How to Understand Your Audiences’ Digital Behavior

As much as it’s imperative to understand your target audience, it’s just as important to understand what your audience does online. Taking the time to know your audiences’ digital behavoirs and needs is critical to solving your own business and content challenges. What can their digital behaviors and actions reveal?

• You’ll learn what content performs the best with the people you want to reach most.
• You’ll understand what you are doing better than your competitors. Even more important, what they may be doing better than you.
• You’ll prioritize what you need to work on.

All this can be derived from how your target audiences behave online, and the rich data that behavior generates will motivate you to take action.

You’re Saying, ‘Show Me.’

Let’s assume you’ve read, and hopefully were amazed at, our blog post on Buyer Personas. If you did, you know these personas are created to profile your brand’s ideal customers. It’s a critical first step to  content creation. You also may recall we like to talk about writing to that “audience of one.” Solving that individual’s specific problem and providing a solution. If you do that, the reality is you are not just interacting one-on-one with a customer. You’re solving specific needs of an entire targeted community that represents oodles of leads and potential customers. But, with each one, you’re communicating very effectively–directly to their needs! (And we also know, from the data we track, that our audience downloaded our buyer persona worksheet in a big way!)

How to understand audience digital behavior?

Here is where in-depth actions taken by your audience are so important to your business and content strategy. Understanding the digital actions of your key audiences will create trending data that helps choose where to spend your time to get the most return in your digital content efforts.

Like personas, you’ll want to begin with understanding your audience profile. They go hand-in-hand. The difference, however, between a buyer persona and your audience profile is the focus on individuals vs. the larger community.  Both identify and focus on key demographics, and more importantly psychographics, that makes a persona (an individual with whom you want to build a deeper business relationship) and audience profile (a community of like-minded individuals taking similar actions) helpful to your efforts in creating content.

Ultimately, identifying and writing down this information will help you determine what (topics), where (platforms), how (format) and why (solve – educate – inspire) you create content.

To get you started on audience profiles, here are important questions to ask yourself, and even better, your audience:

• Approximate age or demo: Millenial? Gen X? Boomer? etc.
• Company and location: Urban, rural, large company, start up
• Occupation: Marketing, leadership, manager, entrepreneur
• Interests: Topics and trends, engaged with and shared
• Challenges and needs: What keeps them up at night? What problems do they need solved?
• Behaviors: What content do they click on? How often? What do they download? Who do they follow?

How Do I Get this Information?

Here are a few tips to learn about your target audience, the best way to reach them and, most importantly, what their digital behaviors are:

Analytics! To truly understand your audience you have to look at facts. When do they go online? What social media site reaches the largest group of your target audience? What Calls to Action (CTA) drove the most downloads? What blog posts have the most views? These are all questions that can be answered by looking at various analytics sites- Google Analytics, Twitter for Business, Facebook Insights, or specific tools integrated into your site, like the HubSpot dashboard. (Full disclosure: as a HubSpot partner, we use this to to drive deep insights right down to the individual contact.)  By understanding the actions of your audience, you’ll begin to see digital habits that create trends.

Track Keywords. Whether through hashtags (#) or by using a keyword tracking tool, knowing what your audience searches for helps you create great, helpful content. Stay on top of trends! You can listen to everything your community talks about, from business phrases to pop culture interests. Know your personas and see where key hashtags intersect. This is a crucial way to find audience behavior.

Competitors. You may know that your brand is better than the competition, but do you know why your audience is choosing you over them? What about vice-versa? To help answer the question, consider building a competitor profile to analyze their current strategy, message and target audience.  With this information you can create content and messaging that highlights key differences and aligns with what’s important to your target audience. Through our Hubspot social monitoring tool, we watch and listen to our competition, to get a better understanding of what they are publishing and sharing, and how the audience is reacting to it.

Influencers. Community influencers are an underutilized resource by most brands. Connecting with influencers that align with your audience adds valuable social cred.  Even just monitoring an influencer’s stream can provide valuable information into your target audience’s interests, needs, and wants.

Listen and Engage. Even after you have an understanding of your audience there is still work to do. Continue to talk with your community and other active communities following your keyword topics. Respond to comments, thank new followers, and make sure that you don’t just watch and see what happens. Take part.