If you know your audience, you can create content that brings value and grow rapidly online.
“Know your audience” is among the fundamentals we learn when it comes to marketing our content. With live streams, this lesson holds even more significance as high audience engagement and interaction from the get-go is crucial to its virality. Knowing who your audience actually is will help you provide the most value and figure out the right tone for your live streams.
Businesses and content creators need to know who their audiences are. But how do you get to know your audience? In this guide, you’ll find four different ways to understand who your audience is. When combined, they will give you fantastic insight on how to bring the most value to your audience, which, in turn, will help you grow online.
4 Ways to get to know your audience – Summary
- Analytics
- Surveys
- Comment mining
- Live interviews
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4 Ways to get to know your audience
1. Analytics
The easiest method of figuring out your audience is through the native analytics of the channel in which you conduct your live streams. For instance, if you are doing your live streams through a Facebook page, you can head over to the Insights tab and click on ‘People’ to find out the demographic layout of your audience.
It divides the demography according to gender, age, location, and language. See which aspects your followers or viewers have most in common to help you determine what content themes will resonate most with them.
In fact, throughout your social media channels, you can check out the analytics and compile comprehensive data regarding your audience. With all that information at hand, you can then identify the profiles that best fit your business or personal brand.
2. Surveys
Analytics are great for knowing the make-up of your audience. But, they don’t accurately grant a general overview of what your audience wants from you. Sure, analytics will tell you that live stream “A” gained more engagement than live stream “B,” but was it really because the audience loved it more or some external reason?
It could be that a major channel shared it, it showed up in people’s newsfeed at a better time, or it was picked up and promoted by the channel’s algorithm quite randomly.
In your search to get to know your audience better than making educated guesses, you could also ask them about themselves. There are tons of ways you can approach this. The simplest – ask them to give their feedback in the comments. You can also create an online survey form and either post the link to it on your channel, mail them to your subscribers or do both.
Nowadays, on most social media, there is also a ‘stories’ feature that allows you to create a post that’s up for 24 hours, and any audience engagement goes directly into your social account’ mailbox.
Surveys are also helpful when the medium for your live stream is not your personal account for which analytics are not available.
3. Comment Mining
There can be scenarios where neither of the two above steps could be useful to you in trying to figure out your audience. For instance, you could be just starting out or have too low an audience size (composed mainly of people you know) to effectively figure out what is the real audience in your niche.
The solution? Look for comments on other, more successful live streams in your niche and see what their audience is saying. This can give you great insight into what type of audience you might be attracting as your channel’s visibility grows. Plus, because you already have that insight, you can optimize your live streams accordingly and grow your presence even faster than you might have otherwise.
4. Conduct Live Interview
If you want to delve deep into who your audience actually is, their likes and dislikes, and what you can do to create value for them with your live streams, there is no better way than conducting live interviews.
Of course, it’s not a problem if the people you want to target live a reasonable distance away from your location. We have video conferencing for that. Plus, with the added benefit that the interaction can be recorded for easy later referencing.
Final thoughts on knowing your audience
Understanding who your audience is or who you want them to be is crucial. When you know your audience, you know what they need and what will bring them value. This is, without a doubt, the best way to ensure that your content creation efforts are being worthwhile.
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