One of the biggest determining factors of your virtual event’s success is how well you master the art of meeting and exceeding your audience’s needs. Leveraging technology to help you with this also plays a huge role in delivering meaningful event experiences.
While many event organizers continue to struggle with understanding their audience’s needs and delivering value accordingly, we think it needn’t be as complicated. Because, in reality, it is quite simple, when the right strategies are implemented. Hence, in this article, we take you through some effective strategies that can help you analyze and understand your target audience’s needs better.
1. Review Existing Data and Analytics
This is the first step towards figuring out your audience’s needs. When you don’t have too much data to look into, start digging into what you already have. For example, there can be some data that your company has previously gathered – either by conducting a survey on a focus group where the people have stated their opinions for a particular product or a service, a previous event’s landing page traffic data, etc. This helps you gain a basic yet good understanding of your audience’s preferences, interests or pain points to establish what they actually expect.
From this starting point, identify any gaps in the data you currently have. You may need to gather more specific information, such as sending out surveys to get detailed answers on product or service-related questions that matter most to your audience.
2. Reflect on Previous Successes with Your Audience
When analyzing your audience, it’s important to look back at what’s already working for them in terms of your products, services, marketing, and customer support.
This valuable information reveals why your audience continues to engage with your brand and what aspects of their experience they enjoy. As your business grows and evolves, refer to these successful strategies when making decisions about new initiatives or changes, to ensure you are staying aligned with what your audience needs.
3. Develop Buyer Personas
Next, create buyer personas, if you haven’t already. These detailed profiles help you understand your audience’s motivations, needs, and preferences, guiding your product development and marketing efforts.
By creating buyer personas, you’ll gain clarity on the specific reasons your audience seeks your product or service, how to effectively target them, and how to build long-term relationships with them. Additionally, buyer personas ensure that all teams within your organization remain aligned with your audience’s needs, increasing the chances of successful engagement during your virtual events.
4. Use Surveys to Gather Insights
Surveys are an excellent tool for diving deeper into what your audience thinks about your products, services, and overall brand. They provide direct, specific feedback and can help you refine your approach based on actual customer input.
With surveys, you can ask your audience both broad and detailed questions to uncover what they like, what they don’t, and what they wish you would improve. The anonymity of surveys can often encourage honest, actionable feedback, giving you the real insights you need to optimize your strategy.
You can easily manage this process using questionnaire or survey tools, which simplify creating and distributing surveys, while also organizing and analyzing responses in one place.
5. Monitor Your Competitors
While understanding your audience’s needs, working smart is just as important as working hard. By monitoring your competitors, you’ll be able to understand what they are and aren’t doing right, how they are engaging with your shared audience, etc. This will help you inform and create new strategies to target your audience more effectively.
6. Track Audience Feedback, Comments, and Engagements
Tracking your audience’s behavior is also crucial to understand what your audience needs. Check out what they like as well as what they dislike, and you’ll gain a holistic view of their preferences. Your social media accounts can be a treasure trove of information on your audience’s needs and preferences – think comments sections, like & dislike trends, DMs you receive, poll responses, etc.
This continuous monitoring will not only help you decipher what your audience wants but will also create a positive image about your brand, as you show them that you care about their experience and seek their feedback/opinion actively.
7. Experiment with Content and Product Updates
Don’t hesitate to experiment with new content, or product and service enhancements to better reach your audience. Experimenting with new things is an excellent way to know if your business is on the right track and making adjustments to stay in line with your audience’s changing needs.
For instance, your marketing folks might propose contacting your audience using a new medium, or your engineers might think of modifying a certain product feature. As long as the experiment shows potential, test it out and see how well your audience responds to it.
Experimentation allows you to discover new means of relating to your audience, and this will result in higher engagement and retention. On the other hand, if something fails, you will learn from it and be able to avoid repeating the same error in the future.
Bottom Line
To create successful virtual events, it’s crucial to understand and meet your audience’s needs. By reviewing existing data, gathering feedback, analyzing what’s working, and staying aware of competitor strategies, you can continuously improve your approach.
Experimenting with content and product updates ensures that your events stay relevant and engaging, helping you build stronger, long-lasting connections with your audience for sustained success.
FAQ
To gather feedback, you can use live polls, Q&A sessions, post-event surveys, and feedback forms. These tools allow you to collect real-time insights and get a sense of your audience’s thoughts, preferences, and experiences during the event.
Use your virtual event platform’s event analytics tools that track participation, interactions, and engagement metrics. Monitor how attendees are interacting with your content, whether they’re joining in on the discussions, participating in polls, networking in breakout sessions, etc.
