Audience Research: The Complete Guide for Marketers in 2025

We launched SparkToro four years ago with the firm belief that audience research — and the knowledge that the tech giants gather about us — should be accessible to all. In the pre-Musk era of Twitter, when the API was free and available to all developers, we offered a suite of free tools that marketers got a ton of value from. But as Twitter-now-X behavior changed along with API features and pricing, we had to shift to other data providers (shoutout to Datos and MarketMuse!), sunset all our free tools, and relaunch our audience research tool in 2024.

SparkToro now uses search and clickstream data in addition to social data. We’re able to show you popular keywords in your audience, suggest new topics for content creation, and we can even show you the most-used and lesser-used social networks, apps, AI tools, and search apps. Audience research has changed a lot over the recent years, but we’re very aware it’s still not a household name. (Er, by “household” we mean “conference room” but nobody would know what I’m talking about.)

We aim to change that.

In this long overdue guide, I’ll walk you through audience research. What it is, why it’s critical, the difference between audience research and market research, the current state of audience research (including 5 big myths), the different ways to do audience research (there are 12!), and how to future proof your tactics.

What is Audience Research?

Audience research is the process of gathering and analyzing information about the people you want to reach with your marketing. It’s understanding your target audience’s motivations, pain points, and behaviors. Everything you learn will inform your marketing strategies, messaging, and campaigns. Done well, your efforts will resonate with your audience.

Audience research is the heart of every successful marketing strategy. Without it, creating content, campaigns, or products becomes an exercise in guesswork. It’s the process of stepping into your audience’s shoes, learning what drives them, and uncovering the language they use to describe their experiences.

Audience research allows you to stop shouting into the void and start having meaningful conversations. It shifts your focus from what you want to say to what your audience wants and needs to hear.

Why Do We Need Audience Research?

You probably know something isn’t working with traditional audience research or your customer research. Maybe you’ve noticed your survey responses don’t match actual user behavior. Or perhaps you’re wondering why your content resonates with peers but not potential customers. You’re not alone, and more importantly — you’re not wrong.

The way people discover and engage with content has fundamentally changed. Google answers two-thirds of searches without a click. Social platforms prioritize native content over links. And your audience? They’re probably making decisions about your brand long before they ever reach your website.

This audience research guide is for marketers who need to understand their audience in this new landscape. Not just who they are, but how they actually behave — not how they say they behave.

Audience Research Vs. Market Research: Focus, Data, and Use Cases

Some upfront clarification: audience research is not market research.

Audience research is people-centric, market research is landscape-centric. Think: micro vs. macro. Through audience research, you get to know your target audience on a micro level. You learn your audience’s needs, preferences, behaviors, and the language they use to describe their problems. Through market research, you learn about your target market on a macroeconomic level. You learn about industry trends, competitors, and the viability of products or services.

For audience research, the data sources tend to be the audiences themselves. Customer or audience interviews, surveys, focus groups, and social media listening are key. Your CRM and customer support logs should come in handy too.

For market research, you’re likely combing through industry reports, competitor benchmarking, field studies, economic data, and trade publications.

And it’s not about one vs. the other. They have different use cases. Market research is more useful in the early strategic decision-making, like entering new markets, launching new products, or changing your pricing. Audience research will help you create resonant content, improve marketing campaigns, and fine-tune your messaging. Market research will help you decide to launch a product in a new market, and audience research will help you design the campaign launch. You start with market research which serves as your map, and you continue with audience research; it’s your compass that keeps you headed in the right direction.

The Current State of Audience Research

We’re not doing enough audience research. In the 2024 State of (Dis)Content report, The Content Studio surveyed over 500 marketers and found that over 41% admit to not doing audience research “nearly enough” while 19% conduct this research monthly. What’s more, there’s a correlation between career satisfaction and audience research: people who rarely do audience research are NOT satisfied in their careers.

In other words, “Audience research gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy marketers just don’t hate their careers. They just don’t.” — Elle Woods, 2001.

And, perhaps because there isn’t an agreed-upon universal roadmap to audience research, we tend to make a bunch of assumptions about our audience. Here are those five big assumptions or myths:

The Five Big Myths in Audience Research

1. “Our survey data tells us everything we need to know.” Reality: People are terrible at accurately reporting their own behavior. They’ll tell you they read The Wall Street Journal when they actually read Morning Brew.
2. “We know our audience because we know our customers.” Reality: Your current customers represent a tiny fraction of your potential audience. You’re missing everyone who hasn’t found you yet, and you’re missing the people who influence your customers. This includes relevant creators, journalists, analysts, VCs, and more.
3. “Traffic sources tell us where to focus.” Reality: Where people find you isn’t necessarily where they spend their time or make decisions. Google might drive most of your traffic, but the decision to search often happens elsewhere. Of the ~40% searches that do end with a click, almost half of them are that click is typically a branded or navigational search, meaning they already knew what they wanted and were just trying to get to their desired website. And forget giving the credit to your referral data. In our Dark Social study, we uncovered that social networks are frequently hiding referral strings. 100% of all visits from TikTok, Slack, Discord, Mastodon, and WhatsApp were marked as “direct,” and contained no other referral information. 75% of visits from Facebook Messenger contain no referral information. Instagram DMs as well as public LinkedIn and Pinterest posts also missed substantial portions of referral data (30%, 14%, and 12% respectively).
4. “Interviews and focus groups give us everything we need.” Reality: Those techniques are fine for getting opinions and preferences, but terrible for uncovering statistically significant demographic, behavioral, or source of influence data. People cannot reasonably remember, nor do they accurately reflect this information, and unless you’re able to interview thousands of randomly selected people that perfectly represent the audience breakdown, you’re gonna get biased information.
5. “We only need to do audience research once — before we launch.” Reality: 🙄 Audiences change! Behaviors and preferences change! Sure, they might not change every week. But at least once a year (ideally a handful of times per year), you should be researching your audience’s demographics, behaviors, and sources of influence.

How to Do Effective Audience Research (12 Different Ways!)

To do effective audience research, you need to gather qualitative and quantitative insights into your target audience’s behaviors, preferences, and pain points. Here are some key methods — and ideally, you’ll do at least a few of these, and combine your insights:

1. Social Listening and Online Monitoring

• Use tools like Google Alerts, Talkwalker, Mention, Brandwatch, Sprout Social, or Meltwater to track conversations about your brand, competitors, and industry trends.
• Monitor social networks to see what your followers and your competitors or similar brands’ followers are discussing. 
• Pros: Easily scalable and there are already a lot of well-known tools to help you do this.
• Cons: You/your brand need to have at least some traction in order for alerts to, er, well… alert you.

2. Social Media Discovery

• Use LinkedIn Saved Searches, create “finsta” Instagram accounts, and create lists on Twitter/X and Bluesky to curate feeds that represent your audience.
  • To create your LinkedIn Saved Search, start by entering a name into your search bar to get to an initial search results page where you can access the filters. (See image below.)
  • Filter by Post, Latest, Past Week (or 24 Hours, whatever you want), and then enter and select the LinkedIn accounts you want to keep up with.
  • I learned this pro tip from our friend, growth marketer Chantelle Marcelle but I can’t find her original post detailing this. Giving credit where it’s due!
• Study hashtags and keywords. Analyze popular content formats, and monitor content engagement patterns.
• Pros: This can be easily done no matter how early or how far along you/your brand are. It’s also free (i.e. the cost is your time and effort).
• Cons: You already need to have a sense of who your audience is and the social networks they use. If you’re starting from scratch, you might not know which social accounts to monitor.

3. Competitor Analysis

• Identify your competitors, analyze their digital presences, analyze their customer sentiment, and then compare. Your competitors will likely fall into these categories:
  • Direct competitors: Those who offer a similar product or service as you.
  • Audience competitors: Those who share the same audience as you but might not be in direct competition with you. You also (likely) share similar customers. (Think: Mid-market webinar platform and CRM; or eco-friendly hair product and makeup.)
  • Aspirational competitors: Those you aspire to be. Many of us still want to be like HubSpot one day.
• To understand their digital presences, consider auditing their website and SEO strategy; social media presence and engagement; advertising and paid strategy; product and pricing; and customer sentiment.
• Use SEMrush, Ahrefs, Similarweb, or BuzzSumo to analyze competitors’ website traffic, keyword strategies, and top-performing content.
• Understand customer sentiment through reviews on G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot.
• Track which publications cover them.
• Pros: You will learn a ton. And everything you learn will inform every aspect of your marketing strategy.
  Cons: It’s a lot to learn. You will need a very clear criteria for your ideal customer so you can ensure you identify the correct competitors.

4. Community and Focus Groups

• Lurk in forums like Subreddits where your audience is likely to congregate over topics most relevant to your brand. Participate if you feel compelled, but make sure you’re not being self-promotional or you’ll get downvoted or worse, banned.
• Host a private Slack group, Facebook group, or LinkedIn community to engage your audience in discussions.
• Conduct virtual or in-person focus groups or run ads on Meta/Google/YouTube to test messaging, branding, or product positioning. Focus groups can be useful for hearing how your audience discusses a topic or pain point, which can then inform your messaging or positioning. Digital ads, however, will give you immediate feedback on what type of ad/creative/copy is most effective.
• Pros: Especially in public or semi-public forums, you’re likely to find candid discussions.
  Cons: Hosting a private community is very labor intensive and takes a long time to build. Focus groups require specific expertise to run, so you may need to invest in training your team or hiring a consultant.

5. Surveys and Polls

• Use Google Forms, Typeform, SurveyMonkey, or Qualtrics (especially for enterprise) to create short surveys for your audience. Consider asking your customers first, or put some spend behind marketing this survey to ensure you get a decent sample size. A good sample size will vary across industry and goals, but as a baseline, at least 100 respondents is usually a good start.
• Conduct in-platform polls on LinkedIn, Instagram Stories, or Twitter/X to gauge opinions quickly. This might be more effective for gauging content topics or either/or questions that are easy for people to answer on the fly.
• Incentivize participation with discounts, free content, or giveaways.
• Pros: When you effectively reach your target audience, this can be a great way to learn about them at scale.
• Cons: Susceptible to bias. There’s a difference between what people say they do and what they actually do. They might misunderstand a question or two, or in the case of multiple choice, their true answer might not be represented.

6. Customer and Prospect Interviews

• Interview current customers to understand their pain points, motivations, and decision-making process. Ideally, you’ll include Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) questions.
• Conduct user research calls with prospects who match your ideal customer profile.
• Ask open-ended questions about their biggest challenges, preferred content, and buying triggers.
• And finally, this pro tip from our friend Asia Orangio, Founder of DemandMaven: “You can conduct interviews with audience members using sites like Respondent.io and UserInterviews.com. It’s one of the fastest, easiest, and most cost-effective ways to get qualified audiences to talk to you. You just have to be savvy with the screener surveys to ensure you’re getting the right-fit people. We’ve conducted hundreds of interviews from both of these platforms and you can literally source just about anyone — from doctors to CMOs to PhD students to construction workers. They have everyone.”
• Pros: You get to hear directly from your customers! Not only is this great for relationship-building, but you get the opportunity to learn how they describe their problems, and you get to hear their tone.
• Cons: Again, the bias problem and disconnect between what people say they do and what they actually do.

7. Search Intent Analysis

• Gather keywords to analyze; categorize keywords by intent (Google’s classifications are informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional); and analyze SERP features to confirm user intent. Here’s a little more insight into Google’s search intent classifications:
  • Information: user is looking for knowledge
  • Navigational: user is looking for a specific brand or website
  • Commercial: users is interested in a product or service
  • Transactional: user is ready to buy
• Use tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, or SEMrush
• Study autocomplete suggestions, analyze “People Also Ask” sections, and review related searches.
• Use the findings to inform your content creation. Match your content to user intent and structure your content based on Google’s preferred format.
• Track all this information in a spreadsheet to learn trends over time.
• Pros: There are tools that are easily available. Plus, there’s a good chance you’re already using Google Search Console, so might not have to worry about adding a new tool to the mix.
• Cons: Search intent can be ambiguous. A user might be searching for “best customer listening tool” but what they’re actually looking for is a ticketing system to organize requests. It also doesn’t capture the full buyer journey. This likely only helps a classic content team.

8. Website and Content Data Analysis

• Understand how your content is performing and how users are navigating your website.
• Use Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Cloudflare Web Analytics, Domain Overview, Hotjar, Zipy, Site Audit, or more to track site user behavior, such as time on page, bounce rates, and conversions.
• Identify high-performing blog posts and content topics to see what resonates.
• Use Hotjar or Crazy Egg for heatmaps and session recordings to understand user engagement.
• Pros: You’ll likely identify some UX and SEO fixes to improve aspects of the user experience. You might also get inspiration for creating new content, and ideas for pruning old or unhelpful content.
• Cons: There could be too many metrics to track, and you’ll get lost in the data. For instance, Google Search Console and heatmaps might show conflicting insights, making it unclear what to prioritize.

9. Cross-Platform Tracking

• Use tools like Amplitude, Segment, Mixpanel, Heap, Woopra, Adobe Analytics, Matomo, Click, or more to follow audience movement between platforms
• Study content sharing patterns, track how information flows, and monitor multi-channel engagement.
• Get a more holistic view of your customer journey.
• Pros: The learnings can benefit the whole marketing team. Getting the full overview can give the content team ideas, and can help performance marketers better understand how to allocate spend.
• Cons: Can be difficult and expensive to set up and to train team members. (I once worked at a company where we spent months putting the data together and onboarding the team with the platform.)

10. First-Party Data

• Leverage the data your company has collected directly from your audience, whether customers, site visitors, or social media followers.
• Use tools like your customer relationship management (CRM) such as HubSpot or Salesforce to segment your audience by demographics, behaviors, and purchase history.
• Use email marketing data (open rates, click-through rates, and which subscribers engage most/east with your emails) to gauge interest in specific topics.
• Analyze chat transcripts from customer support and sales calls to identify common pain points.
• Pros: You’ll be using the data and tools you already have. You’ll also get a deep sense of your current benchmarks.
  Cons: While this gives you a great sense of your audience right now, you might not gain a ton of insight into what to do next. And if you’re an emerging brand, you won’t have much data to dig into. 

11. Third-Party Research

• Lean on extensive research from reputable think tanks and research companies like Pew Research, Nielsen, CB Insights, eMarketer, and others.
• Learn about public opinion and cultural shifts, as well as how people consume news and information.
• Get data on consumer behavior and demographics, even if they are likely to be broader than your target audience.
• Pros: Credibility. Citing these sources tend to be effective when you’re presenting to your executive team and when you use them in audience-facing content, like your blog posts.
  Cons: These firms describe people at scale, so you’re unlikely to uncover niche insights for your audience specifically.

12. AI and Predictive Analytics

• Finally, we would be remiss in not mentioning AI-powered insights.
• Consider using tools like People.ai or Gong to analyze sales or customer interactions and buyer intent. You’ll even get guidance on next steps.
• Leverage predictive analytics in marketing automation platforms (Marketo, HubSpot) to forecast trends in audience behavior.
• Pros: Speed. These tools will analyze data faster than you can, and the insights gained may be immediately actionable. They may also reduce human bias.
  Cons: AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on. Data silos across departments (marketing, sales, customer service) can weaken AI’s effectiveness. There may also be privacy and ethical concerns, especially if a tool/practice isn’t GDPR-compliant. Finally, because the AI model is likely to attempt to uncover patterns, you might end up optimizing existing trends instead of creating new ones — especially if you’re overreliant on AI-generated ideas.

Now… because you are on the SparkToro Blog and the VP of Marketing is talking to you, you have to know that I’m going to pitch our audience research tool here. You can should use SparkToro for methods 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 11, and 12. SparkToro tells you the social networks, apps, and tools your audience uses more/less frequently than the average web user. You’ll learn which Subreddits your audience lurks in. You’ll get demographic data. And you’ll get all the keyword/SEO insights you can’t get in your standard keyword research tool. Remember my compass analogy from a million words ago? (Don’t worry, I almost forgot too.) SparkToro is that compass. And it’s kind of the map. And it’s the binoculars. And it’s the fire-starting kit.

Future-Proof Your Audience Research

You don’t need to run the same audience research tactics over and over again to future-proof your work. But you do need to figure out how to stay agile. Keep a pulse on the platforms your audience uses, and maintain a relationship with your audience. Diversify your data sources so that you don’t become overreliant on one. And as much as I hate relying on corporate idioms, you need to see the forest for the trees. Focus on first principles (e.g. social platforms tend to suppress links and reward comment engagement), not tactics du jour (e.g. “Link below in the comments!”)

We might leave X for Mastodon for Threads for Bluesky for the next social platform. AI models will get updated. A new cryptocurrency will launch. Maybe those Bored Apes will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars again. But the one thing that will never change is the fundamental need to understand your current and potential audience. The most successful marketers aren’t those with the biggest budgets or the fanciest tools, but those who consistently combine multiple research methods to build a true understanding of their audience’s behavior. So start with one or two methods that make sense for your situation, stay curious about what the data tells you, and remember: the goal isn’t to perfectly predict your audience’s next move, but to understand them well enough to meet them where they are.