By There isn’t actually anything “wrong” with best practices. Best practices are general guidelines for what to do in order to ensure a general baseline of success. The problem comes when you employ best practices without personalization or a point of view. Then you’re just leading with some statistically average decision and marketing to… nobody in particular.
Certainly not bad enough to shit the bed, but definitely not good enough to be remarkable. Best practices are the “beige” of marketing: when everything you’re doing is just good enough, but nobody’s actually influenced by it. They just… tolerate it.
I talked about this recently on the Weidert podcast (around the 8:12 mark) and how silly it is when we marketers talk about these “best practices” that are really just tactics derived from data across many audiences and many contexts. As if we know what could possibly work for every audience at every given time. But we can’t know what could work for every audience. We can know that we need things that will resonate with the right audience. You guessed it, this is where audience research comes in.
How Audience Research Makes Practices… Best
When you do audience research, you stop asking “what should I do?” and start asking “what does this audience actually respond to?” It sounds simple, but it changes almost every downstream decision. You might’ve been posting on LinkedIn three times a week (and no more than 5!!!) because that’s what the algorithm guides say. Or writing 1,500-word blog posts because that’s what “performs well for SEO.” Or you’ve been spending an extra several hours per week sending pitches, or paying for an agency to send embarrassing pitches on your behalf, to show up on the better known podcasts because bigger means better which means profit. That’s the best practice, right? Go for as much reach as possible. But what best practices won’t tell you is that you’re almost certainly better off spending those hours finding and hanging out in those semi-private Slack groups where the several hundred audience members trust each others’ recommendations and niche podcasts.
So what will tell you that? Audience research. The ongoing yet sporadic practice of figuring out where your audience is hanging out online, and understanding their motivations, pain points, and behaviors. Once you know all this, you’re no longer marketing with the least offensive shade of beige. The messaging you write and campaigns you deploy will be bright, bold and funky purple, calming and stylish sage green, or… whatever other color you know it’s supposed to be.
I’ll tell you right here that the best way to do audience research is through SparkToro because it’s fast (literally all you have to do is describe your audience in plain speak), and data-backed (we use search, clickstream, and social data to create a snapshot of where your audience is hanging out online, what they’re talking about, and what they’re searching for). But of course, you don’t have to use SparkToro. Instead, you could:
Talk to 5 people in your target audience.
You get great bang for your buck here. If you talk to a mix of customers and prospects, you might even be able to turn this into a case study (or start the conversation for that), and you’ll almost certainly uncover new ways that your audience talks about their problems. Then when you market to them in their own words, it’ll resonate really well. In these audience interviews, you can also ask where they hang out online, the social accounts they follow, and the shows/YouTube channels they pay attention to.
The downsides? There’s often a difference between what people say they do and what they actually do. Plus, in learning only what they’re telling you, you’re not learning where they are or what they’re doing in the context in which they’re suffering from the problem that you/your product/your service solves.
Go to the Subreddit (or other community) they hang out in.
This is great for when you know where your audience is hanging out. You’ll get to lurk on their real, unfiltered discussions. This gives you shared terminology, a sense for what’s top of mind for them, and general inspiration for how you can create content that will resonate with them.
The downsides? Not only do you have to be correct in identifying communities, it also might take you a while to realize value. You could be skimming through forums for hours before developing a marketing idea that truly has legs.
Dig into your own analytics — but look past the vanity metrics.
Your website analytics, email data, and social insights are an underutilized goldmine for audience research. Which blog posts are getting the most time-on-page, not just clicks? Which email subject lines got replies, not just opens? Which social posts sparked actual conversation instead of just passive likes? These signals tell you what your audience is genuinely engaging with vs. what they’re scrolling past.
The downsides? Analytics tell you about the audience you already have — not the one you’re trying to reach. And they’re backward-looking by nature, so they’re better for refining what’s working than discovering entirely new directions.
Of course, shameless plug here: You could learn where your audience is hanging out online, the Subreddits they frequent, the social media accounts they follow, the keywords they search for, and the topics that are most likely to resonate with them — all on SparkToro.
How to Make Best Practices Your Best Practices
Best practices are a fine starting point; they’re like default settings that you still have to make your own. Audience research is how you configure those settings for your actual situation.
Take content format as an example. The best practice might say long-form written content builds authority. Sure, maybe. But if your audience skews toward practitioners who are heads-down in tools all day and decompress by watching YouTube in the evening, then you might be best off producing tight, useful video that fits the context they’re actually in. Though personally, I would imagine that the long-form written content is still worth it because it’ll get indexed by Google and crawled by the bots which could help serve you up in AI tools.
Or channel strategy. The best practice is to be where your audience is. Obviously. But this is useless without the next step, which is actually finding out where that is and in what context you could be most impactful. Just because there are over 3 billion users on Facebook, it doesn’t mean that’s where you should market your B2B tool. You need to be looking at the platforms people are hanging out on when they’re likely to be receptive to your marketing. In this case, I’d wager it’s LinkedIn. And even then, I’d say you still need to find the specific influential accounts, niche newsletters, and smaller but fast-growing podcasts. That specificity is the difference between marketing that blends in and marketing that actually lands.
Best practices will keep you from making catastrophic mistakes. But they’ll also keep you perpetually average. And in a marketing landscape where everyone has access to the same AI tools, the same algorithm guides, and the same “data-backed” playbooks, average is increasingly invisible.
The marketers who cut through aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or even the most creative ideas. They’re the ones who know their audience well enough to show up in the right places, say the right things, and make the right people feel like the content was made specifically for them.