Audience research is a vital part of marketing and advertising. By understanding the needs and pain points of the people who interact with your brand, you can improve your messaging, SEO, and most importantly—client acquisition.
What Is Audience Research?
Audience research is how businesses get to know their target customers - their demographics, behaviors, needs, and pain points. It's the key to creating marketing that truly connects with the right people and drives better results.
Conducting audience research requires looking at the size, composition, and defining criteria of your audience.
As a result of your research, you will be able to separate your audiences into groups called segments. These individuals share certain characteristics—for example, their age, interests or how often they use a product.
From there, you can make your marketing campaigns, content, and ads more relatable to your audience.
What Are the Benefits of Audience Research?
Carrying out target audience research provides insights that can help your business achieve its goals faster and more efficiently. That can translate to improved customer acquisition, customer retention, and revenue.
Audience research also helps marketers stay in touch with the people that matter most. Knowing a group of people’s average age, pain points, and preferences will allow marketing teams to see their audience as real people, instead of just an abstract concept.
Most importantly, it allows marketers to connect with audiences more deeply because they understand how they think, behave, and live.
At the same time, audience research can highlight opportunities and obstacles for your brand.
For example, if your competitors are trying to communicate with your desired audience but aren’t succeeding, audience research can reveal why and how you could create content that resonates more successfully.
Your brand can then develop more relevant campaigns for audiences and stay ahead of the competition.
When conducting audience research, most companies opt to create a buyer persona, which describes the ideal customer in terms of their preferred channels, messaging, and motivations.
Buyer personas humanize audience research and ensure that you speak to the right customers in the right way.
How to Research Your Target Audience
Audience research is an ongoing process that can collect both quantitative and qualitative metrics.
Quantitative Research
Quantitative research includes facts, figures and statistics to give an overview of your audience segments.
This data includes users’ demographics (age, location, education, and profession) and users’ behavior (online activity, buying habits).
It can be collected via analytics tools that track where users are based, as well as how they engage with your marketing material and product. Data capture forms are also effective for quantitative information.
Qualitative Research
Qualitative research, on the other hand, gets personal insights from your user base. For example, it might include collecting reviews, analyzing feedback, conducting exit interviews, reviewing survey results, and examining onboarding FAQs.
Additionally, it gathers users' psychographics—such as interests, opinions, and lifestyles—through focus groups, surveys, questionnaires, and feedback forms.
How do you collect this information?
Tools like survey generators, quiz-makers, and in-person meetings can help gather audience data.
In addition, audience research tools can produce qualitative insights, keep audience research up to date, correct, and processed according to your business needs. Such solutions save time and are more accurate than manual audience research.
Audience Research Examples
A variety of tools and resources are available to assist businesses in conducting comprehensive audience research. These methods provide a deeper understanding of your customers, which can guide your marketing strategies.
Customer Interviews
Speaking directly to customers via the phone or in-person is one of the most simple, yet powerful ways to get to know your target audience. Conversations in real time give you a window into customers’ lives, motivations, and purchase obstacles.
It also reveals buying triggers, and can generate unexplored marketing channels or materials for you to orient toward. Plus, you can integrate customers’ own words into your messaging to more strongly resonate with them.
Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis involves monitoring your competitors’ marketing materials and customer engagement. It includes competitors’ social media channels, email campaigns, websites, promotional offers, and customer reviews.
Keeping atop of these areas can show where your competitors aren’t meeting audience needs and present gaps for your brand to fill.
Surveys and Questionnaires
Whether on your website, sent via email or during a phone call, surveys and questionnaires are opportunities to ask your audience certain questions or to rate their experience with your brand. You can also gather more data about audiences with these resources, as well as offer rewards for customers who complete them.
Audience Research Tools
For brands with large audiences, audience analysis tools automatically analyze and visualize data for audience segments.
These tools can additionally support with competitive analysis and go beyond demographic data to show user behaviors and sentiment.
Let’s take a closer look at tools that can aid in audience research and analysis.
Semrush Audience Intelligence App
The Audience Intelligence app from the Semrush App Center creates reports around your audience’s evolving demographics, personality, media affinity, buying mindsets, interests, socioeconomics, and more.
It provides businesses with data insights into various social consumer segments, empowering brands to engage with social audiences in a more meaningful way.
The app has an IBM Watson integration that analyzes the personality characteristics of audiences, focusing on the Big 5 Ocean personality types. As a result, brands can leverage data around individuals’ buying mindsets and online habits.
The app also highlights the most appropriate platforms, channels, and outlets for brands to reach audiences at scale. Data can be viewed by total audience or by audience segment.
Engagement data can be viewed for three types of content: liked, shared, and influential.
Elsewhere, users can compare data points against the national or global average, making it easier to spot trends and tap into them with your marketing materials.
Brands can also source influencers and partners through the app, as well as see how audiences engage with competitors and analyze competitors’ untapped audiences.
With this functionality, you can fully define your target audience and boost your brand engagement and reach.
A free version of Audience Intelligence is available with some limitations. The paid plan costs $150 per month and has nine sections of in-depth data on audiences, plus more report options.
Traffic & Market Toolkit
The Traffic & Market Toolkit helps businesses conduct effective audience research and uncover competitive insights across any website or industry, with coverage in 190 countries.
It includes tools like the Market Overview dashboard, which gives brands a clear snapshot of their market—including total size, leading players, and competitor growth trends.
For content-focused audience research, the Top Pages dashboard reveals which pages drive the most traffic to a competitor’s site, broken down by channel (direct, search, referral, paid, and more). It also highlights Trending Pages, helping you spot what’s gaining or losing traction with their audience.
The Audience Overlap dashboard and Demographics dashboard provide deeper insight into who your competitors are reaching. You can explore shared audience segments across domains and understand characteristics like age, gender, and more—ideal for refining your targeting.
Finally, the EyeOn tool helps you monitor competitor activity automatically, keeping tabs on content updates, campaign launches, and shifting strategies.
The Traffic & Market Toolkit makes real-time, data-backed audience research easier and more actionable than ever.
Ready to understand your audience better?
Try the Semrush Audience Intelligence app and Traffic & Market Toolkit to carry out your own audience research and reap the business rewards.
