The advertiser’s approach to audience analysis [According to experts]

“Feedback and insights from consumers tell them what resonates and what doesn’t — before a business releases their creations out into the world.” - Steve Phillips, Zappi’s CEO and founder

As marketers, we often hear the classic bit of advertising advice, “Advertising to all means selling to none.”

That’s why great advertising always starts with your audience. 

A 20-something living in downtown New York needs different brand or product messaging to a father of four living in Mount Pleasant.

An audience analysis can show you which ads stay with your target market, which products they buy again and again, how they see themselves and how they see your brand.

In this post, we explore the importance of audience analysis in more detail and guide you through the process. 

Market segmentation research involves grouping your audience into subcategories of the market based on shared traits, attitudes, demographics, behaviors, needs or interests. 

By categorizing your audience this way, you’ll start to see how these characteristics impact consumers’ perceptions of ads, drive brand engagement and influence buying behavior. 

The more clarity you have on who your ideal customer is, the more insights you’ll have into the kind of ads that will be most successful with them. You’ll know which music to use. You’ll know if they want humor over a serious tone. And you’ll know the perfect ad length to keep them interested.

When it comes to audience analysis the less limits you put on your categorizations, the better. If you just focus on demographic audience analysis features, such as age ranges or job roles, you’ll only have a limited understanding of your ideal customer and how to advertise to them. 

That’s why a multi-faceted approach to an audience analysis is so essential. Analyzing and bringing together demographic, psychographic and behavioristic segments allow you to get a deeper understanding of your audience.

A multi-layered approach is also important because you can use it to understand how each audience category impacts the other categories. 

For example, if you know thirty-something professionals with high household incomes (demographics) are motivated by success and anxiety around financial security (psychographics) and they spend a large amount of their income on professional development, then you’ll have a more complete picture of your audience and know how to target them more effectively than you would if you’d only focused on one or two of these categories. 

Let’s take a look at each of these categories in more detail: 

1. Demographic 

A demographic audience analysis is when you categorize and analyze your audience based on demographic features. These may cover age, gender, ethnic origin, marital status, educational background, household income and geographical location. 

2. Psychographic 

Psychographic audience analysis involves breaking down and analyzing your audience based on their inner psyche — focusing on the attitudes, beliefs, emotions and personality traits of your segment. 

“Psychographic profiling would not only ask ‘what’ customers like, but also ‘why’ they like it. 

As an example, a brand selling non-dairy milk alternatives could target their marketing towards vegans or lactose intolerant consumers to some success. 

But by profiling customers through a psychographic approach, they could identify and target vegans who care deeply about animal welfare, or understand why lactose intolerant segments prefer a particular dairy milk substitute.” Sagacity

3. Behavioralistic 

Behavioralistic analysis refers to the process of categorizing and analyzing audience segments based on a shared behavior. Examples may include where they are in the customer journey, buying behaviors or the types of media they consume. 

Let’s take a look at how to build an audience analysis. 

1. Define your research goals 

The first step is to define your research goals. Why do you want to know what you want to know? Once you understand the why, you can get clarity on the kind of data you need. Concrete goals can give you more insights into how to construct your surveys and interviews. 

2. Choose your segmentation criteria 

Next, choose your segmentation criteria. What are you going to focus your research on? Which target audience demographics will you collect data on — will you focus on age, income, ethnicity? 

Which behaviors are you most interested in — past purchase behaviors, eating habits or preferred media channels? 

And which psychographics will you take a look at? Such as your audience’s personality, attitudes or values. 

3. Design your survey 

Surveys are one of the best and most common forms of consumer research. They’re mainly a quantitative form of data collection, think of questionnaires with multiple choice answers or questions that ask respondents to rank their perceptions or feelings on a scale from 1-5. 

Quantitative methods like surveys allow for breadth, giving you insights into patterns and trends among your target segments. 

But the quality of your survey results depends on the quality of your survey design. Keep these best practices in mind: 

• Clean design: A clean design will make it easier for people to read and respond to questions, improving your response rates. 

• Short questionnaires: A long survey can lead to survey fatigue, where respondents get tired of answering questions. This can impact the completeness and validity of your data as respondents may share  incomplete or untrue information to finish the survey faster. 

• Non-leading questions: To make sure your data is reliable, don’t ask leading questions. A leading question suggests there’s a right answer, such as, “Is Pepsi the best soft drink?” 

• Clear questions: Your questions should be clear and readable. GMC says, “Your questions should be clear, succinct and unambiguous. The goal is to eliminate the chance that the question will mean different things to different people. A key standard for a good question is that all the people answering it should understand it in a consistent way and that it should mean to them what the researcher expected it to. Ambiguous words such as ‘usually’ or ‘frequently’ have no specific meaning and need qualifying. You should avoid using them in your questions.” 

• One question at a time: Keep your survey to one question for each section. Overloading your respondents with several questions at once can overwhelm and confuse them. 

With Zappi’s predefined consumer surveys, you can hit each of the survey best practices on our list as we build these best practices into our survey designs. The platform also makes audience analysis easier and less time consuming to create automated reports from your survey findings. 

4. Run interviews 

“A customer interview lets you speak to the people who matter most — the folks who buy your product. It's a great way to uncover your customers' challenges, the solutions they're looking for, and how you fare compared to your competitors.” Clint Fontanella

Qualitative research, such as interviews, is research that supports in-depth exploration of consumer’s inner perceptions, beliefs and emotions. 

They are great choices for helping you uncover more about the behaviors and psychographic features of your customer segments. Qualitative research is designed to help you find the “why” and “how” behind what consumers do.

Interviews are another one of the best forms of qualitative research. While surveys can give you a huge breadth of data on your audience segments — interviews provide depth. With interviews, you can dig more deeply into your audience’s perspectives, motivations, needs, preferences and anxieties. 

To ace your interviews: 

• Create rapport: By putting your interviewee at ease, they’ll feel more comfortable to share their genuine thoughts and feelings with you. Showing warmth with direct eye contact, smiles and light humor can go a long way when it comes to creating rapport.

• Ask open-ended questions: Come with open-ended questions prepared to make sure you’re covering the points you need to. Semi-structured interviews, in which you prepare questions but also allow yourself to ask questions off script, are one of the best kinds of interview approaches. They allow both the interviewer and interviewee to guide the conversation, opening up the topic to new directions so you can get more insight into your prospect’s perceptions and views. 

• Listen well: Use active listening techniques. Give your interviewee your full attention, don’t jump into the conversation before they’ve finished speaking, and watch for non-verbal cues that show you may need to ask more questions on a particular topic. 

5. Collect and analyze secondary data 

Secondary data is data that already exists — rather than data you create yourself. Secondary data can enrich your primary data, it can help you validate the conclusions you’ve come to through your own research and give you new insights into your customer segments. 

There are many places you can go to collect solid secondary data: 

1. Look on social media 

Head to popular social media platforms with your audience segments and find out what they’re talking about. 

Influencer hauls on TikTok, product rants on Reddit or Instagram commenters weighing in on a new product launch, tracking and recording consumers’ unfiltered opinions, is a great way to get a deeper understanding of your audience. 

When it comes to social listening, track brand mentions, competitor mentions and monitor and review conversations on the market more generally. 

2. Analyze customer feedback, reviews and support requests

What have your customers already told you about your brand or product? Speak to your sales and support teams to learn more about the most common feedback they hear from customers. Also take a look at review sites to find out what customers think and feel about your company and product.

3. Pull from current consumer insights data 

Use AI to draw from the consumer insights data that’s already available. You can ask ChatGPT or Gemini to pull from third-party data from academic journals and market research firms on consumers who fit your audience segments. Use this information to validate your results or highlight new areas for research. 

6. Create buyer personas 

Buyer personas typically cover the overarching characteristics of your audience. Think: background, careers, attitudes, pain points and behaviors. 

By bringing together your demographic, psychographic and behavioral data in one place, buyer personas help condense your research data. This makes it easier to use the data you’ve collected for things like product development, ad creation or marketing campaigns. 

Use a tool like Hubspot’s buyer persona generator to quickly create personas to use in your creative briefs and product development discussions. 

7. Centralize and analyze your data 

“The top issue that bothers me is when brands conduct their consumer research on a project basis, testing one ad at a time, instead of taking a more holistic, human view.

When insights processes happen on an ad hoc basis, the consumer sits at the periphery instead of at the center. When brands test ads and don’t even store their data in any platform or system, insights are obtained on a one-off basis. When that data doesn’t get integrated into a broader ecosystem, the focus is only on the point-in-time impact.”

- Nataly Kelly, CMO at Zappi

Use Zappi to simplify and improve your audience analysis by automatically centralizing and analyzing your data. Zappi allows you to take a look at several metrics, customize results using different filters and dig deeper into your results with advanced analytics. 

“Zappi’s agile online platform runs all of your consumer research and securely stores that data right in the platform, getting you insights in less than a day. The platform is also very easy to use, providing charts as your data comes in, relevant themes seen across responses, consumer verbatims, and direct comparisons of key metrics by country, category, brand and other relevant benchmarks.” - Kelsey Sullivan, Content Marketing Manager at Zappi 

You can even use our AI-powered Agents to get instant insights into your audience segments: 

1. Use the Facilitator Agent to ask for information about a particular customer segment 

2. Wait for the Category Insights Agent to analyze your data and provide insights

3. Use the Creative Agent to turn insights into creative or product concepts

To learn more about our AI Marketing Agents tool, request a demo.

Let’s take a look at some of the best use cases of an audience analysis. 

Moving into a new market 

Audience analysis is essential for moving into a new market. You can use audience analysis to spot “gaps” in your customer segments — maybe you’re overlooking a subcategory of unlikely consumers who could be a great match for your product. 

You can also use audience analysis to research and understand a new audience. What worked for one audience may not work for another. Use audience analysis to understand what drives a new audience when it comes to product and creatives. 

Ad Creation 

Audience analysis is the foundation of all great ads. 

From the music to the tone of the ad, you can turn your data into the kinds of creative your audience wants to see. 

Zappi’s Amplify system gives you a by-the-second analysis of your audience’s responses to your creatives and can be used to measure a host of audience reactions including ad engagement, appeal, understanding, relevance as well as emotional reactions and intensity (measured by emojis).

Below, the Zappi team talk about how PepsiCo used Amplify to create Super Bowl ads that resonated with watchers:

“PepsiCo’s teams first develop several alternative animatics to bring their story to life in different ways. Then they research the animatics with consumers using the Zappi Amplify Ad System. 

Robust analytics such as second-by-second emotional response and detailed consumer feedback help the teams to identify which parts of the creative are more powerful so they can dial them up, and which resonate less and might need cutting or changing.” 

Read PepsiCo’s Super Bowl case study in full here.

Product development 

Audience analysis can show you who needs your product, why they need it, and how to develop and advertise your product for this type of consumer. Audience analysis can help you make sure that’s demand for your product. It can also help you avoid skipping over a winning product concept. 

Researchers Ellen van Kleef, Hans C.M. van Trijp, and Pieternel Luning say:

“New product development (NPD) can originate from new technology or new market opportunities. But irrespective of where opportunities originate, when it comes to successful new products it is the consumer who is the ultimate judge.

So, in order to develop successful new products, companies should gain a deep understanding of `the voice of the consumer.' Consumer research can be carried out during each of the basic stages of the NPD process: (1) opportunity identification, (2) development, (3) testing, and (4) launch.”

You can’t create a great ad or successfully launch a new product without knowing who your audience is. From demographics to psychographics, you need a multi-layered understanding of a consumer to market to them effectively.

By combining multiple research approaches and data sources with the right tools, you can get a host of campaign-changing insights into your audience.