Audience research: defining your audience

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OVERVIEW

This article is an extract from A Concise Guide to Researching Audiences. The Guide forms part of the Audience Research Toolkit produced Curtis+Cartwright Consulting Ltd on behalf of the Strategic Content Alliance and links to all the elements in the toolkit can be found at the end of this page.

The article is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

The target audience

The importance of the target audience

Knowing who you would like your audience to be and what services you intend to offer is vital for any service. It may appear obvious, but it should be part of business planning as there are implications for funding and potential routes to sustainability for a digital service.

The characteristics of the target audience should influence the delivery of a service, the functionality provided, means of access etc. It is important to recognise that a service may have more than one distinct audience. Needs and expectations of the different audiences are likely to be only partly overlapping and the implications this has for service delivery should be considered.

Understanding the audience can be vital to give a sense of focus and identity to a service. Trying to be all things to all potential users is difficult. Different groups of users may have incompatible needs (eg experienced academic researchers will prioritise heavyweight search and analysis tools when using an archive; leisure users will expect a very user-friendly interface that lets them quickly explore the archive and get a flavour of the contents). This doesn’t mean that a digitised archive shouldn’t aim to appeal to both audiences, but understanding that these are distinct audiences with different needs should inform the design and development of the service.

The concept of the target audience in service development

Service development may be either resource-driven (eg because someone has a great idea) or audience- driven (eg if an organisation wants to extend its audience). Both approaches are valid, but detailed service development should take into account the intended audience for the service. The service must appeal to them, so their habits, needs and expectations will have an impact on the nature of the service and the ways in which it is promoted.

Understanding the target audience will be critical to the success of the service. Audience research will focus on finding out the sorts of resources and services that appeal to the target audience, how they would prefer to access the service, and the technologies they use. Background knowledge about attitudes, lifestyle, social interactions etc is also likely to be useful if the resource is to be primarily for leisure use rather than for formal learning.

Defining the target audience

Defining your target audience doesn’t need to be a difficult technical exercise. A good starting point may be to picture an ideal audience member – or a typical, actual audience member. How would you describe this person? The descriptors you use are good starting points for thinking about categories for audience segmentation.

A more formal approach to defining the target audience would be to develop a series of user profiles or fully worked personas as an aid to service design and development (see sub-section). Negative user descriptions, profiles or personas can also be helpful: the kind(s) of people your service is not intended for.

Describing the target audience

The characteristics of the target audience should influence the delivery of a service, the functionality provided, means of access etc. The features included in a description of the target audience will vary according to the service but may include residential address, occupation, gender, interests, technological expertise etc. A target audience may be very inclusive (eg all the people in Manchester) or highly specific (eg qualified medical professionals with a research interest in Osgood-Schlatter’s disease).

Audience segmentation

Audiences are often segmented into different categories. Published data (eg television viewing figures, newspaper readership) often segments the audience on the basis of demographic categories. Academic libraries are more likely to categorise users according to their role within academia. The most appropriate way to define a target audience and segment the actual audience will depend on the service and the objectives of the audience analysis work, and several different approaches to segmentation are possible.

Sources of advice and guidance

The Strategic Content Alliance Audience Analysis Toolkit

This toolkit for public sector bodies, commission by the Strategic Content Alliance from Curtis and Cartwright Consulting provides a range of resources about how to undertake successful audience analysis. All may be found on the Audience pages of the Alliance blog. They include the following:

Guides

These offer an in-depth study of how to define your target audience, planning audience research, the various methods which are available for collecting research data, then analysing that data to obtain a useful model of your likely audience and continuing to use audience research to make sure your service responds to their needs effectively.

The Guide to Researching Audiences
A Concise Guide to Researching Audiences
Audience research: a visualisation chart

Case studies

The case studies offer in-depth studies of the audience analysis activities undertaken by ten public sector institutions to inform the service they provide. The case studies cover a diverse range of initiatives including the development of the BBC i-player, the Europeana project, the digitisation of the John Johnson collection and the JISC national e-books observatory project.

The Guide to Researching Audiences: Case Studies
The Guide to Researching Audiences: Illustrative Case Study

Presentations

These presentations are taken from a workshop held in July 2009 presenting the audience analysis work done for the Alliance by Curtis and Cartwright.

Audience research for practitioners
Audience research: why you should be doing it

Briefing papers

The briefing papers provide valuable summaries on audience research for different domains in the public sector, recognising that different audiences have different needs and expectations and summarising the key sources of support for each area.

Audience research for cultural sector practitioners
Audience research for people experimenting with digital media
Briefing paper: Audience research for education and research practitioners
Audience research for library and knowledge practitioners
Audience research for programme, service and research practitioners
Briefing paper: Audience research for senior managers

Harvested links to other resources

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