Ask These Questions To Understand Your Audience

Sometimes you can get so carried away in your own department within a digital marketing agency, that you can lose focus of some of the most basic but most important marketing principles. The content team could be concentrating on perfect grammar, and how many words they are writing, the SEO team are beavering away adding schema and fixing broken xml site maps. The web team are heads down in code to make site speed improvements and bug testing, whilst the PPC & paid social team are grafting to get the absolute best ROAS they possibly can.

Sometimes it can be so easy to get caught up in everyday tasks that one can forget about one of the, if not the most, important things across every marketing channel. Your audience. There is no point having perfect grammar in a piece of content if it doesn’t hit home to the pain points of your potential customers. If your meta description doesn’t speak to your audiences wants & desires, your poor CTR won’t keep you in position 1 for long. Your website could load in a flash but if the imagery doesn’t resonate with your audience, they will bounce right back to the SERP to find a site that does.

Understanding your audience, what makes them tick, what they are frustrated about, what problems they have, where they hang out online, what products they buy, what ethics they hold dear…. getting to truly understand these things about them allows your company to position yourself as the saviour to their problems, the antidote to the other companies who don’t understand them.

I’ve been collating a list of the questions we need to ask our clients to truly get to understand their company, their products or services and their audience. And, you lucky devil, I’m now going to share that list of questions with you. It’s forever evolving, so do share if you’ve got any additions.

Whether you work as a Marketing Director or at an agency like ours, this list should help you form the basis of your audience personas and your marketing strategy.

B2B 

• What industries / sectors do they target and why? 
• Are there future industries / sectors they could target and why? 
• What makes a company suitable for their products?
• What size of business needs the product / how many employees or revenue? 
• What job title would be excited by product?
• Who would be the implementer of the product?
• What job title would be the purchaser of the product/ gives sign off? 
• Short buying cycle or long? 

B2C 

• Who buys the products/ services now?
• Who could buy the products and services – who are they suitable for? 
• Gender
• Age 
• Location 
• Income / Job / Home Owners etc 
• Is the product a low cost / mid range / high cost product? 
• What do their reviews mention about the product? Why do they like it?
• What do they care about? Is it cost, ethics, quality, quantity?
• Where do they hang out online?
• Are any influencers popular with your audience?

Location 

• Where are their customers currently located? 
• Where could they be located if they were to expand? E.g can you deliver to US/ Europe, just locally?

Unique Selling Points 

• Gather a list of unique selling points for each service / product / company as a whole and who they are relevant for 
• Pain points for customers – What pains or problems do they have that the product or service solves?
• What are the specific things that the company can solve for people or companies in general? 
• Are there any specific problems they solve for certain people/ specific roles or industries? 

Data 

• Do you have any existing customer data? 
• Is the data segmented and how is it segmented?
• How much data do we have and how is it being used currently – can we use it better? 
• How was the data collected and is it GDPR compliant? 

Services & Products 

• Which services and products do you make the most return on? 
• Which is easiest to explain? 
• Which has performed best so far? 
• Which has performed worst – and why? 

Previous Marketing Campaigns + Agencies 

• What marketing channels are working and which ones aren’t?
• Has anything worked well with previous agencies / internal marketing campaigns in the past? 
• What didn’t work and why? 

Competitors

• What USP’s are your competitors promoting about themselves?
• Do you share those USP’s and can you ‘beat’ them?
• What do your competitors’ customers say about them in reviews? Good and bad?
• What images do your competitors use?
• What do their paid ads say and show?

I’m sure that there are more questions to add… I’d love to hear yours!