5 tips to help you routinely audit your market & audiences
To create a successful marketing or brand strategy, you need to analyse exactly where your capabilities lie, and how they correlate with the outside world. This involves keeping ahead of what’s happening, so that you can identify any upcoming opportunities or threats and ensure that your marketing and content is primed and ready to deal with them.
Keep asking and assessing these questions:
Where are your customers?
What problems are they currently facing?
Do you need to do something different to solve these problems?
What are your competitors doing?
What are your potential customers talking about?
What’s going on politically, and how might this impact your business?
So how do you keep on top of these important questions and weave them into your regular routine? Here are my top tips for easily analysing your environment.
1. Identifying opportunities to join in the conversation
Is there a big campaign happening that means that audiences are talking about something that’s relevant to you?
Watch social media regularly to see what’s being said about your industry and products and ENGAGE with it. Note it down. Make sure that you’re acting on useful information coming straight from your customers.
Make a note of any awareness days coming up that are appropriate and plan your content around them. There’s an abundance of campaign days out there and they are discussed online, on TV, on forums, on billboards and in communities – make sure you are getting involved!
2. Keep watching the news and industry updates
Make sure you are joining any networks or groups for your industry so that you know the latest developments or changes. Follow influential people, or topical experts on social media; set up Google Alerts for search terms for your industry, and actually read them when they throw something up!
Digest blogs, articles and magazines to ensure that you aren’t missing anything, book in an hour a week for reading with a cup of tea and no other distractions. Make notes throughout of what are opportunities, threats or potential content material.
3. Follow your competitors
Keep an eye on your competitors at all times. Follow them on social media. Set up Google and social listening alerts to keep an eye on anything in the media about them. Sign up for their newsletters to see how they communicate with their customers and get the latest information directly from them.
Conduct content analysis audits of their website and compare them to your own – do they provide any information on their site that you don’t? Set up an RSS feed so you are notified when new content is added. Read it analytically, is it useful content for your audiences? If they are doing something well and it’s working for them – learn about it. If they are doing something badly and it’s hindering them – use that as an opportunity.
4. Speak directly to your customers
Run regular polls and surveys with your customers to get their thoughts and views on things – not just product related, but analysing their values and behaviour through two-way communication. I don’t mean a long Google Survey through a newsletter – I mean short snappy, one-question polls on LinkedIn, Instagram stories or Facebook.
Create poll content that is gamified so that customers WANT to take part. Think about competitions in return for a little win they give you more detailed information on a specific topic. Be creative, don’t make it hard work for your customers – but turn everything into an engaging conversation that brings you vital data to help you analyse your audiences.
5. Join webinars and events to get the latest information and talk to others
Yes, events can be good for networking – and some webinars can be off-putting as you suspect you will be targeted with sales pitches for weeks to come afterwards. However, it is a great way of signing up for a specific time to digest information that’s useful.
Reading blogs is great, but online or in-person events mean that you are exposed to specialists and experts that you may not have searched for independently. They may fall slightly out of your industry box, but still, have the knowledge and be talking about an area that will impact you.
Push yourself to learn something new, listen to a panel discussion about a topic you would never normally read about. Make notes about it all and then turn that into an action list after the event to ensure that you are following up with the information you have gained from the day.
Have a look for:
Webinars
Online conferences (or in person)
Twitter chats
Online community groups
Instagram lives
YouTube lives
Wrap up and key points
In a nutshell, it’s important to constantly be reading, learning, developing and watching the media to hear about developments and news that will impact on your business and customers. To stay relevant and successful, you need to keep ahead of the industry – and you won’t do that if you only focus on your own content and customers. Don’t do an annual audit, make it part of your monthly routine.
