Audience Research

You might be wondering how what we do is different from other audience research agencies. It’s simple: we’re obsessed with how audiences find, consume and share stories. We dive deep into media-related habits and trends. We’re obsessed with audience attention patterns (ask us about our Attention Pattern Spectrum!). And we’re obsessed with what makes stories compelling and effective.

We openly share our curiosity and insights with everyone in our newsletters – breaking down the magic of content formats in Formats Unpacked, and unpicking the history and future of audience attention in Attention Matters.

Here’s how we can help you understand your audiences better:

Audience Trends and Media Behaviour

Why it is important

Understand your audience’s changing media behaviour to refine your content strategy. Get answers to questions such as:

What kinds of stories does your audience actively share with their peers and networks?
What are the key trends in media that affect how they consume content, and therefore what you should be creating?
How has the changing workplace affected their consumption of media?

How we can help

Using interviews, roundtables, focus groups and desk research, we get under the skin of your audience to truly understand their relationship with media.

What you’ll get

Reports summarising the current audience landscape and trends
Actionable insights from our research with your audience target group

Audience Segmentation

Why it is important

Audiences don’t have short attention spans, they have short consideration spans – unless you know what specific audiences need, and how you can provide value to them, your content won’t cut through the noise.

How we can help

We will segment your audience based on their content needs. For example, in a B2B setting, CEOs might have different needs and expectations from content compared to a HR manager, a payroll manager or a marketing manager. In a grant foundation setting, the needs of a grantee organisation may be different to that of the wider funding sector, individual Fellows, or internal employees.

What you’ll get

A list of audience personas that capture the key needs and behaviours of your target audiences, and what already gets their attention and engagement. From here we’ll develop ideas for content formats that will be effective and sustainable.

Audience Engagement Strategy

Why it is important

If you want to convert attention into action and sales, you need to keep visible and relevant to your audiences over the long term. There are stories we scroll past, and stories we subscribe to – if you want to be the latter, you need to get the value proposition of your content right.

How we can help

We will run a value proposition workshop ensuring your content resonates with and engages your target audience, and develop an audience engagement strategy to drive conversions and grow an audience that you can directly own.

What you’ll get

A value proposition workshop
A report with the value proposition for your content
An audience engagement strategy to help you grow owned audiences.

Top 10 Frontier Technologies for Climate Action

We were commissioned by Brink, who run the Frontier Technology Livestreaming project, to convert the results of CleanTech Group’s research into easily readable, more accessible audiovisual form.

Scroll Stoppers

The Storythings team knew audience behaviour had changed over the COVID-19 pandemic based on anecdotes from our friends and colleagues in the industry – but we wanted to know if our hunches were right. We needed the data! So we decided to do what we do best.

Q Visits Innovation

Q is a community of thousands of people across the UK and Ireland, collaborating to improve the safety and quality of health and care.

PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs– Future Strategy and Theory of Growth & Impact

PBS Student Reporting Labs (SRL) in the US connects students with a network of public broadcasting mentors and an innovative journalism curriculum to develop digital media, critical thinking, and communication skills while producing original news reports.

Science Gallery London – Theory of Growth & Community

Science Gallery London is King’s College’s flagship public facility connecting art, science and health.