Audience research: 10 places to get started with no budget (+ one practical example)
You don’t need to be a seasoned UX researcher to get a sense of what your audience is talking about online – nor do you need to spend a fortune.
What did online users search for this year in your target region? What recurring fears and frustrations do consumers experience within a specific industry? What do prospects dislike about your competitor’s product?
If you’re like me, you spend hours observing how your users interact in the wild. The good news is, you don’t need to be a seasoned UX researcher to get a sense of what your audience is talking about online – nor do you need to spend a fortune.
In this post, I share 10 social listening, conversation mining and search tools you can try for free – no matter your role within the product organization. I also share how I’ve used these tools myself to extract user insights and come up with UX design recommendations.
Facebook groups
While it’s true that Millennials and Gen Z are leaving Facebook, Zuckerberg’s social network can still be used effectively to find meaningful user conversations in specific niches – such as natural healing, DIY, beauty, gardening, pets, parenting and home cooking, to name a few.
If you’re launching a new product or service, you can search Facebook posts and groups to understand the needs, goals and pain points of your intended audience on a more general level. Alternatively, you can research what people are saying about a particular company or product.
The screenshot below is taken from an Italian Facebook group where pet owners exchange tips and recommendations on their beloved animals. Here, five customers are reviewing a stress-relieving product for cats. Three of these comments are generally positive, while the other two are fairly negative. You can extract vocabulary highlights, user frustrations and potential suggestions to better serve these customers.
subreddits (+ GummySearch)
Reddit is a great social network for gauging sentiment, as ideas and opinions are more in depth, and users tend not to mince their words. This mostly applies to English-speaking communities, but you can find plenty of hidden gems in other languages, too.
In this excerpt from a Reddit thread in Italian, a developer makes the case against putting yet another pizza delivery app on the market (as opposed to listing your business on an existing multi-vendor app). Information like this can help you validate and further refine your business idea.
You can also pair Reddit with GummySearch, an audience research tool that helps you monitor communities, uncover solution gaps and track keywords related to your business – not to mention generate content ideas inspired by what your actual prospects are saying.
As an example, here is a screenshot from the Audiences page, where I searched for popular discussions among no-coders.
GummySearch comes with a basic free tier you can use for 7 days without having to enter your payment details.
Quora
When it comes to exploring communities, Quora is similar to Reddit, but it’s focused more on sharing first-hand knowledge rather than brands and their products. It’s interesting to see what questions are being asked and what the mood is around certain topics.
In this example, I’ve used keywords to bring up user discussions on the connection between social media and fake news.
So far, I’ve focused on spaces that prioritize the community and networking aspect, because they allow us to analyze conversations more closely. You can apply this approach to more media-heavy platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Twitch, too.
Let’s move on to other tools out there.
Amazon customer reviews
Another effective way to learn what buyers think of your product (or your competitor’s offering) is to read their reviews on Amazon. A quick scroll through customer reviews allows you to understand what works and what needs to be improved. In addition, the Q&A section can reveal consumers’ most frequent concerns and drive you to focus on features they actually care about.
In these screenshots, you can see both the Reviews and the Q&A sections for a voice-controlled smart speaker. Amazon does a good job at highlighting social proof (popular questions, pictures, ratings, most liked features, most searched keywords), which is often key when it comes to making a purchasing decision.
Google Trends
Google Trends is one of my go-to places when I want to compare keywords and discover locally related queries, as well as learn about yearly search trends.
In the example below, I tested keywords related to foldable smartphones in Italy until I found some popular ones. I then looked at the breakdown compared by region.
And here is a comparison of Google’s Year in Search 2021 and 2022 in Italy. While 2021 saw several queries related to the pandemic, vaccines and home cooking, in 2022 there was a shift to travel, politics and the war in Ukraine.
It might also be worth taking a look at a recap of last year’s shopping trends.
AlsoAsked
You know the ‘People also ask’ section in your Google search results? Simply put, it’s where Google displays questions people commonly search in relation to your query. You can use a keyword research tool like AlsoAsked to extract data from the People also ask section and see how these topics are connected in a tree diagram.
Understanding search intent can help you create new – or improve existing – content in a way that better resonates with your audience. Here, I searched how to get back into shape after the end-of-the-year holidays and got a series of related questions, visually arranged into four sub-topics.
Right now, AlsoAsked offers you a limited number of free searches without having to sign in.
AnswerThePublic
Similar to AlsoAsked, you can use AnswerThePublic to monitor searches, validate ideas and see visual representations of your results. While AlsoAsked derives data from the People also ask section, AnswerThePublic shows combinations of auto-complete searches.
In this example, I searched for ‘electronic passport’ in Italian and got results organized into five categories: Questions, Prepositions, Comparisons, Alphabeticals and Related. The darker the dot color next to each result, the higher the search volume for that query.
At the moment, AnswerThePublic has a public version, which comes with one free search, but you can create a free account to get three free searches per day.
AllTop.com
You don’t see many RSS feeds these days, but there is a website where you can still use them effectively. AllTop.com lets you create a personalized RSS feed by bringing your favorite online publications in one place. This is especially useful if you’re studying a product, brand, audience or niche and want to stay on top of the news. Your feed can also turn into a valuable resource for content curation.
Here’s a feed I created when I started researching the edtech industry some time ago. Instead of receiving dozens of newsletters every week, I now see the most recent headlines from my selected sources on one page.
SparkToro
Here’s one last tool to wrap up this list: SparkToro. SparkToro is an audience research tool that helps you learn more about your readers or prospects, from their job title, the keywords used in their niche and the sources of influence they pay attention to.
Here, I tried searching for a social account my audience might be following. I got data on the words and hashtags they frequently use, influencers they follow, websites they visit the most and press accounts they read. You can use these insights to build better user personas and, as we’ve seen, find keywords and topics for content creation, among other things.
Right now, Twitter is the social network with the best coverage, and the tool seems to be working best with English.
On the free plan, you have 5 searches per month available to test some of SparkToro’s features.
A practical example
Now let’s see how I used the tools I mentioned in a personal project to learn more about my users and better cater to their needs. As part of a challenge by the UX Writing Hub, I started laying the foundation for a brand-new gardening app and writing microcopy addressed to an Italian-speaking audience.
Here’s what I did:
I used the tools above to research my audience – gardening enthusiasts. Then I recorded vocabulary highlights, user fears and user goals in a conversation mining template provided by the UX Writing Hub.
As I filled in the template, recurring themes emerged and I started getting a clearer picture of the gardening landscape in Italy.
For example, I learned that:
- During the pandemic, when they were experiencing social isolation, people turned to DIY gardening to restart an old hobby, disconnect, and cope with anxiety. Several gardening-related terms were recorded among Google Trends’ most popular searches – from growing vegetables indoors and creating home-made compost bins to finding flower shops nearby.
- There are plenty of users passionate about growing their own plants, but they’re just getting started with gardening and don’t know how to take their first steps. They say it’s difficult to find reliable learning materials, so they use a mix of books, specialized blogs, forums, YouTube videos and advice from friends or the local florist.
- Newbie gardeners are frustrated because their inexperience and lack of specific knowledge has led many of their beloved plants to wilt. These users are looking for clear and straightforward instructions to grow aromatic herbs, vegetables and flowers at home – whether it be in the garden, on a balcony or indoors.
Why is this preliminary research so important?
Because it can set the stage for the whole UX design process – not just the UX writing component.
- Users turn to gardening to relax? The new gardening app can use a muted, earthy color palette that conveys calmness, stability and organic growth. This could be paired with a tone of voice that is warm, informal and reassuring.
- Users have recurring questions and fears? The app can address common concerns by prominently displaying dedicated features and content sections that are newbie-friendly.
- Users struggle to find trustworthy information because it’s scattered everywhere? The app can collect information from leading sources and provide it all in one place in a digestible format.
- A reliable gardening website doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version? The app can fill that gap, too.
After implementing these insights into some design mockups, I circled back with actual gardening enthusiasts and asked them for feedback to keep improving the copy and visual elements.
I hope this post helped you. Do you use any of the tools we’ve looked at? Are there any others you’d like to add to the list?
Let me know in the comments.
