Why is it important to consider your audience when planning to write a business report?

You put work into making sure your products are of the highest quality. But if you sell hot dogs and your marketing campaigns only reach vegetarians, it doesn’t matter how amazing the product is. Understanding your audience is a basic prerequisite to finding and maintaining any success as a business, and performing audience analysis is how you achieve that.

What is audience analysis?

Audience analysis is the process of collecting as much information as possible about your audience to better understand who they are and what they care about.

That’s a broad definition of audience analysis, and in practice it can take on a few different forms.

• Social audience analysis uses the extensive data social media platforms have about active users to help brands understand their audience.
• Branded audience analysis is focused on identifying and understanding the audience of a specific brand, whether your own or that of another company in your space.
• Unbranded audience analysis is about understanding an audience with something other than a shared brand in common, such as customers of a general product type or readers of a particular publication.
• Competitor audience analysis is when you identify and analyze data about the audiences of your competitors.
• Demographic audience analysis is categorizing and analyzing an audience based on specific demographic categories, like age, gender, and geographic location.
• Psychographic audience analysis is when you categorize and analyze an audience based on factors like affinity, interests, and values.

Audience research has long been a part of doing business, but today target audience analysis is arguably easier than ever. Brands now have access to a huge amount of audience data via social media platforms. If you can effectively turn all that information into clear insights about who your audience is and what they care about, you can use what you learn to build a more successful all-around business strategy.

Why is audience analysis important?

Audience analysis is important because you can’t effectively communicate with an audience you don’t understand. For businesses, reaching the right people and crafting a message that resonates with them specifically is crucial for achieving any success.

And beyond gaining a basic understanding of who your audience is (and who it isn’t), target audience analysis helps you answer a number of strategic business questions, such as:

• What platforms and channels should we invest in? If you know your audience hangs out on Twitter more than Instagram, you can focus your efforts accordingly.
• What types of topics should our content cover? Social data reveals the types of content your audience is sharing and topics they’re discussing online, which helps you create a content calendar relevant to their interests.
• What kind of factors do our customers consider in choosing a brand? Are they price conscious consumers that often talk about discounts and deals, or quality seekers that talk about their favorite name brands? Social data can help you pick up on their shopping habits.
• What values are most important to our audience? Consumers increasingly factor brand values into their shopping choices. Social audience analysis offers insights into what values matter to them, so you can match your company’s actions and messaging to their priorities.

How to conduct audience analysis

The particulars of how to do audience analysis will vary based on your resources and needs, but a good social audience analysis process will often include the following steps.

1. Select an audience analysis tool

Social media offers a ton of audience data, which is mostly a good thing. But if you try to monitor and analyze it all manually, it quickly becomes overwhelming. An audience research software simplifies the audience analysis process. It makes the work of monitoring audience insights much more efficient, and paves the way to gaining more useful information.

2. Clarify what questions you want to answer

Your audience analysis process will have more focus if you determine what you want to get from it at the outset. Determine the specific goals you have, so you can shape your research based on your needs.

3. Decide what to create your audience based on

Based on the questions you selected in the last step, figure out what common factor to use in creating your audience. If it’s a branded audience, that will mean using your customer list, one of your brand accounts, or that of a competitor. If it’s unbranded, you may want to use a keyword, hashtag, or particular profile attribute like job role.

4. Generate an audience report

If you selected Audiense in step one, a report will be automatically generated once you’ve defined your audience.

Now you can start digging into the data.

5. Use the data to answer your initial question

The report produced will contain a lot of different information. Spend some time with it to see what you learn, but don’t get too distracted from your initial goal. Keep the question you started the process with top of mind, and use the knowledge contained in the report to find the answer. Then repeat the process with any other goals or questions you have.

Uses for audience analysis research

Audience analysis research can be put to use in a number of valuable ways. Here are a few examples.

Understand your current customers better

Social media audience analysis can provide you a lot of information about who your audience is in terms of their geographic location, demographics, interests, and values. All of that helps you develop a business strategy based on who your target customers really are, and what they actually care about.

Identify new audiences

A good audience analysis tool will make it easy for you to identify new audiences. It can do that by identifying profiles that are similar to those of your current followers, and by helping you understand the audiences of your competitors.

Track trends in audience interests

People’s interests and habits change. Spotting trends in what your audience is doing and talking about sooner rather than later can help you stay on top of your industry, and develop a competitive advantage.

Find influencers in your space

Do your target customers tend to follow the same few accounts? Identifying the top influencers in your industry is an important step in kick starting an influencer marketing campaign. And paying attention to what influencers say and do can also help you better understand the kind of topics and content your audience will appreciate.

Identify business opportunities

If a lot of your audience complains about the same problem, that may reveal a product they need that no one else has created yet. Social audience analysis can reveal insights you can turn into product ideas, new features to add to existing products, new channels to consider, or new marketing initiatives to try out.

Create more relevant marketing strategies

Marketing works best when it’s relevant to the audience you’re targeting. Audience analysis ensures you understand how your customers think, what concerns they have, and what their main interests are. You can use that to craft more effective ads, choose more useful topics in your content marketing, and ensure you’re investing in the channels your audience actually spends time on.

Using Audiense for audience analysis

Audience analysis can be a powerful tool for improving business outcomes. But to achieve any of the benefits it can offer, you need the means to do it well.

Audiense Insights makes identifying relevant audiences and understanding who they are fast and easy. And it goes beyond basic demographics to help you grasp what your audience truly cares about, and what communities they’re a part of. All of that adds up to knowledge you can use to more effectively connect with them in the ways that matter most for your brand. Try Audiense Insights for free.

1. Determine the scope of the report

A common fault of many reports is making the scope of a report too general or too vague. When you choose a subject for a report, one of the first steps is to narrow the scope to a report length.

The scope of the report is defined by determining the factors which you will study. You need to limit the amount of information you will gather to the most needed and most important factors.

For example, factors to be studied to determine ways to improve employee morale might include:

Salaries Fringe benefits Work assignments Work hours

Evaluation procedures

You could study many other factors relative to improving employee morale. Some may be important, and you may want to consider them later. For any one report, however, a reasonable scope must be clearly defined by determining what factors will be included.

2. Consider Your Audience

Always consider your reader or readers. Unlike letters and memos, reports usually have a far wider distribution. Many people may be involved in a decision-making process and have need to read the information in the report.

Your job is to make it easy for the reader. In order to make reading your report easier, think in terms of the reader.

Each audience has unique needs. Some audience consideration include:

• Need (from your report)
• Education level
• Position in the organization
• Knowledge of your topic or area
• Responsibility to act
• Age
• Biases
• Preferences
• Attitudes

Some false assumptions commonly made regarding audiences are:

1. That the person who will first read or edit the report is the audience
2. That the audience is a group of specialists in their field
3. That the audience is familiar with the subject of the report
4. That the audience has time to read the entire report
5. That the audience has a strong interest in the subject of the report
6. That the author will always be available to discuss the report

To avoid making these false assumptions, writers should identify everyone who might read the report; characterize those readers according to their professional training, position in the organization, and personal traits; and determine how and when the reader might use the report. Audiences are basically of three kinds:

Additional questions to ask regarding your audience are:

1. How much background will the audience need?
2. Do you need to define any terms you are using?
3. What language level will be most appropriate for your readers?
4. How many and what kind of visual aids should you use?
5. What will the audience expect from your report?
6. Does the reader prefer everything given in detail or merely a brief presentation that touches upon the highlights?

3. Gather Your Information

Now that you have a clear understanding of the purpose and scope of your report and who you are writing to, you're now ready to gather your information.

Information you gather can be of two types: Secondary and Primary. Secondary is information gathered and recorded by others. Primary is information you gather and record yourself.

At this point you should be doing your research. Think WHERE you are going to find your information. If the purpose of your report requires purchase information, you might want to check with vendors and distributors for features and pricing information. For certain types of information you might be checking out the library (books, magazines, journals, or newspapers). Another good source of information is the internet. Conduct a search using key words to find what information that might be useful to you in cyberspace.

As you are gathering your information, create a way to manage your information. Massive information is difficult to sort through if it is not organized. One idea is to place different piece of information on note cards (with the source on that card). By separating pieces of information on cards, the information later can be "rearranged" and sorted when you are determining your plan of presentation.

4. Analyse Your Information

Now that you have information, you need to analyse it.

The purpose of the analysis is to make sense, objectively, out of the information you have gathered. You will not want personal bias of any kind to enter into the analysis.

Information is compared and contrasted in an effort to try to find new ideas or the best ideas. Separate facts and figures need to be interpreted by explaining what they mean--what significance they have.

For example, if you were doing a study to determine which computer to buy for your office, you would collect information on the type of work you are currently doing in your office and the kinds of work you want to do. Then you would gather information on computers. This information might include cost, compatibility, speed of operation, machine capacity, machine dependability, maintenance availability, potential for upgrading, and other factors. Then you would compare and contrast (analyze) the different computers to determine how well they can do what you want done, what their potential is, how dependable they are, and so on. Once all the information is gathered, you are ready to determine solutions.

5. Determine the Solution

Based on your analysis, you will be then be ready to offer a solution (or solutions) to the problem you have been studying.

For example, which computer would be the best buy for the word processing center or what office arrangement would be the best for effective work flow?

A word of caution: The gathered information should be the basis for making this decision. A tendency in business report writing is to "slant" information in the report to lead the reader to the decision the writer want. Make sure you report all pertinent information--good and bad. The credibility of the report (and credibility of you) is at stake.

Make sure, however, that a solution is even requested. Depending on your position in the organization and the particular business study, a solution may NOT be requested in the report. Your purpose would then be to present the objective facts. These facts would be used by someone else to determine the best solution.

6. Organize Your Report

You've got your topic, your information, and your decision. Now you're ready to determine how to present your information.

Before actually writing, organize your information into an outline form. You can formulate an outline for your report by choosing the major and supporting ideas, developing the details, and eliminating the unnecessary ideas you've gathered. This outline becomes the basic "structure" of your report.