Streamline Audience Research With These Templates

It can be difficult, almost impossible, to sell anything without understanding how your target customer thinks and behaves.

As a result, audience research is a critical component required for marketing success. It should be one of the first (if not very first) tasks completed before going live with any sort of marketing effort. However, the complexity and difficulty of audience research can vary widely from business to business.

My hope is that with this post and the shared resources here, I can make it a bit easier. As I dive in deeper below, I’ll discuss:

• How you can conduct research with access to actual customers

• How you can conduct research without access to actual customer

• How you can conduct research without talking to people at all

Speaking With Actual Customers

To start off with, customer research is the easiest and most straightforward when you have access to actual customers that you can talk to. When this is the case, step one is simple; set up interview times with these customers.

From here, I’ve taken care of step two for you. I’ve put together this customer survey template (make a copy to steal it as your own) that is designed to capture insights across three main areas:

• Demographic data

• The customer’s journey to find your brand’s solution

• What the customer’s experience has been like with the product thus far

Granted, this survey is designed more for the B2B space, but many of the questions are broadly applicable to any industry.

If possible, I recommend interviewing customers live if you get the chance. Facial expressions, or tone of voice, can often reveal more than a written response ever could.

In the end, regardless of how you get these questions answered, they’ll provide you with insights into who your customer is, how they found you, and what they like and dislike about your product/service. All of which are incredibly valuable when putting together marketing plans.

Conducting Research Without Access To Customers

However, what if you don’t have the luxury of connecting with actual customers? Many agencies/consultants/etc… might not have the ability to contact their clients’ customers for a variety of reasons, but that doesn’t mean that these insights no longer apply to them.

A good alternative is interviewing members from the sales or customer success teams.

I’ve got a survey template you can steal for those conversations too.

When speaking with the sales team you can learn a lot about how customers found the solution, common objections that they might have, and more. This can all be applied directly to messaging from ad creative, to landing page design, to email campaigns, and more.

If you really want to get a feel for the customer experience, book your own demo or free trial. Ask the sales team to treat you like an actual prospect, and you’ll be able to leverage your first hand experience as a contextual frame for future conversations.

On the other hand, speaking with the customer success team will give you insight into how customers feel after they’ve already gone through the onboarding process. You can identify what features they rave about compared to what types of support requests they ask for the most. These different types of insights will similarly fuel how marketing efforts position the product/service you’re supporting.

Conducting Research Without Talking To People At All

Lastly, I recommend using this final approach regardless of your access to customers, sales, or customer support. It’s quick, easy, and doesn’t require speaking to any actual people at all.

You can lean on everyone’s favorite AI tool; ChatGPT.

In this example conversation, I entered several prompts into ChatGPT as if I was conducting audience research for HubSpot. I encourage you to skim through the conversation, but a summary of the prompts I entered is below:

• How do companies search for, and select a CRM?

• What do potential CRM customers care about the most?

• Summarize all of the positive reviews of HubSpot.

• Summarize all of the negative reviews of HubSpot.

By clicking the conversation link above, you’ll notice that the responses to each of these prompts are quite lengthy. As with any AI tool, these responses should be vetted, but they contain valuable insights similar to what can be found when connecting with customers, sales, and customer services teams.

I hope that some of these resources will provide some value to you, and expedite your audience research process.

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).