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¶ Audience Analysis
¶ What it is
Audiences are the groups of users defined as the product's target users based on combinations of attributes that are meaningful to the business. Here we can also refer back to the definition of our target personas from Validation. Yet, the definition will evolve during Scaling the product as we might adjust whom we target.
¶ Why it is useful
Defining and analysing the relevant audiences helps to abstract the user behaviours and conclude the interest points to guide the business and marketing. What’s more, it can be used to discover new audiences and new opportunities. It helps to answer questions such as whether we are attracting the users we want and what our audience portfolio looks like.
¶ When to use it & Who is involved
The target audience should have been defined at least for one primary version in the project charter at the starting point. However, this, of course, needs validation and also may be changing. Definitions and objectives will change over time.
When the product already has some users and the amount has reached a critical level that allows for proper data analysis, it is time to perform the analysis and help the product team understand the actual user groups using the product.
Usually, the roles involved are:
Product managers, marketing managers, brand managers, researchers, and data analysts.
¶ How is it done
- Determine the analysis tool: Data retrieving is relatively easy nowadays, but data analysis may be overwhelming. How to use the data scientifically depends on the tools chosen and the business goals to achieve.
- Define the audience: First, understand why you need this audience analysis to list the common factors to distinguish the specific audience you would analyse. These factors will indicate the differences among audiences. These can include demographics, behaviours, jobs-to-be-done, and other vital indicators which can be used to cluster groups of people. The first time around, you can use your personas to inform those.
- Set up meaningful metrics: Pick the attributes which help you attain your goals. For example, if you want to track the user behaviours of the selected audience, you may be interested in how long a user may stay on a single page, how many users don’t act as leaving the page, etc.
- Perform the data analysis: By understanding all the tracked attributes, you now have a better view of what the concerned audience likes / dislikes and can identify their buying patterns and trends.
¶ Do's & Don't
Do's
- Try to synchronise the evolving definition of your target audience over time with your Personas. This gives you a continued robust artifact to work with in Design, informed by Operations data.
- Look at multiple ways to segment users and see what the data tells you about the coherence of the cohorts you define. If a segmentation leads to cohorts showing high behavior divergence, the definition might not be helpful.
Don't
- Don’t simply use your Personas to define the target audiences. See how you can use them as a basis but evolve them with the granular data at your disposal.
¶ Tools needed
- Analytics data
- Persona statements
¶ Useful Tips
¶ Types of Audience Analysis
1. Demographic analysis
It includes factors like gender, age, educational level, religion, occupation and so on. This helps marketers to classify users easily by certain features of people, as the info is something not frequently changing.
2. Psychographic analysis
It is the study of audiences based on their activities, interests, opinions (AIOs), values and lifestyles (VALS.) It aims to analyse the users’ psychological and emotional motivations.
3. Behavioral analysis
Behavioural analysis studies the behaviours of human and non-human organisms. It focuses on understanding, explaining, describing, and predicting behaviour.
4. Branded/unbranded analysis
Branded analysis aims to perform the analysis of a certain brand, while the unbranded analysis of a certain product regardless of brand.
¶ Example
