How To Find Out What Your Audience Wants - Part One: Questions and Tools

Welcome to our three part practical, research-led framework for marketers and creatives who know the most important part of any campaign is the audience and how to speak to them!

We’ve spent decades working at the intersection of audience behaviour and creative strategy helping organisations move from assumption to evidence, and from evidence to action. That breadth of experience is what this framework is built on: not theory, but the patterns that emerge when you've asked the right questions enough times to know which answers actually matter.

Part One: Questions and Tools

Knowing your audience takes a disciplined research function. It’s a structured process of gathering behavioural evidence, validating hypotheses, and reducing decision risk. If you can’t trace your audience insight back to a defensible method, you don’t have insight, you have opinion.

This is a practical, data-led framework for understanding what your audience actually wants. Something we should all be thinking about before making any plans.

Start With a Clear Research Question

Before collecting anything, define the decision you’re trying to inform and make it specific. We’ve compiled some examples of important questions to consider, that we consider, when thinking about how to find and crack an audience. We’ve also included some tools and systems that help us gather relevant data to build workable segments.

1. What unmet needs are limiting category growth?

This question matters because audiences are not just defined by who they are, but by what they are still struggling to solve. If you only look at existing buyers, you end up optimising for the current category ceiling.

Unmet needs reveal the people who should be in the market but aren’t. Identifying these gaps expands your definition of the addressable audience and exposes white space for innovation, positioning, and messaging. Unmet needs grow audiences.

We’ve found the following tools extremely useful:

Qualitative Systems & Tools

• Dovetail / EnjoyHQ / Aurelius – for coded qualitative research & synthesis

• Reframer (Audiense) – for insight generation & pattern discovery

• UserTesting / Lookback – moderated & unmoderated user interviews

Behavioral & Search Mining

• Google Trends – unearth rising search patterns

• AnswerThePublic – unmet questions people ask about the category

• Exploding Topics / Trend Hunter – signals of emerging unmet needs

• Brandwatch / Talkwalker / Meltwater – social conversation mining

2. What barriers are preventing conversion

Barriers tell you which audiences are interested but stalled. There is always a group hovering at the edge of purchase, aware, maybe even persuaded, but held back by friction, risk, confusion, or identity conflict.

If you don’t understand those blockers, you mislabel them as “low intent” or “not our audience.” In reality, they are often your most commercially valuable segment because they require less education and more reassurance. Diagnosing barriers helps you distinguish between people who will never convert and people who simply need a different message, experience, or proof point to move.

These tools will help you on your way:

Funnel Tracking

• Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

• Adobe Analytics

• Heap / Mixpanel / Amplitude

• Heatmaps & Session Replay

• Hotjar

• FullStory

• Crazy Egg

• Mouseflow

User Objection & Feedback Tools

• Qualaroo

• Usabilla

• Survicate

• Intercom / LiveChat

A/B Testing Platforms

• Optimizely

• Adobe Target

3. What emotional drivers influence brand choice?

Two customers can buy the same product for completely different emotional reasons.

Emotional drivers reveal the why beneath the what. Whether someone is seeking status, security, belonging, self-expression, control, or progress. Without understanding these drivers, segmentation becomes superficial and creative becomes generic.

When you map emotional motivations, you uncover distinct audience mindsets that cut across demographics. That allows you to target more precisely, position more sharply, and build brand meaning that resonates beyond functional benefit.

Try the following tools:

Brand & Emotional Measurement Tools

• Zappi / CMB (BrandFx) measure emotional equity

• Kantar Link / Millward Brown BrandZ

• YouGov BrandIndex / YouGov Profiles

Implicit & Social Signals

• Implicit Association Testing (IAT) through specialised research partners

• Neuro‑insights / Biometrics labs for subconscious response measurement

Social Sentiment Tools

• Brandwatch (again!)

• Talkwalker

• NetBase Quid

Semiotics / Cultural Insight Tools

• Netbase Quid Explorer

• Cultural Analytics via LexisNexis / Factiva

4. What triggers movement between segments?

Audiences are not fixed; they evolve. People shift from prospect to buyer, loyalist to switcher, premium to value seeker, often because something in their life or perception changes.

Identifying these triggers, life events, economic shifts, dissatisfaction, new aspirations, exposure to new ideas, helps you predict when audiences are most receptive. Instead of treating segments as static buckets, you understand the forces that destabilise them. That turns audience strategy from descriptive (who they are) into dynamic (when they are ready), which is far more powerful for growth planning.

Explore with these tools:

CRM & Behavioural Cohort Tools

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud

• HubSpot

• Oracle Eloqua

• Braze

Advanced Analytics & Cohort Analysis

• Amplitude

• Mixpanel

• Heap

• Looker / Tableau / Power BI

Predictive Platforms

• Rivery / Segment (Twilio) / RudderStack – Customer data infrastructure

• Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)

• Salesforce CDP

• Adobe Experience Platform

• Treasure Data

Insight Is Earned, Not Imagined

If Part One makes anything clear, it’s this: understanding your audience is not a workshop exercise or a brainstorm slide. It is an operational capability.

• The questions you ask define the quality of the growth you unlock.

• The tools you use determine whether your answers are evidence or assumption.

• The rigour of your method dictates whether your strategy scales or stalls.

But data collection is only the beginning…

In Part Two, we move from questions and systems to methodology.

How do you:

• Design research that avoids confirmation bias?

• Combine qualitative depth with behavioural scale?

• Synthesise multiple data sources without diluting meaning?

• Translate raw findings into commercially actionable audience segments?

If you’re building audience understanding at scale, across markets, products, or complex customer journeys, Part Two will give you the structure to do it.

Part Two: How To Find Out What Your Audience Wants: Method, Validation & Synthesis.

Coming Soon Part Three: How To Find Out What Your Audience Wants: Turning Audience Insight Into Creative & Growth Systems.

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