How to conduct audience research
4 - How to Better Connect with your Readers
Audience research is absolutely critical if you hope to resonate with your reader and ensure your stories stick. Although audience research is often used in non-fiction, and business writing, it certainly doesn’t hurt if you’re telling fictional stories as well.
Understanding who your readers are will be key in crafting content that they enjoy, learn from, and remember. It'll also help you market your content (fiction and non-fiction) in the right places.
- In business, in-depth audience research can help you better sell products.
- In fiction, it can help you better sell your books.
Here's the process you can follow to get the most out of your audience research:
- Run competitor research
- Host interviews & focus groups
- Look at sales reports
- Run observation-based research
- Use market segmentation
- Build audience personas
Let's look at each step in more depth:
1) Run competitor research
When writing for a brand, it's essential to study your competitors to enhance your storytelling.
Ask yourself what you like and dislike about their blogs and how you can do better.
Also, identify "tone competitors" – brands that inspire you and align with your desired tone.
Example tone competitors for DSLX might include brands like Typeform, Mailchimp, and Hotjar.
What to look for in competitor research
- Technical Language: Analyze the technical words and expressions your competitors use and what they need to explain.
- Content Types: Observe the various content types they use, such as images, infographics, podcasts, videos, etc., to improve your own content.
- Consider other factors like style, formality, simplicity, white space, content length, structure, humor, and SEO tactics (keywords, headings, FAQs).
Competitor research for storytelling
For both fiction and non-fiction writing, competitor analysis can help you understand story structure, language, presentation, and style.
For fictional storytelling, learn from authors writing for a similar audience in terms of content length, structure, story peaks, language techniques, etc.
The outcome of a competitor analysis
Your competitive analysis should leave you with insights and inspiration to write better for your target audience.
Use it as a guide to enhance your own efforts and engage your readers effectively.
Remember, learning from your competitors can be a valuable source of inspiration and improvement in your writing.
2) Host interviews & focus groups
Hosting interviews and focus groups is beneficial for both business writing and fiction storytelling, although the insights they provide can differ significantly.
For business writing
In the context of business writing, interviews and focus groups are invaluable. They can reveal the language your target audience uses among peers, the brand stories they want to hear, and the questions they have left unanswered from other pieces of content.
Understanding your readers' language is crucial not only for relatability but also for enhancing your content's searchability (SEO) and appeal.
For fictional storytelling
When conducting interviews for fictional stories, focus groups can spark fresh narratives and character developments that you might not have considered previously.
Beyond the story itself, they can aid in creating captivating book covers, crafting compelling blurbs, and identifying the right publications for book reviews, all of which can impress potential readers.
Building a community
Importantly, these focus groups help you establish a small community of readers who have contributed their time and input to shape your content.
These individuals will feel a sense of ownership in your work's success, so when your book or blog goes live, you can rely on them to help expand its reach within their own communities.
Harnessing interviews and focus groups can be a powerful tool in your writing journey, enabling you to create content that resonates and connects with your audience while also building a supportive community around your work.
3) Look at sales reports
This one is a bit more self-explanatory. You want to look at your sales reports and content engagement reports to understand what's actually resonating with your audience. When it comes to sales reports, it can be really interesting to A/B test your checkout pages to figure out the messaging that's working best for your customers and convincing them to hand over their hard-earned cash.
When it comes to content engagement reports there are a few metrics to consider:
- CTR: click-through rate, aligned alongside impressions (in SERPs i.e Google search) are clear signals if the titles and meta descriptions to your work are performing well for you or not. If you've got a high number of impressions but a low number of clicks it's probably time to change up your content.
- Bounce rate: uh-oh! A worrying one. You want this as low as possible. If people are bounding then it's suggesting you're not delivering on what they came for. Or, their experience with your work is failing them: this could be anything from site load speed to the blog layout and design.
- Time on page: a great metric to understand how much time people put into reading your work. There are tools out there to suggest how long it should take someone to read (you can do it yourself as well) and ideally, you want your readers to be hitting 50% of this or above. (So many of us are scanners, it's okay if they skip over what they already know). But, 50% and up of your read time is a great signal.
- Further on-site engagement: this one is a great signal that a reader found your writing so engaging or relevant that they've decided to stick with you and keep reading.
- Clicks: here I'm referring to all types of clicks. Link clicks can highlight what people are interested in, and if those links are external links then perhaps it's worth building a separate article on that topic and converting it to an internal link in the future.
- You may also see "rage clicks." These are clicks that a reader makes because they think or want something on the page to take them somewhere else. You may see rage clicks on certain words or terms as users look for an explanation (a great signal to build more content around that topic.
- Or, you may see clicks on other on-page features like menu items or images. If people are rage-clicking somewhere, consider where you can send that click that keeps their journey relevant and with you.
4) Run observation-based research
Next on our list is observation-based research, a fantastic way to gain insight into what your target audience desires in a story.
Explore forums
Forums are treasure troves for both businesses and independent fictional storytellers seeking inspiration.
Platforms worth checking out:
It's astonishing how niche these forums can get. Never doubt that your chosen topic lacks a readership. Your niche it's out there, and these forums are where you'll uncover it.
At the same time, you can consider certain hashtags or keywords as forum filters for popular social media channels. Consider searching for your topics on platforms like TikTok to see what content or questions people are putting out there. Once you're on that content, get stuck into the comments to explore audience insights even further!
Dive into the details
Roll up your sleeves and dig deep into these forums. Find the community that perfectly aligns with your writing.
Become an active member of that community and keenly observe their conversations, questions, and discussions. Keep these insights in mind as you craft your content.
When the time is right, you can even consider promoting your writing within these forums but always respect their community guidelines.
By immersing yourself in these forums and truly understanding your audience's needs and interests, you'll be better equipped to create stories that resonate and captivate.
5) Use market segmentation
Market segmentation is a crucial step in audience research.
Segment your data
Your stories often resonate with various types of people, from different demographics to psychographics.
Divide your data into groups and consider two key approaches:
- Tailor your stories to each audience segment for a stronger connection, even though it might be a significant effort.
- Adjust how you market your stories to each segment. Some may respond better to ads, specific social media platforms, or use different language and have distinct pain points.
Benefits of audience segmentation
Audience segmentation ensures that you reach and engage with everyone within your larger audience.
Implementing segmentation
Once you've defined your audience segments, leverage marketing tools to act on this data, especially with mailing lists.
Tools like MailChimp can help organize your different types of readers.
For targeted ads, ensure effective segmentation to deliver the most compelling ads, increasing the likelihood of conversion or clicks.
By effectively segmenting your audience and tailoring your approach, you can better connect with and appeal to various segments within your broader audience. This strategy can significantly enhance your outreach and engagement efforts.
6) Build audience personas
The final piece in your audience research puzzle is creating audience personas.
Don't underestimate the importance of audience personas; they're well worth your time and effort.
Remember: Audience personas are not static documents you create once and forget about; they should be in a constant state of evolution.
Dynamic personas
These personas should be regularly revised and continually evolving.
They serve as tools to help you better understand and internalize the data you've collected.
When crafting or promoting your stories, you can continually check if you're effectively addressing different segments of your audience.
Resource for building personas
For more guidance on audience personas, check out the Audience Personas guide by DSLX for Maze.
This resource is particularly helpful because it emphasizes creating personas not solely based on demographic traits like age, gender, and location.
It includes user persona templates that can inspire your efforts.
User personas are the foundation of your audience research. Depend on them, keep them up to date, and refer to them regularly.
Setting yourself up for success
When you write and market with these personas in mind, you're positioning yourself for success in engaging and resonating with your audience.
Audience personas are dynamic tools that can greatly enhance your understanding of your audience and improve your storytelling and marketing efforts. Keep them evolving, and you'll be well-prepared for success!
That's it for this lesson, now you're prepared and ready to understand your audience and how to write and create for them.
In our next lesson, we’ll cover how you can foster curiosity and buy-in with your storytelling.