Understanding your audience is one of the most important pieces of content marketing. After all, you can’t create engaging content if you don’t know what your audience wants. But how exactly do you find that out?
At many organizations, the answer is: by making educated guesses. At Message Lab Media, we’ve developed a straightforward audience research approach that removes guesswork by gathering concrete data, through surveys and interviews. We like this approach because:
Surveys capture a large number of responses. This helps gather data from a large quantity of audience members.
Interviews help you dive deeper into specific questions and get in-depth answers.
We recently put this into action when a biomedical research institute wanted to understand things like what their audience wants to learn about, whether they actually read the institute’s newsletter and how in-depth the content should be. We learned four things that might surprise you:
1. Don’t be quick to ditch print publications
It’s easy to write off print publications – they’re expensive, their word count is limited and a lot of mail ends up in the recycling bin. We’ve been creating this institute’s newsletter for years, and we wanted to know whether people actually read the print version. To find out, we sent print and digital surveys to the institute’s readers and asked about their preferences.
Print was the resounding winner:
- 54 percent of respondents preferred to read the newsletter in print
- 24 percent preferred online
- 21 percent had no preference
It’s also worth mentioning that we received more responses through the survey that was mailed with a prepaid envelope inside of the print newsletter, compared to digital surveys that were sent out with the digital newsletter and shared via social media.
2. Your readers’ interests may not be what you think
We gave readers a list of topics to select from, asking which topics they were most interested in learning about. New discoveries and new grants tied for first, which wasn’t surprising. But the second most selected topic was a surprise: the audience really wanted to hear more about research tools and technologies.
This was particularly interesting because this research institute has tons of cool tools to talk about (a confocal microscope, anyone?), but we had assumed that readers might not be very interested in those. We were wrong, and have since created many stories about new and exciting technologies.
3. People will spend time reading
Organizations pour a lot of time and energy into their newsletters and other storytelling efforts. But sometimes you can’t help but wonder – are people actually reading them? Web analytics can provide some insight, but we wanted to dig deeper.
Along the way, we wanted to investigate the assumption that, in this day and age, shorter is always better. We learned that:
- People read what we send them! 55 percent of respondents said they “always” read the newsletter, while 36 percent said they regularly read it.
- Readers liked a mix of longer features and shorter stories/callouts, rather than all short stories.
- The top answer for “how long should it take to read each story” was “five to seven minutes.” Only five percent of respondents selected “two minutes or less.”
4. Readers want to learn about science
We work with many research institutes who turn to us for science content creation and often run into the same question: How much scientific detail is our audience actually interested in?
It’s easy to make an argument in either direction — you could guess that if readers are intentionally engaging with a research institute, they must want to know all about the science. But you could also make the argument that readers may not be particularly interested in the scientific details — they just want to know that this institute is looking for treatments or cures that will help them or a loved one.
We asked the following multiple choice question:
What level of scientific detail are you interested in? How detailed should our science stories and explanations be?
- Not very detailed, I am more interested in the impact of research and discoveries rather than details of the science.
- Somewhat detailed. I’d like an overview of big discoveries.
- Very detailed. I’d like in-depth specifics about the research.
- Other, please specify
“Somewhat detailed” received the most responses, with 54 percent of respondents selecting this answer. The next most common answer was “very detailed” at 22 percent. That’s right — 76 percent of respondents wanted scientific detail in the stories!
We followed up the survey answers by asking our interviewees about how scientific our stories should be. They essentially said the same thing as the survey respondents — they didn’t need an extremely deep dive, but they most enjoyed the stories that brought them along with the science. They liked a moderate level of detail that helped them understand the research and its impact without going too far into the weeds.
Learn how to do audience research
This article is based on findings from one audience research project for a specific institute that needed science communications help. Your organization’s audience may have completely different needs and preferences. That’s why audience research is so important.
If you’re curious about our audience research process and how it could help your organization, drop us a line or learn more about our strategic science communication and content marketing services.
