How to Gain Insights Into Your Audience

To build emotional resonance, you need to connect with your audience on a personal level—and that starts with knowing them deeply. This goes beyond basic demographics like age, location, or income. Emotional connection happens when you understand their values, fears, and motivations. → Start by observing conversations in your niche. Look at social media comments, forums, or community spaces where your audience hangs out. → Pay attention to the language they use—what words and phrases pop up often? These conversations provide clues about their emotional triggers and concerns, which you can reflect in your messaging. → Conduct open-ended surveys that ask “why” questions rather than just “what” questions. For example, instead of asking which features they like, ask why those features matter to them. This reveals the emotions behind their preferences, helping you create messages that align with their deeper needs. → Lean into behavioral data. What content do they engage with the most? Which emails get opened and which links get clicked? Patterns in behavior tell a story—identify what topics capture their interest and shape future content around those insights. → Build personas that reflect real challenges and aspirations. Instead of general personas, create living profiles that evolve as you learn more about your audience. Use specific examples or anecdotes that help your team see the audience as individuals, not just statistics. → Most importantly, listen without assumptions. Don’t assume you know what your audience wants—stay curious, ask questions, and let their responses shape your strategy. When your audience feels understood, your content naturally becomes more engaging and emotionally resonant. Knowing your audience deeply means being present in their world. When you tap into their motivations and speak directly to their fears and aspirations, your message cuts through the noise and builds meaningful, lasting connections. #storytelling #marketing #customermarketing

Familiarity doesn’t equal understanding. Closer you are to your market, the easier it becomes to project your own experiences, fears, and preferences onto your audience,  and call it empathy. You’re not understanding them. You’re remembering you. Founders often build brands for the version of themselves that existed years ago. But your audience isn’t you. They don’t think like you. They don’t frame success like you. And they don’t feel what you feel when they make decisions. That’s why the job of a founder is to separate self-perception from audience reality. You have to unlearn what you think you know. You have to replace assumption with observation. Here’s how that shift happens: 1. Listen for language, not logic. When your audience describes their problems, pay attention to the words they use, not just the facts they share. Language reveals emotion. Emotion reveals value. Your brand should echo their words back to them, not yours. 2. Ask questions that make them pause. If your questions can be answered instantly, you’re still on the surface. The best insights come when people have to think,  when silence sits between the question and the answer. That’s where truth lives. 3. Validate your beliefs with behavior. Don’t assume alignment because they nod in agreement. Watch what they actually do, what they open, click, buy, and ignore. Behavior is honesty. 4. Challenge your comfort zone. The audience you think you understand might not be the one you’re really serving anymore. Markets evolve faster than self-awareness does. Revisit your assumptions quarterly, not just annually. Because when you confuse your perspective for theirs, you lose resonance. Your message might still sound right to you, but it no longer feels right to them. Clarity requires distance and objectivity, the ability to step back from your own ego long enough to see the world through someone else’s eyes. If you truly want to connect, don’t ask, “What would I want to hear?” Ask, “What do they need to feel to believe me?” That’s when your brand stops being a reflection of you, and starts becoming a mirror for them.

99% of your marketing problems can be solved by understanding your audience more deeply. Not surface-level stuff. I mean deep, messy, complex insight. The kind that doesn’t come from a PowerPoint slide but from real conversations and raw curiosity. If you're trying to build messaging that resonates, campaigns that convert, and content that actually lands, go deeper. Here’s where the gold lives: 🎯 Customer interviews (ask about frustrations, not features) 🎯 Sales call recordings (listen for objections and buying triggers) 🎯 Interviews with salespeople (What are prospects asking them? What’s resonating with prospects? What’s not?) 🎯 Win-loss analysis of your CRM data (then conduct a gap analysis against your website & content to identify what needs augmenting and what needs building) 🎯 Following ICPs in LinkedIn (what they are writing about and commenting on?) 🎯 Review sites like G2, Capterra, Trustpilot (real words, real emotions) 🎯 Reddit questions and comments (unfiltered truth, sometimes brutally so) 🎯 Audience surveys (with some open questions, not just checkboxes) 🎯 Third-party podcasts & interviews (what do they like to talk about?) 🎯 Informal conversations at events (informal conversations allow for unique ideas and insight) 🎯 Your “Inner Circle” of experts (quickly tap into their perspectives) Let’s Destroy Mediocre Marketing!

Struggling to come up with content ideas? You might be missing the most obvious—and powerful—source right in front of you. Imagine knowing exactly what your audience wants to hear from you.. → Before you even write the post. → Before you spend hours brainstorming. → Before you overthink it. Sounds like a magic trick, right? It’s not. This insight is sitting in your own comment section. One of my favorite ways to find my next best-performing post? → I mine the comments. Not just on my posts — but on my competitors' posts too. When someone comments — especially asking a question, sharing a story, or adding insight — they’re telling you exactly: → What they care about → What they’re struggling with → What they want to learn more about And according to LinkedIn’s Content Insights Report: • Posts that directly answer common audience questions get 32% higher engagement • Posts built from real conversations are 45% more likely to be saved • Posts sparked from "comment cues" generate up to 2x more dwell time in the feed Your audience is already giving you the blueprint. You just have to listen. How to turn comments into content gold: Step 1: Look for Patterns → Are people asking similar questions? → Are they curious about how you achieved something? → Are they sharing insights you can build on? Step 2: Create the Post They’re Asking For → Take the conversation spark. → Build a full post expanding on it: context, insight, story, tactical lesson. Step 3: Close the Loop → Tag the original commenter if appropriate. → “𝘏𝘢𝘥 𝘢 𝘧𝘦𝘸 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘢𝘴𝘬 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 [𝘵𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘤], 𝘴𝘰 𝘐 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘬 𝘪𝘵 𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦.” Bonus move: mine comments from your competitors Want an edge most people miss? → Scroll through posts from leaders and peers in your niche. → Watch what 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 audiences are asking. → Find the gaps—the questions that aren’t being answered. → Be the first to create a clear, value-packed post that solves it. This does two things: ✅ Positions you as the person who 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘴 ✅ Captures attention from an audience already hungry for those answers If you see the same question popping up across multiple posts? That’s not random. It’s a blinking neon sign that 𝘺𝘰𝘶 should own that conversation. When you engage intentionally, your future content starts writing itself. The best creators aren’t reinventing the wheel every day. They’re just paying closer attention to the conversations happening around them. Start mining the gold you’re already sitting on. No guessing. No struggling. Just listening—and showing up.

Most marketers don’t know what an insight is. And it shows. We’re drowning in data, trends, and decks of charts. But most of it is useless. Here’s the brutal truth: Data = Numbers on a page. (OK) Observation = “Oat milk sales are up.” (Yawn) Trend = “Plant-based is growing.” (Blind Freddy could see that) Insight = “Shoppers are switching to oat milk because it feels healthier and more sustainable than dairy.” That one sentence? That’s where growth comes from. An insight is not something you read in Nielsen. It’s the sharp “why” behind behaviour. It’s rare, valuable, and worth millions when you get it right. Most marketers confuse data with insight. That’s like confusing a shopping list with a three-course meal. One feeds you, the other doesn’t. And let’s be clear: if your “insight” could be copy-pasted from a LinkedIn carousel with pastel graphics, it’s not an insight. It’s marketing wallpaper. Examples of insights that built brands: Coke Zero Sugar: Saw “diet” was toxic, so reframed the offer. Now worth billions. Dove: Saw women were alienated by beauty ads. Built Real Beauty, and built category leadership. Red Bull: Saw people didn’t want a drink, they wanted an edge. Created a whole new category.   How to actually find a real insight (not the fluff most marketers call one): 👂 Get out of the office. Stop staring at dashboards and start talking to consumers. Go into homes, watch how people shop, sit at the dinner table or go into a few stores. You’ll learn more from one hour in front of a consumer than from 10 PowerPoint decks. 🔍 Look for contradictions. Insights usually hide in tension: “They say they want healthy, but they buy indulgent.” “They say they care about sustainability, but only if the price is right.” That gap is where opportunity lives. 📊 Stop worshipping data. Data tells you what is happening, never why. Treating data like insight is like mistaking the weather forecast for a holiday. 🧩 Connect across culture. Insights don’t come from a single dataset. They come when you combine consumer behaviour with wider cultural shifts. Example: plant-based eating didn’t explode because of soy milk — it rode the wave of climate anxiety + health + foodie culture colliding. 🚦 Test for action. A good “insight” is useless if it doesn’t drive different behaviour. If it doesn’t change your strategy, your comms, or your innovation pipeline, it isn’t an insight, it’s trivia. ✂️ Be ruthless. Kill weak insights. If it’s just “consumers like convenience,” bin it. That’s not an insight, that’s a horoscope. Most marketers stop at “interesting.” The best marketers push to the uncomfortable “why.” That’s where the money is. So let’s see it. 👉 Drop the best consumer or shopper insight you’ve seen in the comments. I’ll call BS on the weak ones.

Two important sources of great insight that most marketers tend to miss out are: (1)Win-loss analysis (2)Existing customers (1) A win-loss analysis having accurate and comprehensive data (qualitative as well), can throw insights that are rarely documented anywhere else. Even secondary research will not give you that data. Analyzing these can provide trends about geographies, solution areas, industry, company type/ size, the audience involved in decision making, sponsoring, influencing, objections, FAQs, challenges, your USPs and probably your sweet spot. 💡 Example: In one former role, we realized that we were winning more new logos in non-banking finance apps in a particular market and that too primarily for a particular functionality which we werent highlighting much globally. 💡 Additionally, some cases highlighted that prospects were actively liking a particular type of content we were regularly promoting/ distributing and this was purely due to qualitative win-loss analysis that would never show in any numerical analysis (2) Customer interviews: Talking to existing customers ( in a non-sales situation) can help you to get a real understanding of how they use your product, what exactly is their Aha moment, what challenges they face, what's something they'd love to have and so on. Apart from helping the product teams, this provides useful fodder to address gaps in positioning, improve customer retention or help strengthen the buyer's journey. 💡 Example: In one former role, one reason our enterprise customers went gaga over us was our white glove onboarding and the overall post-sales process (typically handled by customer success). This helped us craft a niche bottom of the funnel campaign around this theme. ➡️ To conclude, the above can then be used in your marketing plans to capitalize on strengths, reducing weaknesses, determining areas to avoid, identifying opportunities etc. Eventually, you'll see a marked reduction in sales cycles and better retention as marketing would have taken care of most obstacles hindering the sales process. #B2BMarketing

We talk a lot about content, channels, and campaigns in #demandgen.  However, the most important thing is understanding your customers.  Without that knowledge, you're just guessing. Jumping straight into campaign mode is a big mistake. Even if you already have a file of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), it's still worth it to double-check for any new trends to understand your audience in real-time.  👉🏾Who are they?   👉🏾What are their (present) frustrations?   👉🏾What keeps them up at night? Understanding these factors changes everything. There are many ways to gather such insights:  👉🏾Using surveys gives you quantitative data. 👉🏾Interviews provide qualitative depth.  👉🏾Social listening (very important) reveals what people are saying online.  👉🏾Competitor analysis shows the overall landscape. Recently, I was working on a campaign for a new product. My assumptions were way off, especially after reviewing recent customer interviews, which revealed a different path. Together with my team, we updated our messaging and saw a massive increase in engagement. To say the least, market research saved the (our) day! #b2bmarketing #ABM #marketingstrategy