Our recent interview with UpViral expert Mitch Aunger was an eye-opener. In his four years of running referral giveaway campaigns, one very important strategy he shared was proper audience research.
That enabled him to collect over 257,000 leads for himself and up to 75,000 more for his clients.
When you are creating a giveaway, the first thing you need to do is understand your target audience. This might sound illogical, but unless you know your audience well, your giveaway won’t be as successful as it should be. We’ll explain in a while.
How do you conduct audience research? We’ve got you covered in this article.
What Is Audience Research?
Audience research is basically analyzing who your target market is. You try to understand everything about them. We’re not just talking about basic things like their age, gender, and location.
But more importantly, your research should go beyond the surface and include things like their interests, problems, beliefs, values, and what they buy and why they buy it. These things should be at the top of your priority list.
Why Is Audience Research Important?
Do you have a clear knowledge of the people you want your giveaway to attract? I know this topic gets thrown around so much that some people take it for granted. But when you truly nail your research, amazing stuff happens.
Here are the advantages of audience research:
1. Helps you figure out the best prize to offer.
Picture this:
Let’s say you're a single parent with a toddler. Your main struggle right now is conquering your toddler’s potty training problems.
Now imagine that a friend who’s a potty training expert knows what it takes to solve that problem. She provides you with a potty training chart and some helpful videos to watch. You feel very grateful towards your friend.
If another person has a similar problem, you would probably recommend your friend, right?
This is a basic example of how a great prize can help a contest host earn a prospect’s trust. It attracts more relevant audiences too through referrals. A great prize doesn’t have to be expensive. But more importantly, it needs to provide value to the audience you’re trying to attract.
2. Attracts high-quality leads
As a business owner, you know that you need to attract quality leads into your funnel. Ensuring lead quality is the first step to acquiring paying customers.
Why else would you run a giveaway for lead generation in the first place?
3. Create messages that resonate with them
During our interview, Mitch told us how understanding your audience can help you in choosing the right words to communicate with them. It enables you to speak their language.
With your written copy or video, you can effectively convey how your offer solves their problem!
How to Do Audience Research
Now, you know three benefits of knowing your audience. This time, we’re going to discover different ways to do it. Let’s get started.
1. Collect data from your current audience.
Do you have some actual customers, website visitors, or followers whom you can research on? Start with these people who already interact with you so you begin filling out your customer persona.
Follow these tips:
Use social listening. Social listening is keeping track of your social media channels to check what people are actually saying. For example, a customer may have left some feedback about your product or video content on your Facebook page.
This helps you figure out what people love or dislike about you, and what you can improve on.
Conduct surveys.
Do a target market survey to get direct feedback from your audience. It’s a simple method to know their opinions. Trulia, an American home and neighborhood site, emailed a survey to its subscribers:
Here’s a useful tip:
Keep your survey short. Craft questions that are easy to answer. It should take no more than a few minutes. To increase the chances of your survey getting answered, provide an incentive.
2. Strive to answer very specific questions.
In order to develop a target audience persona, you need to spend time answering specific questions about your ideal customer. These range from demographic questions to daily life questions to pain point questions.
The following sample audience research questions will help develop your persona:
Demographic Questions:
- Where does my customer live?
- How old are they?
- What is their gender?
- Are they married? Do they have kids?
- What level of education did they complete?
Daily Life Questions:
- What does their typical day look like?
- Where do they often hang out online?
- What do they like to do for fun?
- What are their day to day challenges?
Pain Point Questions:
- What’s the biggest obstacle that’s holding them back from reaching their goals?
- What strategies are they currently using to solve their problem? Are they working?
- Where do they go to look for a solution?
3. Check your competitors.
For this strategy, you’re going to check your competition. (These are businesses that share the same target audience as you.)
Your competitors can be a good resource for learning what resonates with your audience! Based on the content they’re putting out or the product they’re offering, you could tell what works and what doesn’t.
Observe closely how their audience reacts to their posts.
Which ones are people interacting with more often? Are they happy? Do their comments reflect a specific want or need that you can meet? What kind of questions are they asking?
4. Test it out and refine your campaigns.
I listened to Copyblogger’s recent podcast episode which was about creating content that resonates. One of the things mentioned that I agree with 100% was this:
“Experimenting is important. You don’t really know unless you put it out.”
The only way to test your ideas for your giveaway campaign is to test them. Put together a giveaway, launch it, and see how well it performs!
Did that video on your giveaway landing page help convince them to sign-up? Was your copy clear? Does offering multiple prizes work better than one huge prize?
If you haven’t tried it yet, we suggest running split tests. By split testing, you can compare different versions of your landing page or share page. This allows you to identify the version that has the most conversions.
UpViral makes it easy for users to create split tests, as you can see below:
All you need to do is click the “Split-test” button. We also have a dedicated section where users can check the results of their split test. They will be able to compare the number of total visitors, leads, and conversion rate among the campaigns.
Audience Research Tools You Should Know About
Eager to get started? Below, you will find 5 free tools to learn more about the audience you already have or want to attract.
1. Facebook Page Insights
Do you already have a following on your Facebook business page? Inside Facebook, you can access demographic data about your audience. From your Facebook page, click Insights on the top menu.
Click People on the left side of the page. It will give you the gender, location, and language of your:
- Fans
- Followers
- People you’ve reached
- Those you’ve engaged with
2. Google Analytics
Known as “GA,” Google Analytics is a tool that enables you to monitor your website visits each month. It shows detailed reports about your visitors’ age, gender, interests, their engagement with your content, and more.
3. Answer the Public
Answer the Public is an amazing tool that reveals actual questions people ask around a certain topic. In the example below, I typed the topic “giveaway.” The tool showed me questions like “What to giveaway on Twitch?”“Why is my giveaway not working?” Are giveaways legal?”
4. Google Trends
Google Trends reveals topics that are trending on Google. You can use it to find out what your audience is looking for online. It’s especially useful if your business offers a product or service that is affected by seasonality.
5. Survey Monkey
Use Survey Monkey to create survey questions that will help you fine-tune your giveaway marketing. Survey Monkey allows you to create different types of questions, from multiple choice to open-ended questions.
Over to You
It’s easy for a giveaway campaign to lose focus without a well-defined audience. Who do you want to attract? Are they people who are likely to become your customers in the future?
Once you nail your audience, only then will you be able to pick a good prize, craft the right copy, and refine the rest of the aspects of your giveaway to get the best results.
We hope this blog post helps! Are you going to do audience research for your next giveaway? Feel free to comment your thoughts below.
If you’re still in the process of deciding which tool to use for a giveaway or referral campaign, we invite you to check out UpViral. Start growing your audience today more rapidly!
