The basic questions of audience research

1. How large is the audience - both as an average, and as the reach (number of different people)? This is explained in more detail in the box [separate file].

2. What kind of people make up the audience? How do they differ from the whole population - e.g. in terms of age group, sex, occupation, etc?
3. Where is your audience? In each part of your coverage area, what percentage of the population are members of your audience?
4. When does your audience use your publication (or tune into your station) - what time of day, what day of week, etc?
5. How do your audience members spend their time? How much of their time is spent being part of your audience? And how much with your competitors?
6. What type of content (e.g. radio and TV programs, newspaper articles) interests your audience most - and least?
7. What styles of presentation do your audience prefer, and what styles do they dislike?
8. Which activities, attitudes, and other effects do your publications cause among your audience?
9. How will your audience react to a new kind of program or article that you might introduce?
10. How can you increase your audience? Is it best to try to find new listeners? Or to bring lapsed listeners back? Or to persuade existing listeners to spend more time with your broadcasts?
11. What percentage of the population in your area know about your station - and how much do they know about it?
12. What is preventing people from using your service as much as they might? Most audience research is directed towards answering the above general questions. Some of them, of course, are more than one question. In fact, some of those questions can be divided into hundreds of more precise questions.
With any proposed research project, it is useful to work out which of the above general questions it tries to answer. Most research projects will cover more than one of the general questions, but if you have done no audience research before, it will be impossible to cover all questions with a single project. You would have to ask thousands of questions, and most respondents would not have enough patience to answer so many questions accurately.

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