or develop new products or features? Define your goals and success metrics, including key performance indicators (KPIs).
2. Gather customer data
There key ways you can gather customer data, including with:
- Your CRM. With a customer relationship management system, you can learn who your customers are and why they buy from you. Look for trends in purchases, returns, and customer service communications.
- GA4 or another website analytics tool. Use an analytics tool like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to get more detailed insights into how customers found you, how they engage online, and what their journey looks like.
- Social media. Customers don’t hold back on social media. You can know how they feel about your brand and what they’re saying about you if you just take the time to look. SEMRush’s media monitoring app can help you easily uncover your brand mentions on social media and the sentiment behind them.
- Direct questions. Ask your audience about their preferences, behaviors, and needs in post-purchase surveys, interviews, or focus groups. You may be surprised at how freely customers share their opinions. Tools like KnoCommerce are a great way to do this within your Shopify store.
3. Segment your audience
Organize all your data to uncover actionable insights. Conduct your analysis based on the types of audience analysis that best suit your objectives. Here are some examples of how you can segment your audience:
- Frequent vs. one-time purchasers
- Premium vs. budget product buyers
- Engaged vs. unengaged customers
- Female vs. male customers
- Location-based segmentation
4. Create personas
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal audience based on your segments. They help you personalize your marketing, develop products based on specific needs, and align business strategies with these groups. Buyer personas usually have names and images to humanize and make them easy to envision. Key components of a buyer persona include:
- Specific demographic details (your persona’s age, gender, marital status, etc.)
- Job role and industry
- Goals and challenges
- Buying motivations
- Favorite and least favorite social media channel
- Favorite and least favorite brands
- Preferred content type (video, blog articles, images, etc.)
- Hobbies
5. Apply your insights
Use your analysis to make impactful business decisions, like customizing messaging and content to specific personas, opening a new line of communication on social media, or improving and developing new products to fill gaps in a personas’ pain points.
Share your audience insights across your entire organization, including the sales, marketing, product, and customer service teams, as these insights can help each area improve its processes.
6. Evaluate and iterate
Finally, track the KPIs you identified in step one and evaluate the success of your analysis based on the objectives you set. Continuously gather feedback from your audience and use their feedback and your tracked data to make improvements where needed.
Audience analysis FAQ
What are the five steps of audience analysis?
The first five steps of audience analysis are:
1. Define your objectives
2. Gather customer data
3. Segment your audience
4. Create data-driven personas
5. Apply the insights
How do you analyze an audience?
To analyze an audience, gather data on their demographics, behaviors, sentiments, needs, and preferences. Then, segment your audience and create personas to guide product, marketing, and sales decisions.
Why is audience analysis important?
Audience analysis is important because it helps businesses adapt their messaging, products, and services to meet their audience’s specific needs.
