Audience Research: Survey

In order to gain an insight into what my target audience wants I created a survey on the website survey monkey and shared it on major social networking websites. Social networking has now become the norm and 30 million people in the UK now have an account with some sort of social networking site, therefore it is more useful and convenient to share surveys through social networking sites in order to get fair mixed results. I chose to share my survey on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr account and I by doing this I got results from 11 people and they were a mix of both male and females. 54.5% of my results came from males and 45.5% of my results came from females. 

I was surprised to find that many people (36.4%) who filled out my essay were between the ages of 25-34, this was followed closely by peope between the ages of 35-50  (27.3%) and people between 18-24 olds (18.2%).

The next step was to find out what kind of social grades my target audience fit under. Social grade is a classification system based on occupation and it enables a household and all its members to be classified according to the occupation of the highest income earner. I found out that 27.3% of people who filled out my survey were people who fit under the  C1 category  (Supervisory, clerical junior managerial, administrative or professional) and also people who fit under the E category (State pensioners, casual or low grade workers). Also categories AB and C2 both filled in 18.2% of the survey each.

Next I created a question asking my audience to fill out what category in the demographics list suits them most. 4 people that filled in the survey said that they thought themselves to be innovators and 3 said that they were striver's.  

Now that I know what kind of audience are filling out of my survey, I begin to start asking basic questions to figure out what my target audience choose to consume. The first question I asked to be filled out was how often people watch television. In a way I expected to see the response I got. Most people watch television for about 2 hours a day, however others will watch television for more than three hours a day. I think this is because a lot of people who completed this survey were fit under category E of the social grade, so most of them are younger members of society, the unemployed and elderly people. These people are more likely to watch television and are therefore far more likely to watch the type of product I am going to produce.

I then wanted to find out what kind of documentaries are popular among the people who took my survey. Nature documentaries seemed to be very popular with 8 (72%) people choosing this as their favourite type of documentary. This was closely followed by reality documentaries (45%) and drama documentaries (45%).

I also wanted to find out how much people watch documentaries, so added this to my survey. I found that most of the people who chose to fill out my survey only sometimes watch documentaries. This surprised me a little as I thought they would watch documentaries quite often due to the results I found in question 5. However, 36.4% said that they do watch documentaries often.

For question 8 I asked what institutions people preferred, in order to gain an insight into what style of documentary people prefer. Out of the five institutions listed (BBC, ITB, C4, C5, Sky and Youtube) 36.4% of the people who answered my survey preferred documentaries made by channel 4. Another 36.4% of people who answered this question preferred documentaries produced by the BBC and Sky.

My next question was more focused around the newspaper advert I will be creating as a part of my A2 project. I thought it would useful to ask what newspaper publication is popular among the people who answer the question in order for me to know where I would publish my advert and perhaps what style it should follow. The highest amount of votes went to The Independent, which received 4 votes (36.4%) and in second was The Guardian which received 2 votes (18.2%). All of the other publications received one vote, apart from The Sun, which did not receive any votes at all. 

Question 10 focused around the double page spread I have to create for my project. I wanted to know what television listings magazine are popular. This will be essential when designing it, as I will have to know what kind of language the magazine uses, how it looks and how it's laid out.  Nearly half (45.5%) of all the people that took the survey voted Radio Times as their favourite listings magazine. The rest of the magazines only received 2 votes each.

Now that I have conducted research into who my audience are and what they want, I can now to think of ideas to suit my them. Products made without considering the target audience will not get far in the real world and audiences will be left dissatisfied. Therefore I think it is essential to research into your audience and I think that conducting this research will benefit me and my documentary.