Audience research

What audience research is

Audience research finds out who actually buys from you, what they already understand, what they are quietly worried about, and how they describe the problem in their own words. The evidence comes from talking to real customers and to the people who sell to them, not from an internal workshop.

It answers who, not what and not when. The list of things those buyers need answered is buyer question research. The order in which they read things is customer journey mapping. Those three sit next to each other and get confused constantly, so it is worth being blunt: this one is about the person.

When you need one

Two situations make it urgent. Your content is written to a customer nobody has checked on in years, usually the customer the founder had in mind when the business started, who has since been replaced by somebody younger, better informed or buying for a different reason. Or you are about to spend real money on writing, and nobody in the room can agree who it is for, so every draft gets argued about on taste.

You do not need this if you speak to your customers all day and could describe three of them accurately from memory. Write that down yourself and spend the money on the writing. Research is for when the honest answer is that nobody in the business knows.

What gets looked at

Five sources, because each catches something the others miss.

• Customer calls. Five to eight conversations, half an hour each, with people who bought recently and, where you allow it, one or two who did not.
• Whoever sells. An hour with each person who talks to buyers, on what the buyer already knew, what surprised them and what they were nervous about.
• The words. How customers name the problem in emails, inquiry forms and reviews, set against the words your own material uses for the same thing.
• The circumstances. What had to happen in their business before buying became urgent, and who else had to approve it.
• What they already know. The level to write at, so nothing is explained twice or assumed once.

What does not go in it is a demographic profile. Age brackets and job titles are easy to collect and almost never change a sentence of anything you publish. The findings worth paying for are the ones that alter how a page opens.

What you get

The audience note. Two or three written portraits, one per type of buyer worth writing for, a page each. What they do, what triggered the purchase, what they knew, what worried them, who else was involved, and what would have lost the sale. Built from the interviews and quoted from them, not invented.

The vocabulary list. Two columns. What they call it, and what you call it. This is the cheapest thing in the deliverable and often the most immediately useful, because it can be applied to existing pages in an afternoon.

The call. Forty-five minutes walking through the portraits with whoever writes or approves copy, so the portraits get used rather than filed.

Nobody is asked to fill in a form. The whole value of this work is in the sentences people say when they are talking rather than choosing from a list, so the interviews are conversations and the quotes come back verbatim.

A worked example

An illustration. A payroll bureau in Kitchener has always written for the small business owner. Eight customer calls show that in most of those sales the owner never read a page of the website. The person who did was an office manager, usually the one who had just been handed payroll on top of an existing job, and what she was worried about was not cost but being personally blamed for a late remittance.

The portraits say so plainly. The vocabulary list shows the bureau selling “payroll outsourcing solutions” to a woman who searched for help with remittance deadlines. Nothing about the service changes. What changes is who every page is addressed to, and the first two pages rewritten that way are the ones that had been getting read and abandoned.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Who you think buys, who sells for you, and whether I may contact customers. No charge.
2. The introductions. You email the customers you are willing to have interviewed. I take it from there and nobody is pressed.
3. The interviews. Two to three weeks, because this part runs at the speed of other people's calendars.
4. Writing up. Three to five working days, then the portraits and the vocabulary list arrive ahead of the walkthrough call.

What it costs

Quoted after the first call, because the cost is mostly interview count and you decide that. Research on its own is quoted separately; it is also the opening section of a content strategy plan, so if you expect to want the plan, start there and this comes with it. The number is agreed in writing before any interview is booked, and the pricing page shows the four ways of working.

What happens next

Three usual moves. The portraits are handed to whoever writes, and existing pages are re-pointed at the right reader. The research feeds the question list, which is the natural second step. Or the vocabulary list becomes a piece of agreed house vocabulary so five names for one thing stops happening. The research is a complete piece of work and nothing further is assumed.