Ideal customer personas (ICP), customer profiles, audience persona, or target audience — there are a lot of jargon words to mention ‘ideal customers.’ Everyone busy chasing their ideal customers faces a common problem — how to find audience insights to make a product, marketing, pricing, and positioning more relevant. This article shares five target audience research tools (+2 bonuses) to find and understand your ideal customer.  

GapScout — Automate audience research with online reviews. 

GapScout is a great market research tool that uses online reviews and sentiment to supercharge your audience research efforts.

It connects all leading review platforms, scans them on autopilot, and brings you real-time audience insights, including what your audience likes, dislikes, or perceives about your product.

With GapScout, you can dig deeper into your audience’s habits, preferences, sentiments, etc., and use these insights to create informed decisions related to pricing, product development, product-market fit, marketing, and more.

Also Read:

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AYTM (Ask Your Target Market) — Conduct market surveys. 

Ask Your Target Market (AYTM) is an interesting tool that works better than traditional audience research panels. The platform has access to over 100 mn respondents and uses tech to help business owners run market research surveys to understand their audience.

The platform’s predictive sampling engine allows you to find the most engaged audience and target potential customers by demographics, psychographics, and behavioral attributes. Also, the in-built market research survey tool will enable you to create intuitive quantitative and qualitative surveys based on best practices and the most relevant market research questions.

This tool is really excellent for people who are looking to gain some meaningful insights about their target audience but might not have their audience yet.

Sparktoro — Unearth online audience insights. 

Sparktoro is an exciting tool that analyses live web pages, social media profiles, podcasts, and all sorts of online platforms to tell you where your audience spends the most time.

According to their website, they crawl more than 80 million profiles regularly to let you know who your audience is, where they’re most active, and what themes/interests are most engaging for them.

You can also use Sparktoro insights to understand your audience demographics, behaviors, interests, psychographic, and more. Use the tool to discover common interests, passions, and influences among your target audience.

Audiense — Find what affects your customers. 

Audiense is an excellent platform for audience intelligence that helps you collect valuable insights for different audience segments on autopilots. The platform leverages social channels to identify what influences your audience and enables you to unearth your audience’s preferences.

The platform is suitable for businesses with customers who are pretty active on social media. Moreover, it helps them find the shared beliefs, interests, lifestyle choices, and affinities of your target audience.

According to the company, the tool allows you to capture ‘cultural insights’ to help you segment audiences, create data-driven personas, identify influencers to work with, and understand niche audiences. The tool also complements your existing survey and social listening initiatives to unlock deeper audience insights.

Remesh.AI — Speed up your customer interview process. 

Remesh is an AI-powered qualitative research tool to find audience insights for building your marketing strategy. The SaaS platform allows you to have a conversation with up to 1000 people from your audience simultaneously and uncover insights.

One of the best features of the platform is that it helps speed up the process of having one-on-one interviews to unearth insights. Remesh segments all participants from your audience into custom segments to slice the data based on preferences, interests, likes, and dislikes.

Understand what your audience wants by getting answers directly from your customers and organizing the voice of customers in real time.

Bonus: Free Audience Research Tools & Platforms to Gather Data.

Need to do some research, but don’t want to pay the price? Here are some great free options!

Statista

Statista is a leading platform that offers datasets across all major industries. You can find behavioral statistics, preferences, and interest data by browsing the platform. Statista organizes information about behavioral patterns, market trends, audience interests, and general industry outlook in the form of trends.

Use the platform to start market research, discover macro patterns, unearth market opportunities, or validate your hypothesis.

Pew Research Center

Pew Research Center is a free platform that provides accurate audience data across industries. You can access reports, graphs, demographic information, and more related to behavioral patterns, industries, public opinion, interests, and more.

Pew Research also has several other free projects like LivingFacts (now archived. But you can still access the project data on how the American population lives, works, believes in, and behaves. This can be useful for discovering behavioral patterns and creating a detailed audience persona. 

Start target audience research by tracking online reviews now.

Audience research is a crucial step in your startup journey. Without knowing your target audience and their needs and preferences, it is nearly impossible to create effective messaging or campaigns.

Most entrepreneurs struggle to get close to the audience and start audience research, though. Using online reviews is a great way to get started with audience research.

Use a tool like GapScout that scans every online review and gives you data-backed insights into what your audience wants. Basically, put your audience research on autopilot with just one tool.

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