What it is & how to conduct it

Audience research sounds simple: figure out who your audience is, learn what they want, and build your strategy around your findings.

In reality, it’s rarely that straightforward. And without a reliable framework, you risk collecting data that isn’t relevant to the questions you need answers to.

Below, we cover the core challenge of audience research, why you need relevant data, and the types of research to draw on. Then, we walk through a six-step workflow for running audience research yourself.

Why audience research needs many inputs

The core challenge with audience research is that what people say versus what they actually do can be different, and relying on one source of data can skew your insight.

A survey might highlight price as a big factor when deciding between two products. If you relied on that data alone, you might choose to provide discounts and coupons as a way to nudge people toward conversion. 

But your analytics might actually show that people consistently buy your premium option. In this case, discounts and coupons might not be the right approach.

Avoid making decisions based on assumptions by gathering enough data to cross-check what people say against what they actually do. That way, every decision aligns with your audience and their needs. 

What audience research involves

Audience research involves collecting and analyzing data about the people you want to reach, so you can make informed decisions based on them.

For example, you can create much more effective marketing campaigns when they’re based on audience research that reveals your ideal customers’ behaviors, needs, and pain points. 

You can collect audience data through methods like surveys, interviews, website analytics, industry reports, and third-party data sites like Pew Research or Statista. 

Audience research typically covers six core dimensions, and each dimension answers different questions:

Dimension	Examples	Question answered
Demographics	Age, gender, location, education, and occupation	What are the statistical characteristics of this person?
Socioeconomics	Income level, household size, and employment status	What is their social and economic standing?
Psychographics	Values, interests, attitudes, and beliefs	What do they care about?
Behaviors	Purchase patterns, content consumption, and platform use	What do they actually do?
Pain points	Specific problems like tracking and collecting payment from late invoices	Why would they seek out your company?
Firmographics (B2B)	Industry, company size, revenue, and tech stack	What are the traits that define the organization?

Audience dimensions are most powerful when you combine many. For example, knowing your ideal customer is a 35-year-old homeowner doesn’t tell you much that’s actionable until you also find they research products for weeks before buying and don’t trust contractor quotes without seeing reviews. 

Additionally, you’ll likely end up with a range of data that describes multiple buyer types. For example, you might notice that some people in your audience are new homeowners while others are retirees that manage multiple rental properties. Combine these dimensions into different groups to create segments (more specific groups of buyers). 

Once you have a complete picture of your audience, you can use it to do things like shape your content marketing strategy or optimize a landing page.

Audience research vs. market research

Audience research zooms in on individuals while market research zooms out to the competitive and economic landscape you and your competitors operate in.

For example, audience research looks at elements like your audience’s behavior, motivation, and pain points, while market research looks at market size, competitor positioning, pricing trends, and industry growth.

Run audience research when you’re deciding who you’re trying to reach and engage. Run market research when you’re deciding where to compete or how big an opportunity is.

Why does audience research matter?

Audience research matters because it replaces assumptions about your customers with evidence, which leads to faster and more accurate decisions.

Proper audience research helps with: 

• Targeting: Reach the right people instead of a broad, generic group
• Messaging: Write copy that reflects how your audience actually talks about their problems
• Product development: Build features around real pain points instead of hypothesized ones
• Retention: Spot why customers churn and fix the actual cause
• Pricing: Understand what customers perceive as valuable and what they’re willing to pay for

Types of research and examples

Types of research include quantitative (based on numerical data) and qualitative (based on subjective insights from your audience), and you need both for a complete picture of your audience.

	Quantitative	Qualitative
Answers	“How much?” and “To what degree?”	“Why?” and “How?”
Format	Numbers	Exact quotes from participants
Sources	Analytics, surveys, social metrics, and CRM/sales data	Interviews, focus groups, open-ended surveys, social listening, and reviews
Best for	Spotting patterns at scale	Understanding the reasoning behind a pattern

For example, quantitative research tells you that 30% of customers cancel their subscription within their first 60 days but not why. Qualitative research tells you most of these customers never used the feature that convinced them to sign up in the first place — they got stuck setting it up and gave up before reaching out for help. 

How to conduct audience research: A step-by-step workflow

Conduct audience research by:

1. Defining the goal of your research
2. Gathering behavioral data from places like site analytics 
3. Hearing from your audience via surveys and interviews
4. Analyzing competitor audiences
5. Cross-referencing data from different sources to build a complete picture
6. Turning your findings into one or more audience personas

To illustrate this framework, we’ll use an example of optimizing the messaging on a sales page as we go through each step. However, this framework works for many other purposes.

Step 1: Define the decision your research will inform

Defining the decision your research will inform guides your data collection efforts.

Examples that work as a starting point for audience research include:

• Which channel to invest in next quarter
• Which messaging angle to lead with in a campaign
• Whether to expand into a new customer segment

Pick one of these (or write your own and state it as a single sentence — it’s the filter that tells you what’s worth gathering and what’s just noise. 

For our example, we want to know which messaging angle to lead with on a sales page. 

Step 2: Gather behavioral data

Gathering behavioral data (how people interact with your business) gives you an unbiased baseline to check self-reported answers against later. 

Google Analytics is a useful source for behavioral data where you can find things like:

• Engagement rate to see which pages resonate with people
• Conversion rate by channel to see which traffic sources actually turn into customers
• Average engagement time or pages per session to see how much people explore before taking action

The specific metrics that you’ll want to collect depend on your decision from step one.

Easily find metrics in Google Analytics by searching the metric you need.

Or by clicking “Reports” in the left sidebar to find a specific report you need.

In our example — optimizing a sales page — we might want to know which pages buyers visit before making a purchase, so we can see what information they rely on leading up to conversion. 

We could use the path exploration template (“Explore” > “Path exploration”) to see the different journeys people take before becoming buyers.

Once in the path exploration template, click “Start again.”

The pop-up asks you to select between a starting point and an ending point. We’ll use an ending point and choose “Event name” and select “purchase” for our event (so we can see the paths people take before becoming customers). 

Select the drop-down in “Step -1” and select “Page title and screen name” to see specific pages.

Then, click into a page to expand the previous steps.

After clicking and expanding different steps, we’ll have a good idea of which pages people visit before they become customers,which helps us understand the information they might need on a sales page.

Step 3: Hear from your audience

Hearing from your audience through interviews, surveys, and social listening reveals the motivations your behavioral data can’t show on its own. 

For example, in trying to optimize our sales page, we might find that people who convert tend to visit the pricing page multiple times before becoming a customer. 

Knowing this, we could ask customers what factors they took into consideration before buying by adding a survey on the thank you page. Or we could use an exit-intent survey (a survey that displays as someone is about to leave) to ask why they didn’t feel confident in buying. 

Add surveys to your website with a tool like Typeform. Consider adding a question to your survey asking if they’d be open to a quick interview where you can ask more detailed follow-up questions.

Use a mix of closed- and open-ended questions when conducting surveys and interviews. Closed-ended questions tell you how many people share a view, while open-ended questions help you understand the reasoning behind those patterns:

• Closed-ended: Questions with a fixed set of answers (yes/no, multiple choice, rating scale, etc.). Useful for measuring how many people share a view, so you can quantify a pattern across a large group.
• Open-ended: Questions with no fixed answer, inviting a response in the person’s own words. Useful for surfacing language, context, and reasoning a fixed answer can’t capture.

Just be sure to treat any feedback here as directional. People may not give you the whole truth for a number of reasons (misremembering facts, politeness, etc.). At this stage, make sure to record everything, so you have enough data to analyze later on.

You’ll also want to hear from people indirectly via social listening because it captures what people say when no one’s asking. That means you’ll see unprompted opinions in communities, reviews, and forums, which are often more candid than anything said directly in a survey or interview. 

The Media Monitoring app tracks these conversations for you when you configure it to track keywords for your brand or your competitors.

Once configured, open Media Monitoring’s “Mentions” tab to see all keyword mentions with their sentiment. This shows you what people think of your brand or your rivals. 

Patterns in that unfiltered feedback from social media platforms and forums tell you where your brand genuinely stands, which is often different from what customers say to your face. 

Step 4: Analyze competitor audiences

Analyzing competitor audiences means studying the people your rivals serve to understand what your shared audience responds to — and where your own approach falls short.

Semrush’s Traffic & Market Toolkit surfaces different insights about your competitors’ audiences. In the Traffic Analytics dashboard, you can check user behavior on competing sites and view metrics like total visits, engagement, traffic sources, purchase conversions, and more. 

For our sales page example, we’d want to compare our site’s purchase conversions to our rivals’ purchase conversions. If one competitor has a much higher conversion rate, we could review its sales pages to see what ours may be missing that resonates with our target audience. 

You can also view the Top Pages report to see which competitor pages draw the most visits. Recurring themes reveal what your audience consistently engages with elsewhere.

Step 5: Cross-reference data from different sources

Cross-referencing data from different sources validates your findings and prevents a single, unreliable input from driving your whole decision.

Lay your findings side by side and look for agreement or conflict within your data. 

Let’s take a simplistic look at how we might do this with our sales page messaging example: 

• Google Analytics showed converting customers revisit the pricing page multiple times
• Our survey said price wasn’t a major factor
• Interviews uncovered that buyers need feature lists 
• Our top competitor’s higher-converting pages focus on product features 

Together, this might point us toward leading with feature-focused messaging instead of defending our price. 

Once your sources largely agree, you have enough evidence to act.

Step 6: Turn your findings into a clear picture of your audience

Turning your findings into a clear picture of your audience takes your scattered data and pulls it into one or more profiles your team can use to stay on track.

Combine the patterns that kept showing up across your sources — traits, behaviors, motivations, and pain points — and write a few sentences that describe your audience or a particular segment. 

For example, the research from our sales page example might give us something like this: 

“Budget-conscious managers who need to justify the purchase internally. They revisit the pricing page multiple times before buying to extract the right features to highlight to their buying committee. Before they’ll buy, they need to build a case as to why our product is right for their team.” 

That’s specific enough to answer the original question and give anyone on the team enough to act without digging back through the research.

Use this template if you’re unsure how to start writing your own profile: 

“[Audience segment] who [primary behavior or where they spend time], because [motivation or goal]. They’re trying to [job to be done / problem they’re solving], but [pain point or obstacle that gets in the way]. Before they’ll [buy / convert / switch], they need to [trust signal or proof point] — otherwise, [objection that stops them].”

Future-proofing your audience research

Audiences shift as the channels they trust, the language they use, and the problems they’re trying to solve change. That’s why the teams who stay close to their audience are the ones who routinely revisit their audience research.

Re-run behavioral checks quarterly to catch shifts in how people behave and refresh interviews and social listening when you launch something new, enter a new market, or notice a metric moving without explanation.

Semrush’s Traffic & Market Toolkit is built for this kind of always-on monitoring. Try it today.