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do you really know your audience?




What’s your process for researching your target audience for your events?

 

If only knowing your audience were as easy as reading a couple of tweets on social media. 

 

The reality of demographic analysis is that it requires more than just a passing glance to make your events appealing to your target audience.

 

If you want to understand your target audience, demographic analysis is a good place to start. This will give basic factual data (age, gender, job role etc.).

 

This type of data is easier to collect, will help identify broad market segments and is useful for initial targeting and market sizing.

 

But with so many events (IRL and online) all vying for attention, today’s event organiser must go deeper.

 

We need to understand the psychological factors that drive people's decisions and behaviours, allowing for more personalised and effective communication and marketing of events.

 

We need to understand the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’.

 

Demographics will tell us ‘what’ event someone attended, but to create truly personalised event experiences we need to understand ‘why’ someone attended the event.

 

This is where we need to consider psychographic analysis.

 

First of all, what is psychographic analysis?

 

Psychographic analysis is the study of your target audience based on their psychological traits, including values, interests, attitudes, and lifestyles, to better understand their motivations and behaviours.

 

When done well what does psychographic analysis achieve?

 

  1. Offers deeper insights into customer motivations and values which enables more personalised marketing messages

  2. Improves customer engagement, retention, loyalty and emotional connection

  3. Informs event strategy to better meet customer needs

  4. Enhances brand positioning and differentiation

  5. Allows for more targeted and effective marketing campaigns

  6. Helps identify niche event subject matter 

  7. Enables creation of more detailed and accurate personas

  8. Informs content marketing strategies to resonate with audience values

  9. Helps predict future programme behaviour and event trends based on attitudes and lifestyles

  10. Improves overall attendee experience by aligning with attendee values

 

As the data obtained is more personal, it takes a slightly different approach to collect it. 

 

So how can you start collecting or obtaining data of this nature?

 

  1. Surveys and Questionnaires - create in-depth surveys with questions about values, interests, and preferences

  2. Social Media Analysis - monitor and analyse social media conversations, comments, and posts. Use social media listening tools to gather insights on interests and opinions

  3. Website Analytics - use tools like Google Analytics to track user behaviour and preferences on your website

  4. Focus Groups - organise small group discussions to gather detailed opinions and insights

  5. Customer Feedback - collect and analyse feedback from customer support interactions, reviews, and testimonials

  6. Structured Interviews - conduct one-on-one interviews with attendees

  7. Market Research - conduct broader market research studies to understand audience motivations and preferences

  8. Third-Party Data - utilize psychographic data from third-party providers or data brokers

  9. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems - analyse data from your CRM to understand customer behaviour and preferences

 

These methods can be used individually or in combination to gather comprehensive psychographic data. The choice of method often depends on your specific goals, resources, and target audience of the research.

 

When coupled with demographic analysis, psychographic analysis really helps you to understand your audience and then build event programmes they feel compelled to attend.

 

If there is a subject that you would like us to provide insight on, contact us ideas@tenthousandhours.agency and tell us why it’s important to you (see, a little bit of psychographic research added in at the end there!).

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