An audience.

What does this mean to you? Perhaps, you go to a play or a stand up comedian, you are the "audience" there. This line of thinking is correct.

However, an audience is much larger than this. You are an audience. You buy stuff, you need stuff, you want stuff. You are an audience for all of this "stuff". Whether this is laundry detergent or the latest iPhone app, you are an audience.

From the research side, it is important that you understand your audience. Businesses need to understand why people are buying within what niches, what products are popular and why, and what are the "hot buttons" within that niche.

Think about it. If you had a burger joint on the most active street in New York, but the audience wasn't hungry or the audience did not eat beef, your business would be in a lot of trouble. Just because there are people out there that you know "need" or "want" something does not mean you fully understand why they want it.

That is why you need to perform research on the consumers themselves. You need to understand what people are buying and more importantly, why. Also, different categories of people buy different items for completely different reasons. The marketing message in many cases needs to be targeted appropriately to different demographics.

Is a 90 year old woman the same audience as a 21 year old man?

A 90 year old woman who is dieting is looking for different things in a diet than a 21 year old man. If you try to market the same product with the same sales message to both of these people, you are likely not going to be that effective (you will to one audience, but not the other).

You then need to capture people when they are 'close to buying' instead of the people that are in the infancy stages of their research.

Break your niche down into "sub" categories.

Spend some time researching your market and the audiences within them. Each niche can likely be broken down into smaller sub-categories which will contain different audiences.

And remember, as with anything, RECORD YOUR WORK. Take notes when doing your research. If you don't have it down on paper or within a document, you will forget about it. Research that is forgotten about is time you have wasted.

Find out the "hot buttons" within your niche

So, how do you truly comprehend your niche. Ideally you are in a niche that you understand and that you are your own audience. For example, I play basketball and being the basketball niche would be something where I would understand the audience.

However, if you are not a "hobbyist" within your own niche, there are some simple ways you can research your audience to find out what they are looking for quite easily. For example purposes, I am going to continue with my niche (basketball) to show you how you can quickly find out quite a bit about your audience...and do so using free techniques. I am going to give a quick and dirty way to uncover your audience "needs" and "wants".

Technique #1: Using Google Instant

Google instant is native to the Google search. As you type in a search query, Google tries to predict what you are going to type and gives you relevant searches as you type. For example, I type in "basketball" you can see that it gives me some popular phrases...

Now, to find out what an audience is looking for (in terms of problems), you can determine this by typing in questions before your niche "term". In this example, I am going to add "how to" preceding the term "basketball". This will give me relevant "how to" questions that people are typing into Google.

Quickly, we have are growing closer to understanding some of the "issues" our audience is looking to solve. Four great ideas in just a matter of a few seconds. I can dig even deeper here and do so very quickly. I am going to take the term "how to shoot a basketball" and use Google instant on that. Here is what I got...

WOW! I have just found some exact terms that my audience is looking for and some of the things they are trying to accomplish. Now I could create mini-campaigns around these with the effort of helping this audience! The Google Instant technique works!

I could then elaborate on this by digging into any keyword, using other questions "why", "what", "where" preceding the term basketball. Endless amounts of research can be accomplished simply using the Google Instant search.