5 Challenges Marketers Face in Understanding Audiences [New Data + Market Researcher Tips]

As customer behavior constantly changes, marketers face an ongoing challenge to keep up with their audiences. Personalization and need fulfillment are essential to the success of any marketing campaign, and failing to understand what your customers want could result in lost revenue for your business.

Marketers must stay in touch with evolving customer behavior and preferences to ensure their campaigns resonate with their customers. In this blog post, we'll highlight the top challenges marketers face in understanding audiences from HubSpot's very own 2023 State of Marketing Report to provide data-driven tips for overcoming them.

Challenges Marketers Face in Understanding Audiences

1. Identifying the target audience.

Surveyed marketers reported that their biggest social media challenges are consistently creating engaging content (22%), gaining and keeping followers (22%), and reaching their target audience (21%).

The special thing about these challenges is that the first two are contingent on the third.

Creating engaging content that grows your following is nearly impossible without understanding the target audience. Knowing exactly who you're making content for is a foundational understanding marketers need.

Marketers can conduct more thorough market research to gather data on their target audience to gain a more concise understanding. They can use this data to create buyer personas and plan content for your ideal customer. These personas should be based on recent data and insights from trustworthy surveys, interviews, and other research methods.

2. Understanding customer behavior.

Another challenge that marketers face is understanding their customers' behaviors. Understanding where they spend their time online, what they like, and what they don't like is essential to creating effective marketing campaigns. You want to see how they prefer to view your content, the frequency with which they do it, and what will keep them returning to your business.

To overcome this challenge, marketers can use tools like Google Analytics or heat maps to gather data on customer behavior. They can use this data to analyze their customers' website actions, track engagement, and identify areas for improvement. Marketers can also use social listening tools like Hootsuite to monitor conversations around their brand on social media.

3. Creating content that resonates with the audience.

Creating content that resonates with the audience is a significant challenge for many marketers. They may struggle to find topics their target audience is interested in or may not know how to write content that speaks to them.

For example, many customers in recent years have been looking for brands that share content that reflects corporate social responsibility on topics like social justice, sustainability, or ethical workplace practices. Current-day consumers, especially Millennials and Gen Z, want to buy from companies that display values and a purpose that resonates with them.

There's proven potential in sharing values-based content with customers. According to HubSpot's State of Marketing Report, 16% of marketers plan to get their company talking about values this year for the first time, and 89% of those who already do plan to increase or maintain their investment in this approach.

Marketers can use the data gathered on their target audience to better connect with the customer to create content that speaks to their interests and values. And to make things easier, they can also leverage tools like surveys or customer feedback to see what they want from your marketing content. Once you've identified topics your target audience is interested in, create high-quality content such as blog posts, videos, infographics, or ebooks based on the responses.

4. Measuring the success of marketing campaigns.

Measuring the success of marketing campaigns is another challenge faced by marketers. Without tracking the performance of their campaigns, it is impossible to know if they are effectively targeted towards their audience.

Marketers can set specific, measurable, and achievable campaign goals. They can use tools like HubSpot's Marketing Analytics to track the performance of their campaigns and adjust them as necessary to achieve their goals. By monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) like website traffic, lead conversions, click-through rates, and social media engagement, marketers can measure the success of their campaigns and optimize their strategies accordingly.

5. Keeping up with the latest marketing trends

Finally, keeping up with the latest marketing trends can be tedious for marketers. Digital marketing innovation and news is constantly changing, and marketers must keep up to ensure their campaigns are relevant and useful to the audience they're trying to reach.

To keep up with these trends, marketers can follow industry blogs and social media accounts to stay informed of the latest developments in their niche. By keeping up-to-date on the latest marketing trends and implementing best practices, marketers can stay ahead of the competition.

Understanding your audience helps you cater to them.

Understanding the audience is critical to the success of any marketing campaign. By overcoming these roadblocks, marketers can create campaigns that resonate with their target audience and potentially drive engagement and conversions. Remember to conduct market research, monitor customer behavior, and stay up-to-date on the latest marketing trends. Marketers can overcome these challenges by following these best practices and achieving marketing success.