Here's a number that should worry every marketer: 41% admit to not doing audience research nearly enough. When you add in those doing it "very infrequently," over half of marketers are essentially flying blind when it comes to understanding their customers.
This isn't just a minor oversight. In a world where every marketing channel is saturated and competitive, audience research has become the secret weapon for taking the big swings that actually move the needle. Yet most companies treat it like an afterthought.
The question isn't whether audience research matters – it's why so few companies actually do it well.
The biggest culprit behind poor audience research isn't laziness or lack of awareness. It's structural. "Look at any marketing position, any product design position, engineering position," says Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro. "You will almost never see market and audience research listed as a must-have skill."
Think about that for a moment. Companies will list email marketing proficiency as essential. They'll require Google Analytics experience. But somehow, understanding what your audience actually does online isn't important enough to put in a job description.
This creates a weird gap in marketing education. Everyone learns that knowing your audience is fundamental – it's Marketing 101. But when it comes to actual implementation, it falls into a gray area where everyone assumes someone else is handling it.
The irony is striking when you consider SEO. "We did keyword research every day," Fishkin notes about his SEO background. "It would be absolutely mental to do SEO with no keyword research." Keyword research is just one form of audience research, yet in every other marketing channel – social media, content marketing, PR, email – the equivalent step gets skipped entirely.
Before diving into solutions, it's worth clarifying what we're talking about. Audience research isn't just demographics or basic personas. It's understanding who your potential customers are and what they do on the web so you can reach them with the right message, in the right places, at the right time.
This goes deeper than surface-level data. Take the example of someone searching for "queen mattress sizes." Most marketers stop at the obvious: they want to know mattress dimensions. But that misses the real insight. What's happening in their life that makes them need this information? Are they college students getting their first apartment? Parents upgrading a guest room? Young professionals moving in together?
Each scenario suggests completely different messaging strategies, channels, and timing. A 20th-century ad agency would have asked these questions before creating a single piece of creative. Digital marketers somehow forgot this step.
Large companies do invest heavily in audience research. They buy raw clickstream data, commission market research reports, and employ teams of analysts. But even they struggle with a different problem: data silos and analysis paralysis.
The real gap exists in mid-tier companies making $20-100 million annually. These organizations often assume their marketing team or agency is handling audience research. When you dig deeper, you discover nobody is actually responsible for it.
This creates what Fishkin calls an "important but not time-sensitive" problem. It sits on everyone's list of things they should do, constantly pushed aside by urgent tactical demands. The boss needs an email campaign launched. Cost-per-click needs to come down. SQL numbers need to go up. But nobody's asking whether the channels and tactics being optimized are actually the right ones for reaching the target audience.
The tragedy is that competitors who do invest in audience research can completely change the game while others optimize incrementally.
The most powerful audience insights often come from unexpected discoveries. During a recent campaign for a pickleball paddle company, researchers uncovered something surprising: partner relationships are a huge deal in the pickleball community. There's even a "partner appreciation day," and who you play with becomes almost like another relationship status.
This wasn't something they went looking for specifically. They were just exploring the community, staying open to whatever patterns emerged. That serendipitous insight became the foundation for a campaign that resonated far more than generic sports equipment messaging.
This points to a different approach than the traditional "gather data, then act" model. Instead, start with a specific problem – maybe the boss wants to explore YouTube investment – then use that as motivation to dive deep into audience behavior on that platform.
Here's a counterintuitive truth about modern marketing: the channels where you can't easily prove ROI often offer the biggest opportunities.
Every channel where you can invest a dollar and reliably get $1.01 back is completely saturated. Google Ads, Meta ads, LinkedIn ads – every company and their Fortune 500 competitors are pouring money into these spaces. The result is incremental gains at best.
But channels where you can't quickly prove return on investment? Most CMOs and CFOs avoid them entirely. This creates massive opportunities for companies willing to embrace uncertainty.
Billboard advertising that drives branded search lifts. Guerrilla poster campaigns that cost $500 but generate 15% month-over-month sales increases. Community engagement on Reddit that can't be tracked but clearly moves the needle.
The challenge is attribution. When someone sees your poster, then googles your brand, then converts, the credit goes to Google. When a Reddit thread mentions your company and sales spike, there's no referral link to prove causation. This measurement gap scares away most marketers, leaving huge opportunities for those willing to embrace strategic uncertainty.
The rise of AI tools has created a new problem in audience research. More marketers are turning to ChatGPT for quick answers about their audience, not realizing they're getting "stereotype answers" rather than real data.
Large language models excel at producing words that frequently appear together in training data. Ask ChatGPT what percentage of college students use YouTube for mattress research, and it will confidently respond with something like "84% of students in the greater Salt Lake City area use YouTube for mattress research." When pressed for sources, those links either don't exist or don't support the claim.
"It's like asking ChatGPT for keyword research in SEO," Fishkin explains. "It's easily provable that it doesn't know what it's talking about because ChatGPT doesn't have the data."
The solution isn't avoiding AI entirely, but using it properly. AI excels as a translation layer – helping you describe complex audience segments in natural language that then gets converted into specific behavioral data points. But it should never be the source of that data.
Despite widespread speculation that AI is killing search, the data tells a different story. Search volume hasn't declined even as AI adoption has skyrocketed from 18% to nearly 40% of Americans using AI tools monthly.
The real threat to website traffic isn't people switching from Google to ChatGPT. It's Google providing instant answers through AI overviews and zero-click searches. This trend is particularly pronounced on mobile, where screen real estate limitations make immediate answers more valuable.
Interestingly, heavy AI users – those visiting AI tools 10+ times per month – actually perform more Google searches than average. These aren't competing behaviors; they're complementary. The 20% of Americans who are heavy AI adopters tend to be heavy internet research users across all channels.
Platform behavior is shifting in other ways too. Reddit usage is climbing, with over 25% of US devices now active on the platform monthly. YouTube usage on desktop is declining slightly, but this appears to be a shift toward mobile viewing rather than overall abandonment.
The key to getting audience research approved isn't making a general case for its importance. It's connecting specific research to immediate business problems.
SparkToro learned this lesson firsthand when their growth plateaued after a major data source change. Instead of general customer research, they commissioned specific interviews with their best customers and prospects who hadn't converted. The insight was surprising: most users weren't using SparkToro for tactical channel optimization. They were downloading CSV reports to create presentations that would convince their bosses to invest in specific channels.
This revelation led to building visual reporting features directly into the product. The result? Their best three-month growth streak in company history, even during a tough SaaS market period.
The lesson is clear: audience research works best when it solves specific strategic questions rather than attempting to understand everything about everyone.
Start with problems, not general curiosity. When leadership asks about investing in YouTube marketing, that's the perfect time to research what percentage of your audience uses YouTube, which channels they follow, and what content resonates with them.
Use behavioral data, not surveys. People can't accurately report their own internet behavior any more than they can recall everything they bought at the grocery store last year. Clickstream data, social media engagement, and search behavior provide much more reliable insights.
Focus on your specific audience, not macro trends. Industry reports showing that "Gen Z prefers TikTok" don't matter if your particular Gen Z audience segment primarily uses Reddit. Macro trends are interesting cocktail party conversation, but business decisions need segment-specific data.
Invest in channels where your competitors aren't looking. The platforms and tactics that are hardest to measure often offer the biggest opportunities precisely because other companies avoid them.
Every great marketing campaign starts with an insight about the audience that allows for innovation, creativity, or an unexpected angle. These insights don't happen by accident – they come from dedicated time spent understanding who you're trying to reach and what motivates them.
The companies winning in today's saturated marketing landscape aren't necessarily those with the biggest budgets or the smartest tactics. They're the ones who understand their audiences deeply enough to take calculated risks that their competitors wouldn't even consider.
Audience research isn't just another item on the marketing checklist. It's the foundation that makes everything else more effective. The question isn't whether you can afford to invest in understanding your audience – it's whether you can afford not to.
The opportunity is sitting there, waiting for companies brave enough to make audience research someone's actual job. The data exists, the tools are available, and most importantly, your competitors probably aren't doing it well.
Time to change that.
“I want to know who my potential customers are and what they do on the web so that I can target, reach them with the best possible messaging in the best places at the right time. That's marketing 101.” - Rand Fishkin
00:08 - Problem with audience research adoption
03:24 - SEO analogy for audience research
10:20 - Who should own audience research
19:17 - AI's role in audience research
26:35 - Serendipitous insights from research
34:51 - Google, AI, and search trends
Try Sparktoro for audience research: https://sparktoro.com/
Request a free AI Audit: https://97thfloor.com/ai-audit/
Connect with Rand on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/randfishkin
Connect with Paxton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paxtongray/
Looking for an agency that'll be worth the investment? 97th Floor creates custom, audience-first campaigns that drive pipeline and conversions. Get started here: https://97thfloor.com/lets-talk/.
Rand Fishkin is the co-founder and CEO of audience research platform SparkToro and indie game developer Snackbar Studio. He’s dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through the Whiteboard Friday video series, his blog, and his book, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.
Rand was previously the cofounder of Moz, and Inbound.org, and a co-author on The Art of SEO. He’s keynoted over 100 events around the world on marketing, technology, and startup topics.
