Audience research becomes dangerous when a handful of vivid quotes turns into a precise-looking persona. Interviews, reviews, communities, search behavior, analytics, and campaign data can all help, but they describe different populations and answer different questions.

Strawberry can work across those sources in the browser and approved tools, preserve links and dates, and keep representative evidence beside the synthesis. Your companion can remember the boundaries and corrections the team accepts, so later campaign and content work starts from evidence rather than a generic persona.

Start with the decision the research should improve

Define the product or offer, market, geography, time horizon, audience boundary, and decision in front of the team. If the request is broad, begin with the audience or question most likely to change near-term work.

This workflow studies audiences. It does not build lists of named prospects, contacts, creators, or partners. Keeping that boundary clear prevents behavioral evidence from quietly turning into outreach targeting.

Want to try it?

Ask your Strawberry companion: “Research this audience and show me the evidence behind their needs, language, behaviors, channels, tensions, and meaningful segments.”

Skill

Research an audience

Research the audience behind a real decision and produce a source-linked view of needs, language, behaviors, channels, tensions, and confidence.

Keep different sources honest

SourceWhat it can revealCommon trap
Interviews and support conversationsNeeds, language, context, and tensionsTreating a small selected group as prevalence
Reviews and communitiesObjections, alternatives, and naturally occurring languageOverweighting unusually vocal participants
Search and website behaviorDemand signals, discovery paths, and content needsInferring motivation from behavior alone
Product and campaign dataObserved usage or response within a defined populationIgnoring denominator, attribution, or identity limits

Preserve source type, link or record identifier, date, population, and enough context to inspect important findings. Aggregate or redact personal data when individual identity is not needed.

Calibrate before going wide

When collection could expand quickly, start with a small, varied evidence set across relevant sources, segments, and viewpoints. Review what is included, what is missing, and how the companion proposes to synthesize it.

Coach the boundary and evidence bar before expanding. Capture counterexamples and tensions rather than selecting only evidence that supports the current brief.

Synthesize differences that change the work

Group evidence around distinctions that could change the message, channel, product story, or campaign, not around demographic detail that merely makes a persona look complete.

  • Needs, desired outcomes, and triggering moments.
  • Barriers, anxieties, objections, and alternatives.
  • Language, concepts, proof, and examples people use.
  • Discovery, evaluation, decision, and usage behavior.
  • Channels, communities, formats, and information sources.
  • Tensions or meaningful differences between situations and segments.

For each important theme, show representative evidence, exceptions, confidence, and the marketing implication. Keep observation, interpretation, and recommendation separate.

Turn audience insights into the next plan

Deliver a concise brief with the scope, sources, material limits, evidence-backed segments or situations, needs, language, behaviors, channels, tensions, implications, and open questions. Stop before campaign planning or contact-list building.

Skill

Plan a marketing campaign

Turn an accepted audience view into an approval-ready campaign decision.

Skill

Build a content plan

Use accepted audience evidence to shape themes, briefs, formats, channels, and reuse.

Official Strawberry skill
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name
research-an-audience
description
Research a marketing audience from approved qualitative and quantitative sources, then produce source-linked segments, needs, language, behaviors, channels, tensions, evidence gaps, and confidence. Use before positioning, campaign, content, SEO, or channel decisions; not for building contact, prospect, or creator lists.

Research an Audience

Build an evidence-backed view of an audience that can improve a real marketing decision. Do the research and synthesis; do not stop at a research plan.

1. Define the decision and audience boundary

Understand what the team needs to decide, the product or offer, the market and geography, the time horizon, and which audience is in scope. Use an existing audience definition when one exists, but do not treat it as proven merely because it is familiar.

Agree on the useful output and evidence bar. If the request is broad, start with the audience or decision most likely to change near-term work.

This skill studies audiences. It does not build lists of named prospects, contacts, creators, or partners. Route those jobs to the appropriate Sales, Research, or partnership workflow.

2. Gather evidence that can answer the question

Use the approved sources most likely to reveal needs, language, behavior, and channel context. These may include interviews, surveys, customer feedback, support conversations, reviews, communities, search behavior, website and product analytics, campaign results, sales conversations, research, and relevant public material.

Use Strawberry's visible browser workspace when the evidence lives across real sites or logged-in tools. Preserve source links, dates, source type, and enough context to inspect each important finding. Aggregate or redact personal data when individual identity is not needed.

Keep source populations distinct. A vocal community, a customer interview set, product telemetry, and platform-reported audience data do not represent the same population. Do not turn a count into prevalence without a meaningful denominator.

3. Build and calibrate the first evidence set

When collection could become broad, first assemble a small, varied set across relevant source types, segments, and viewpoints. Show what is included, what is missing, and the proposed synthesis frame so the user can correct the boundary before the research expands.

Continue once the direction is useful. Capture counterexamples and tensions rather than selecting only evidence that supports the existing brief.

4. Synthesize the audience

Group evidence around differences that could change marketing work, such as:

  • needs, jobs, desired outcomes, and triggering moments;
  • barriers, anxieties, objections, and alternatives;
  • language, concepts, proof, and examples people use;
  • discovery, evaluation, decision, and usage behavior;
  • channels, communities, formats, and information sources; and
  • meaningful differences between segments or situations.

Create segments only when the evidence shows a useful difference in needs, behavior, message, or route to market. Do not infer sensitive traits or invent demographic precision.

For each important theme, include representative evidence, the sources behind it, tensions or exceptions, and a confidence judgment. Keep observation separate from interpretation and from the marketing implication.

5. Validate and deliver

Check coverage across the agreed audience and source types. Look for stale evidence, missing segments, over-represented channels, contradictory signals, weak identity matching, and claims that depend on one anecdote.

Deliver a concise audience evidence brief with:

  • scope, sources, dates, and material limitations;
  • evidence-backed segments or situations;
  • needs, language, behavior, channels, barriers, and tensions;
  • representative source-linked examples;
  • implications for the decision in scope; and
  • open questions and the next evidence worth collecting.

Stop before roadmap prioritization, campaign planning, contact-list building, or outreach. When the audience view is accepted, use strawberry/marketing/plan-a-marketing-campaign for a campaign decision or strawberry/marketing/build-a-content-plan for an editorial program.

6. Work within scope and make the method reusable

Follow Strawberry's active scoped permission for every source, account, and action. Draft or ask when permission is insufficient; stop when identity, scope, impact, or sensitive-data handling changes. Verify any completed external action.

After the team accepts the audience boundaries, source mix, evidence bar, and output, offer to save the method for reuse. A recurring monitor is appropriate only when the sources, meaningful-change rule, cadence, destination, and review behavior are clear.