5 Unexpected Questions Marketers Can Ask to Better Understand Their Audiences

Image credit: Austin Distel via Unsplash

As marketers, it’s our duty to have a deep understanding of the people we’re talking to. We are interrupting someone to give them a message about our brands, so we owe it to them to make it relevant to them, and how can we do that if we don’t at least know them? While marketers seldom have the time or budget to do research that lets them completely understand an audience, there are simple best practices that we can add to the research process that can help move towards that ideal. By conducting more-effective research, we can make our work more relevant to the audience and ultimately have an impact on revenue, as brands who are relevant to customers see 230% higher growth than the average S&P 500 company. With that impact in mind, let’s go through a couple of questions that will help you to get to know your audience. 

1. Find out how they fit in their generation 

Generational groups are often massive simplifications that marketers use as a placeholder because they can’t just say “speak to cool people.” How can we interrogate this thinking and go beyond stereotypes? What does being seen as the generation who doesn’t want to work mean to gen-Z? What about being the latchkey kids to gen-X? Asking these questions can help you find something real instead of merely reflective.

Questions to ask: 

• Describe someone in your generation - how are you similar/ different from them? 
• What does the world get wrong about your generation - what do you like/ dislike about your generation?
• How do you navigate the expectations of your generation? 

2. Find out what community is to them 

We can learn a lot from understanding how our audiences perceive community and what it means to them. It’s not always about the accounts they follow or the products they buy. Maybe it’s the reaction they get (or don’t get) from saying they’re a fan of something. Maybe it’s how they open up when someone reveals they’re also interested in the topic. If we know how our customers are feeling when they have those experiences, we can start being a helpful tool to make those interactions better. 

Questions to ask: 

• What are the foundations that make up the communities that you belong to? 
• What’s one thing outsiders don’t get about your community? 
• What do you get from your community? What are they getting from you? 

3. Find out about their relationship with money 

Asking about money is inherently intimate and shows someone’s trust in institutions - and therefore their scepticism in what we’re saying. We all want to feel like we’re doing the right thing with our money (are we saving enough? Spending wisely?), resulting in everyone having a specific and unique relationship with money. Knowing about that relationship can be a wellspring of information about your audience.

Questions to ask: 

• Who do you talk about money with?
• When do you look for the most inexpensive option - what do you splurge on? 
• What did you expect someone with your salary to live like? Do you live like that?

4. Find out how they empathise 

Empathy is the bedrock of human relationships. Uncovering how our audiences empathise with each other can open up brand new creative opportunities by getting to the core of why they care about the topics that they care about. While we would hope that our audience is more empathetic than not, the reality is that the average American is less empathetic than 75% of Americans 30 years ago. Therefore, we have to push back on our assumptions of what people empathise with - is the average person actually empathising with the topics we’re presenting? Why should they? 

Questions to ask: 

• What was the last time you used empathy? 
• What does being empathetic mean to you? 
• What situations require more/less empathy?

5. Find out how they’re not like you

In general, it’s hard to get out of a bubble, and marketers are no exception. Everyone tends to weigh personal experiences much above what we see in research or media. As a result, marketers can easily fall into the trap of talking to themselves. To avoid this, however, we can find the ways we aren’t the audience and use those to have an alternative perspective. 

Questions to ask: 

• What’s your guilty pleasure media? What’s special about it? 
• Why would someone like you *not* like this product/brand?
• What are you tired of in regards to this product/ brand?

It’s impossible to know everything about an audience, but we shouldn’t let that stop us from searching for nuance and fighting against cliches. Let these questions spark your curiosity and provide context for those category insights. You’ll find different rabbit holes you wouldn’t have seen before, they’ll be a starting point for conversations worth having, and the work will be all the better for it. So keep turning over stones and eventually it’ll just be a part of the process.