But knowing your audience goes beyond recognizing the faces in your classes or the names on your client list. It’s about understanding their needs, preferences, and motivations on a deeper level. Audience research is the key to unlocking these valuable insights about your current and potential customers.
In this beginner’s guide, we’ll answer the question “What is audience research?” and walk you through the purpose of audience research, various audience research methods, practical tools to use, and how to apply your findings to grow your wellness business.
By the end, you’ll have the knowledge and strategies to conduct effective audience research and tailor your business strategy and marketing efforts to truly resonate with your ideal clients.
Table of Contents:
What’s the Purpose of Audience Research?
First, let’s define audience. Your audience is EVERYONE likely to be interested in what you have to offer — that means both current and future clients. When you send out a message, these people will be most receptive. But finding and connecting with your audience takes a bit of work. This is where audience research comes in handy.
Audience research, also known as audience analysis, is a kind of fact-finding mission. It’s the process of gathering and analyzing information about your audience to understand them better. This typically includes identifying their needs, interests, preferences, behaviors, and other relevant characteristics.
Audience research goes beyond simply knowing who your audience is; it allows you to understand who they are and what motivates them. This knowledge empowers you to make informed decisions that align your business more closely with your audience’s expectations and preferences.
For wellness businesses, audience research is essential to building an effective business strategy and supporting client-centered decision-making. By truly understanding your audience, you can laser-focus your marketing strategies, optimize your online presence, custom-tailor your offerings, define your niche, and, ultimately, grow your client base with more qualified leads.
In short, audience research helps you:
- Identify and define your target market more accurately
- Understand your audience’s pain points and motivations
- Tailor your messaging and communication strategies to resonate with your audience
- Adjust service offerings to meet audience needs
How Wellness Businesses Benefit from Audience Research
There’s a lot to gain from rolling up your sleeves and conducting some thorough audience research. The deeper your understanding of your target market, the more power you have to ensure your approach and offerings are compelling and authentic.
Consciously or subconsciously, your audience will recognize your efforts and be drawn to your business over others who take a less understanding approach.
This is especially true in the health and wellness space. A base level of understanding is often expected by clients when seeking services in self-care, healing, health, and wellness — and when they find it, the appeal is strong. When you use audience research to guide business strategy, you cultivate long-term success by:
- Developing targeted wellness services that address specific audience needs and preferences
- Improving client retention by better understanding and addressing evolving needs and expectations
- Creating more engaging and relevant content for blogs, social media, and marketing materials
- Identifying new market opportunities and potential areas for specialization, partnerships, or expansion
Types of Audience Research
There are various types of research methods to try out as you embark on your audience research journey. Like any tool, each type of audience research method serves a unique purpose. And, like any tool, it’s worth getting to know how each works and what it’s best for before going all-in on any one approach.
You’ll find that the best approach for your wellness business depends heavily on your specific goals and resources. With that said, you may not need to perform every type of research. Instead, learn the basics, then focus on the methods that align best with your business strategy and will deliver you the information you need.
Qualitative vs Quantitative Research
There are two main categories of research: qualitative and quantitative. Each approach offers distinct advantages and is suited for different purposes in understanding your audience. While both follow structured approaches to gathering and analyzing data, it’s important to understand their unique differences, particularly regarding the types of data they collect:
Quantitative Research (Hard Data)
- All about numerical data and statistics
- Best for measuring specific aspects of your audience, like demographics or behavior patterns
- Allows you to draw conclusive, data-driven insights
Qualitative Research (Soft Data)
- Ideal for exploring the “why” behind people’s behaviors and preferences
- Focuses on gathering in-depth insights into your audience’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations
- Uncovers nuanced information about your audience’s experiences and perceptions
Interviews, Focus Groups, Surveys
When you want audience insights in your audience’s own words, then interviews, focus groups, and surveys are the audience research approaches you’re looking for. Each is a powerful tool for gathering feedback and insights directly from your audience, and each takes a unique angle to information-gathering:
- Interviews are usually one-on-one, making them a little more intimate, but the process provides in-depth and personal insights
- Focus groups, which gather together several individuals for facilitated discussion, offer group dynamics and diverse perspectives
- Surveys have the broadest reach and tend to be the least personal of the options, but they allow you to easily and efficiently collect data from a large group of people
Regardless of which method you pursue, be sure to always:
- Craft clear, unbiased questions that encourage honest responses
- Create a comfortable, non-judgmental environment for participants
- Use a mix of open-ended (qualitative) and closed-ended (quantitative) questions
Demographic and Behavioral Research
When you want to get a general picture of your audience, such as when you’re developing marketing personas or when you want to drill down into their decision-making process, you’ll need demographic and behavioral data. These modes of research help you understand who your audience is and how they behave, further giving you valuable insights for aligning your offerings and tailoring your marketing strategy.
- Demographic Research involves collecting data about quantitative characteristics such as age, gender, income, education, and location. This approach helps you create a basic profile, or persona, of your ideal customer(s) and gain a general understanding of the composition of your audience.
- Behavioral Research focuses on understanding how your audience acts and interacts with your brand or similar wellness businesses and services. Both quantitative and qualitative, it can include studying purchasing habits, preferred communication channels, and engagement patterns with your content or services.
How to Do Audience Research
So many options can be overwhelming at first. That’s okay. There’s a good chance you’ve experienced it from the audience side already: perhaps you’ve participated in a customer survey, agreed to share information through a website or app, or left a review online.
All of this is audience-produced data for use in audience research. That’s great! You’ve already got some experience in the field and are familiar with some of the basic audience research methods. You’re well on your way to using these powerful tools for yourself.
Questionnaires and Surveys
From the U.S. Census to a satisfaction survey from your corner cafe, questionnaires and surveys are powerful data collection tools used by all kinds of people and businesses. And for good reason. Tremendously flexible and straightforward, they allow you to gather both qualitative and quantitative data quickly and efficiently. And if you have an email list in place, conducting this form of research directly with your clients is a breeze.
Tips for developing effective questionnaires and surveys:
- Define your research goals for yourself, i.e., What do you want to learn and why?
- Keep questions clear, concise, and relevant to your research goals
- Use a mix of question types, including multiple choice, rating scales, fill-in-the-blank, and open-ended questions
- Test your survey with a small group before launching it to a larger audience
- Avoid asking too many questions or covering too much ground
Recommended Tools
- Google Forms: user-friendly; good for creating simple surveys
- SurveyMonkey: templates, advanced features, and analysis tools
- Typeform: visually appealing, interactive survey designs
Social Listening and Analytics
Social listening may sound like it involves spying, but it doesn’t! In reality, it means monitoring social media platforms to understand how people talk about your brand, industry, or competitors.
Social listening is totally cost-free at its most basic. All it requires is for you to explore the social media spaces your audience is already frequenting, pay attention, take notes, and adjust accordingly. It’s an excellent way to gather real-time insights about your audience’s preferences and pain points.
Social analytics, a subcategory of web analytics, takes social listening a step further by providing quantitative data and metrics about your social media performance and audience engagement. This approach involves using tools and platforms to collect, measure, and analyze data from your social media channels. With social analytics, you can track metrics such as:
- Engagement Rate: measures how your audience interacts with your content; helps you understand what resonates with them
- Sentiment Analysis: gauges the overall tone of comments and mentions; provides insights into how your audience perceives your brand or offerings
- Share of Voice: compares your brand’s visibility to competitors; helps you understand your market position
Metrics like these allow you to make data-driven decisions about your content strategy, posting times, and audience targeting. By combining analytics with social listening, you can understand what your audience is saying and how they interact with your brand and content across various social platforms.
Recommended Tools
- Hootsuite: comprehensive social media management and listening features
- Sprout Social: in-depth social analytics and listening capabilities
- Mention: real-time social media and web monitoring
Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis is exactly what it sounds like — researching your competitors to analyze their strengths, weaknesses, and strategies. Yes, now is the time to embrace the competitive spirit.
If you don’t like all the baggage that “competition” brings, you can think of it as understanding your fellow practitioners and carving out your unique niche. However you approach it, this approach can provide valuable insights into local and national industry trends, audience preferences, and opportunities to differentiate your wellness business.
To conduct a basic competitive analysis, follow these six simple steps:
- Step 1 – Identify your competitors: Who offers services similar to yours? Who pops up when you search your industry or business online? What other wellness businesses do your followers follow?
- Step 2 – Analyze their online presence and marketing strategies: What does it feel like to spend time in their online ecosystem (website, socials, etc)? What images and messages are the strongest?
- Step 3 – Evaluate their products or services: What are they offering? What is the quality? How is it similar to your offerings or business? How is it different?
- Step 4 – Assess their audience engagement and reviews: Where and how are people talking about them? What is the average rating or review? What gets said most often?
- Step 5—Identify gaps in the market: Which spaces are crowded? Where are the spaces you can fill? What unique niches present opportunities?
Recommended Tools
Using Audience Research to Grow Your Wellness Business
Just as you and your business grow and change, so does your audience — often at a much faster rate. Regularly conducting audience research and incorporating your findings into your business strategy is crucial to business growth and staying competitive, relevant, and successful.
For example, understanding your audience’s demographic information can help you make informed decisions about various aspects of your business. Knowing your target audience’s age range, income levels, and lifestyle habits can help you determine the most appealing pricing strategies, choose the most impactful marketing channels, and even influence the presentation of your offerings.
As you work with audience research, try to focus your approach on serving your clients. When you truly understand your audience’s pain points, motivations, and preferences, you can create services that more fully meet their needs and speak to them in messages that resonate more deeply and authentically. This alignment between what you offer and what your audience needs inevitably leads to higher satisfaction rates, improved customer loyalty, and, ultimately, business growth.
Tips for implementing audience research findings:
- Tailor your messaging and branding to speak directly to your target audience’s values, aspirations, and pain points
- Create accurate, robust customer personas for your current, ideal, and target customers
- Develop new offerings, memberships, or scheduling options that address specific needs uncovered through your research
- Focus your marketing strategies on the channels and methods that best reach and engage your audience
Develop Branding and Messaging That Truly Resonates with Your Audience
Challenges and Best Practices in Audience Research
As with any new endeavor, no matter how simple or challenging, there’s a good chance you may encounter various challenges that will impact the effectiveness of your efforts. Stick with it. Learning how to reach your target audience takes practice — and constant awareness. By staying aware of potential obstacles and implementing best practices to navigate them, you’ll be on track to turning your insights into sustained growth.
While there’s no accounting for every challenge you might encounter, there are some common ones you should definitely be aware of from the outset. In the following section, we’ll introduce you to some of these challenges, strategies to overcome them, and best practices to ensure your audience research is impactful.
Common Challenges Faced During Audience Research
- Challenge: Low response rates or participation
- Solution: Offer incentives for participation and clearly communicate the value of their input
- Challenge: Collecting biased, skewed, or inaccurate data
- Solution: Use more neutral language in surveys, diversify your research methods, and cross-verify information from multiple sources
- Challenge: Difficulty in reaching your target audience
- Solution: Leverage multiple channels (social media, email, in-person events); partner with complementary businesses to expand your reach
Best Practices to Nail Your Audience Research
No matter where you are in your audience research journey, consider implementing these best practices to ensure your efforts are effective and yield actionable insights:
- Stay current with your audience research and in-step with changing trends and preferences
- Explore and combine multiple research methods for a more comprehensive view of your audience
- Involve colleagues in the research process to gain diverse perspectives and insights on your methods and findings
- Activate your insights by letting them guide changes in your business strategy and offerings
- Maintain open communication channels with your audience
By following these best practices, you’ll be better equipped to conduct thorough and insightful audience research that can drive meaningful growth for your wellness business.
OfferingTree’s Built-In Marketing Suite Gives You the Tools to Attract, Convert, and Retain Clients
Audience research is a powerful tool that allows wellness businesses to truly understand their clients, both current and potential. Stay committed to understanding and serving your audience, and you’ll find that your wellness business not only thrives but also stands out in a competitive market.
At OfferingTree, our software includes a client management system, which means your client data is automatically recorded and organized so you can better understand your clients and refine your audience research. Try OfferingTree free for 7 days or watch a demo to see how our software can help streamline your business and give you time back for what you love.
