How to research your audience and use dynamic personas for better ROI

Understanding how to research the needs and wants of a target audience is essential to creating high-converting content. But audience research must be something other than a one-time endeavor completed during the startup phase of a business. 

Join Research Radar, the course that shows you how to do audience research. Upgrade to AI Ignition system to learn how to use AI to fast-track audience research. 

People change over time, and as such, audiences do too. Audience research should be an ongoing initiative for every business, and maintaining a dynamic persona or multiple dynamic personas should be a priority for every content marketer.

In this article, we’ll explain what dynamic personas are, and we’ll look at some of the most important tools for audience research so that you can maintain audience personas and buyer personas that are accurate, to move your business forward. Let’s get started.

What is audience research, and why is it important?

Audience research is the process of investigating your target audience to understand their needs and desires better. You can then use this information to create content that is more likely to resonate with them and convert them into sales or leads.

Why is audience research important? Because it allows you to produce content that is tailored specifically for your target market. And when done correctly, this can result in increased conversions (sales or leads) for your business.

How do you research your target audience online?

The first step to creating high-converting content is understanding your target audience. But conducting audience research can be difficult if you need help knowing where to start or what tools to use. Luckily, we have a few tips for you to get started.

There are many different ways to research your target audience, but some common methods include surveys and focus groups. A popular and more affordable way to research your target audience is by looking for them in online forums such as Reddit and social media. Online research such as this will allow you to discover potential niches and see what topics interest them.

Once you have uncovered a problem, you have the starting point for defining a niche. A niche is a person (who represents a group of people) in a situation and a problem they are experiencing. Once you have determined your niche, you can learn more about them by looking at their social media profiles to understand their demographic information, such as age, gender, location, and psychographic characteristics.

Use online tools for researching your target audience.

When researching your target audience online, it’s important to use various tools and methods to understand who they are and what they want. Several tools can help you collect data on your target audience‘s demographics, interests, and behavior patterns.

The first port of call for many marketers when doing research is using Google AdWords to do keyword research. You can use the Keyword Planner to find out what people are searching for online and then use this information to create content that meets their needs.

However, there should be other starting points for research. You should conduct keyword research after extensive research to understand your audience and create an audience persona.

Why? Because people are only sometimes searching for the same things on Google. Understanding what your target audience is searching for is essential, not what keywords are high performing across the general population is essential. That’s why we always start with finding a niche community on a platform such as Reddit and looking for topics with high engagement. Doing this will give you an understanding of the topics that resonate in your target niche rather than the general population. Additionally, Reddit users are often very open about what they are thinking, feeling, and looking for, so you can get an idea of their wants, needs, and desires.

Another tool that you can use to research your target audience is an AI research tool. You can use AI audience research tools to speed up your research process and generate insights that you might not be able to find with manual research.

buyer persona

Types of audience data: Demographics, Psychographics, and semantic data

There are three main types of audience data: demographics, psychographics, and semantic data.

  • Demographic data includes information about age, race, sex, and religion.
  • Psychographics include things like education levels, interests, and behaviors.
  • Semantic data includes the meanings and associations people make with words and concepts.

Different audience data can be useful in different situations. For example, you can use demographic information to target ads to specific groups of people or to create content that is likely to appeal to them.

Psychographic information can help you better understand your target audience so you can create content that resonates with them personally. Semantic data can help you find keywords or phrases that people are likely to use about a topic and then target your content around those topics.

The benefits of psychographic modeling

There is no replacement for psychographic modeling when it comes to creating content that will engage and compel an audience. The benefits of this methodology include a better understanding of what interests and concerns your target audience and the ability to craft content that speaks directly to their needs and wants. Additionally, psychographic modeling to segment your audience by behaviorally-driven interests can make it easy to identify content topics that resonate with your target audience and create communities of like-minded people.

Targeting an audience based on demographics alone is rarely effective because it needs to consider each person‘s individual preferences. The best way to target an audience online is by using demographics and psychographics together and semantic insights to guide content topic choices.

Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.

John C. Maxwell
 

Use Dynamic Personas to understand your audience and forecast changes.

A persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. When creating personas, consider both qualitative (psychographics) and quantitative (demographic) information.

Dynamic Personas go beyond the average persona by representing not just who buyers are currently but also how they change over time. Dynamic personas also involve looking at “extreme” users or audience members to forecast where your average audience member could move. It also involves continual audience listening on social media and online forums, as well as constant monitoring of market trends so that you understand changes in the market and external forces that could impact your audience.

To create Dynamic Personas, you need to:

  • Determine your audience and create an audience persona.
  • Map out their buyer’s journey and understand what topics resonate with them at every stage. Doing this will give you valuable insights into how best to reach and engage your audience throughout their purchase decision process.
  • Regularly practice audience listening and monitoring of market trends.

How to maintain dynamic personas

Maintaining the freshness of your dynamic personas is essential for keeping your content marketing strategy fresh and engaging. By using various tools to understand your target audience and customer base better, you can create targeted marketing campaigns that are more likely to succeed. So how do you keep your dynamic personas accurate over time? Let’s take a look.

Once you have built an audience and a customer base, you can use tools to understand them better and refine your target personas. You can collect data and gain insights about your existing audience and customers by:

  1. Accessing CRM or Sales Data to understand buyer behavior: One of the best ways to understand your target audience is by looking at data from your past sales transactions. This information can give you a good idea of who your customers are, what products and services they’re interested in, and their buying patterns.
  2. Doing Audience Surveys: Another great way to understand your existing audience and customer base is through surveys. These surveys can measure things like customer satisfaction levels and attitudes. You can also use these surveys to find out more about specific segments within your customer base, and over time you may decide you need multiple dynamic personas rather than just one.
  3. Monitoring Website analytics: Website analytics can give you valuable insights about your audience and customers. This information can include how often people visit your website, what pages they visit, and what kind of content they find most useful. By using a variety of different tools to understand your target audience and customer base better, you can create targeted marketing campaigns that are more likely to succeed.
  4. Monitoring Social Media Analytics: Social media analytics can provide valuable insights about your audience and customers to keep your dynamic persona relevant. By monitoring audience engagement, you can understand what kind of content is most popular and which social media platforms your audience uses most frequently. 
  5. Research the people who follow your brand and how it changes over time by regularly looking at their social media profiles: By studying the people who follow your brand on social media, you can gain insights into their interests and demographics. This information can help you tailor your marketing campaigns to reach your target audience better.
  6. Monitoring market trends such as economic issues, tools they use, or new technologies: By monitoring market trends, you can identify potential issues that may affect your target audience or customer base. This information can help you keep your dynamic persona up to date and make informed decisions about how to serve your customers best.

In a nutshell…

By now, you should understand how to research your target audience and create a dynamic persona so you can create more likely convert content. Using various tools and methods, such as Reddit and social media, you can continually maintain your dynamic persona to produce more relevant and engaging content.

kely to succeed.

Sell On Autopilot helps marketers by teaching our process for conducting research, identifying an audience, and developing a marketing message that resonates.

In our first course, Research Radar, we teach you how to research your audience online using easy-to-follow manual methods to collect data online for free.

In subsequent courses, we teach you how to determine your audience and collect research data using AI.

Once you have real audience data to guide your AI writing software, your blog posts, social posts, vidoes, emails and landing pages can attract and convince the right audience.

What’s in Research Radar?

We show you how to:

  • Discover audiences discussing needs and desires in online communities
  • Research their psychographics including needs and wants
  • Collect and organise this data to gain audience insights

What’s the result?

  • Gain insights to power a data-driven persona and audience profile that will guide your AI writing assistant.
  • Discover topics and issues important to your audience and how they think.
  • Collect ideas for products, services and content to help you grow your business

These insights can help you create:

  • Customer-centric content
  • Content that hits the spot with your audience, just like the article you are reading now.

Yes, in case you were wondering, we do practice what we preach here at Sell On Autopilot. The article you are reading right now was written with the help of an AI writing tool that is powered by BERT and required us to complete an audience profile and avatar, which guides all of the content we create.

Learning how to do target market research will help you develop a data-driven audience persona that will guide your AI writing tool in helping people change their situations.

By understanding what interests, needs, and behaviors are common among your audience, you can create an AI writing tool more likely to appeal to them. This approach will help you identify which features and functions are most important to your audience and cater to the tool accordingly, increasing its chances of success.

AI writing tools can be a powerful way to increase writing efficiency. But efficiency is useless without effectiveness. Your AI writing assistant needs to create audience-centered content so you can build brand authority, attract a targeted audience, and convert your audience to customers to be effective.

Target market research is the first step in creating a data-driven audience persona to guide your AI writing software. We teach you how to research your market, so you are ready to move to the next stage of your research using AI, after which you can go on to use a BERT-based AI writing tool for high-performing content.

Join Research Radar, the course that shows you how to do audience research, to get better results when using AI for content writing.

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Prue Madden

Prue Madden

Prue Madden has extensive expertise in applying AI technology to enhance digital marketing strategies as the founder of Sell On Autopilot. Her career, which spans three decades, includes roles as a director of marketing and operations in countries like Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam, providing her with a broad perspective on marketing across different cultures. As an experienced user of AI tools in marketing, Prue is also an accomplished freelance copywriter and dedicated educator, focused on teaching businesses how to effectively integrate automation into their marketing efforts.