This is the second post in my series about doing audience research.

In the last one, I covered why it’s useful, how to think about audience selection, and what you’re looking for (at a high level) in your research.

In this edition, I’ll look at where to carry out your research, and how to turn what you find into something useful. Let’s get started.

The important thing is that you find out where your audience is spending most of their time and focus your time and effort there.

You do this by looking for the content that people already read, the things they say and the things they search for to identify areas that you can develop content around.

The extent to which you can rely on each of these planks depends on your sector. If your audience is private equity principals, for example, you might struggle to find people writing online reviews of private equity firms, and searches related to the space are likely to be clustered around “how much money do people get paid”-type questions. In that instance, it’s probably better to look at what people are reading.

All of this might feel quite hypothetical, so as we go through I’ll show how it might work in practice. I’m conscious not to do anything related to my current clients’ areas of work, or those of any of the clients of the firm I work for.

That’s quite a broad group, so to be on the safe side I’ll pretend we’re doing research for a company in a space I know nothing about: beekeeping.

Wish me luck. Let’s get started

A quick note on what to look for: I’ve talked before about the different challenges when you do or don’t already have products launched in the market you serve. If you’re building owned media around your preexisting products or services, focus on the problems, obstacles and goals directly addressed by those offerings.

In this situation, you’re looking to find the messages and framing that will communicate your value to readers as effectively as possible. If you haven’t launched a product or service to the market yet, you can cast your net more widely and learn about every goal, risk and obstacle you can.

First off, the best and most effective way to to learn what people want is simply to talk to them. One on one interviews, or even focus groups, are the best way to learn what people think in their own words.

If you have a bit of an existing audience, or strong relationship with your customers, then that’s the obvious place to start - it can be as simple as emailing people and asking them if they’re happy to have a 15-30 minute call for research purposes, but often finding people to speak to requires legwork.

If you’re starting from scratch, however, some legwork may be required. It helps to have something to offer peope in exchange for speaking to you.

In the interviews themselves, it’s important to be very careful about how you ask questions - they should be phrased in a way that focuses on the person’s actual experiences and the actions they have taken in the past. There’s little to no predictive value in someone saying what they will do in future, or sharing their ‘ideas’.

If I were to interview someone and ask “Do you think content could help your business? If so, in what way?” I’ll likely get a very different set of responses than by asking “Do you use any content in your marketing? If so, what are you doing?”

Interview questions need to be open-ended and focused on uncovering the specific actions people have taken or are taking, not what they think they might, or feel they should, do in future.

(For more on how to conduct good customer interviews there’s an excellent book on this called The Mom Test. Well worth checking out.)

Interviews and focus groups are great for hearing what people care about straight from the horses mouth, but they are a lot of work. Thankfully, there are other, lower-effort ways to learn. That’s what we’ll look at next.

Read what they read

Everyone gets their information from somewhere. The world is full of trade magazines, blogs, podcasts and more dedicated to every area imaginable.

To illustrate: A friend of mine did a masters in investigative journalism before securing his first reporter role at a magazine about the caravan business (literally people who manufacture and sell caravans). His first press junket was for the launch of a new type of awning. He’s not a journalist any more.

The media our audience reads can be an incredible window into what they care about. Niche (trade or hobbyist media) spends considerable time and effort rooting out the most important stories in their given area.

The things they choose to cover offer a great insight. Even better, look at the number of comments, how prominently an article is placed, or ‘most read’ rankings to get a better sense of the audience’s priorities.

Similarly, rival companies’ content can play the same role.

Focus on your best competitors (the biggest, fastest growing, longest lasting or most innovative). As you look, ask yourself these questions:

Going back to our beekeeping example, Bee-Craft.co.uk (Britain’s best beekeeping magazine, don’t ya know), prominently features articles aimed at best practice techniques (frame turning, advice for beginners), and about weathering for the changing seasons (insulating, prepping your bees for summer, etc).

The Beekeeping Quarterly, meanwhile, has articles about varroa control (it seems varroa are parasites that attach onto bees, they look gross), biosecurity & biodiversity, ensuring good nutrition for your colony.

They also feature something about dramatic rates of unexplained colony collapse among North American beekeepers, mostly around the almond farming areas in California.

Anything becomes interesting when you look closely enough (except maybe the caravan business).

You’ll remember from last time that we are looking for our audience’s goals, the obstacles they face in reaching those goals, and the risks they want to avoid.

From this, we can see that the goals of our beekeeper audience are to raise healthy bees that create good honey while benefitting their wider ecosystem.

The obstacles they face to doing that are a lack of knowledge (hence the technique and training material, and the stuff on adapting hives throughout the year).

Their specific risks relate to hive health (nutrition, dealing with parasites) and ensuring they aren’t disrupting the local ecosystem.

This raises an important side point - when we are looking for an audience we want to niche down, but when looking for problems it’s OK to zoom back out and look at the overall problem that the audience wants to fix.

Take our varroa example - there’s presumably only a limited number of articles you could write about this specific parasite, but are there other kinds of parasite that need to be protected against? We can zoom it out to even further to be about bee health, which opens up articles about nutrition, optimal colony size/spacing, and a whole swath of other topics (presumably, I don’t know anything about bees).

Read what they say: the fine art of lurking

One of the great things about using the internet for audience research is how much everybody loves to moan.

If you want to know what problems people are struggling with, or the goals they aspire to, it’s often just a case of looking for the things they moan about or ask advice on.

For this step, it’s just a case of looking for what people are telling us. For some categories you’ll be able to read reviews, for others you may be able to sift through the comments on articles or what people are writing on social media. Probably the best place, though, is Reddit.

I have a theory that you could probably make a decent business by taking active, fast-growing subreddits and building media companies that target them. An active subreddit is a goldmine, allowing you to see unfiltered opinions and questions, organised from the most salient to the least through the upvote/downvote system.

Reddit has also recently released Reddit Pro, a free tool that you can use for social listening. Recurring discussions of one of your keywords might be an opportunity to develop content around.

r/beekeeping has 229,000+ members (a great start). Most of the posts are questions from beginners, advice on prepping hives for winter, questions from people who’ve had hives die and even a video of an actual varroa someone found (even more gross).

There are also a lot of posts about protecting against bear attacks, which could be relevant depending on where this hypothetical beekeeping company is based. Even if it isn’t based in a country with bears, hive protection more generally (against things like theft) may well be a topic worth exploring.

Reviews: pay close attention to the haters

Customer reviews (i.e, not written by professional critics) are another great way to learn about your audience. The things that they focus on are a good signal for their goals and obstacles, while the products that are popular also give an idea of their priorities.

Looking at reviews for Flow Hives, I can see that reviewers on their products are focused on how easy they are to set up and use (an obstacle) and how comfortable the bees are with the hive, including during honey collection (happy health bees can go under our goals)

It looks as though these hives are specifically aimed at beginners/people who want ease of use. Ideally we would look at a range of products, both in terms of product type (maybe some of those beekeeping suits and smokers) and hives aimed at different audiences (maybe more advanced beekeepers, or those in more extreme climates).

We won’t do that on this occasion, though, because I don’t actually run a company aimed at beekeepers.

In a similar vein to reviews, where your sector has an active media landscape (blogs, websites, notable influencers/thought leaders on social media), their comment/replies sections can also be a valuable source of information on your customers.

Read what they search

Finally, search traffic is another way to get a window into what your audience is interested in. Even as AI changes search, it’s still possible to learn a lot.

It’s tempting to focus on this step because it’s the lowest effort way to learn. That’s why I’ve left it until last.

Tools like Ubersuggest allow you to enter search terms and see the most relevant keywords, queries and questions that people ask related to it.

You can install inexpensive tools like Keywords Everywhere to see search volumes for your search queries - it’s worth noting that search volumes are not an exact science, but they tend to be in the right ballpark.

There is also just good old-fashioned google - the search bar will try to autocomplete queries based on what other people search for, and after you have searched the AI overview and ‘people also ask’ section are both useful ways to glean a little extra information.

Everything we’ve covered so far is what I would call proactive research - you’re going out to actively learn about your audience. The bulk of this work is done before you launch (though it should continue on an ongoing basis).

The other side of the coin is the reactive research - what you can learn post-launch from the analytics and engagement metrics on your content and socials.

This might mean reviewing the analytics on content after it has been published, or looking at the click-throughs on an ad you’ve been running, or looking at the engagement metrics on a social post. The proactive work helps you to find the key areas you should focus on, while the reactive work allows you to refine your content and make sure it improves over time.

There is a lot to cover on this, and I’m planning to get into it in a future edition on experimentation, but suffice to say the current best practice on this is to batch review your content at set intervals (say after every 25 articles, or 100 social posts, or every month - it depends on volume) and identify what is working the best. This then informs your next batch of content.

We’ll cover this in more detail in the next edition, where I’ll talk about how to take what you’ve learned and turn it into content to test, but the basic idea is that you want to have some form of analytics at every stage of your ‘funnel’, from the social posts and adverts you put out to promote your content, to the content itself, to the signup/purchase pages that the content directs readers on to.

If there's one thing worth taking from this, it's that your audience is already telling you what they want — in the questions they ask, the complaints they post, the articles they share. Your job is just to go and listen.

Next time, we'll look at how to turn what you've heard into a content strategy that actually does something with it.

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