Audience Research
Use to develop a deep, usable understanding of who a brand creates content for — sharp enough that every content skill resonates with them specific…
By Frank Heijdenrijk, MIT licence. Shared here with credit.
Audience Research
Knowing the audience deeply is the highest-leverage input to good content. You can have perfect voice and clean mechanics and still get ignored if the content doesn't speak to what the audience actually wants, in words they actually use. This skill builds that understanding — and writes it down so every other skill can use it.
It goes deeper than the audience sketch in brand-profile. Two ideas drive it:
- Jobs-to-be-done beat demographics. "35-year-old marketing manager, urban, likes coffee" tells you nothing about what to post. "Wants to stop feeling stupid in budget meetings" tells you everything. Capture what the audience is trying to do, not what census box they tick.
- Mirror their language, not your jargon. The single biggest lever in copy is using the audience's own words for their problem. So this skill collects the voice of the customer — real phrases from real sources — and builds a language bank the content skills draw from.