There’s no such thing as knowing your audience too well, but do you feel your team only has a limited or surface-level understanding? If you’re trying to reach your target consumers with strategies based primarily on assumptions instead of data, curiosity may be your key to uncovering new opportunities.
Tap into curiosity
For marketers, curiosity means using uncertainty as a chance to ask better questions.
Here’s an example to put your assumptions to the test: Who is more likely to discover a new brand via social media comments: an 18-year-old internet user or a 43-year-old one?
It’s the 43-year-old, but only barely.
According to the new “Digital 2026: Global Overview Report,” 23.9% of 16- to 24-year-old internet users discover new brands, products, and services via social media comments, compared to 24.3% of 35- to 44-year-olds. However, for both age groups, social media comments are the sixth-biggest brand discovery channel, ahead of retail websites and ads on websites.
So, while you’d be right to assume that social leans younger, with social ads being the top source of brand discovery for users aged 16 to 34, a data-driven gut check offers the kind of detail and context that assumptions can’t.
In an era when consumer insights are as advanced and democratized as ever (and digital behavior is as nuanced as ever), curiosity met with reliable data is one of the few true competitive advantages.
Put smarter solutions to work
For a real-world example, take Neuro, a functional gum and mint brand. When its marketing team had a theory that it should target gaming audiences, the team used it to guide their curiosity.
Neuro undertook a Meltwater consumer intelligence market analysis that not only validated its theory with complex data but also uncovered insights into the kind of social media content that resonated most with its target gaming audience, revealing new ways to position its Sleep and Recharge collection against professional competitors.
“That was enlightening,†said Jennifer Chang, VP of commercial/head of marketing at Neuro. “We learned the value of having the right content for the right audience.â€
With that research at hand, Neuro entered a yearlong brand partnership that helped drive a 406% year-over-year sales lift.
Had the brand chosen to strategize based solely on assumptions, it would have missed out on uncovering the answers to crucial questions. This case emphasizes the need for marketers to better understand the “why†behind consumers’ decisions.
Today, solutions like large language model monitoring, brand-level sentiment analysis, video analysis, and more can help you decode not only consumer preferences but also the motivations behind them. Curiosity combined with reliable data and analytics helped Neuro validate its theories and transform them into supercharged strategies. How many of its competitors can say the same?
Set your sights on the unknown
When consumers’ interests, habits, and preferences are constantly evolving, curiosity becomes your advantage. Looking at the chart below, you will see that the user bases of the top social media platforms have significant overlap. For example, only 1.2% of YouTube’s active users are unique to the platform.
For marketers, this means there isn’t one platform where you can conveniently find your audience. Instead, reaching your target audience across platforms with billions of users requires a healthy dose of curiosity and market research to determine the correct messaging, creative, and channel to break through.
So, as a marketing leader, how can you foster curiosity in your strategic approach? Use uncertainty to guide your attention with questions like:
- When was the last time we updated our personas and how? Where are our blind spots?
- What are my target audience’s motivations, core values, main concerns, and aspirations? Where and how do they spend time online?
- What are the key brand dimensions that emerge in conversations about my brand? Does how we want to be perceived online align with how we are actually perceived?
- Where, how, and why are my priority topics being discussed online? What is the thread running through the most engaging content?
- What are my competitors doing right? What are they missing?
In the past, many of these questions were technologically unanswerable. Today, marketers are limited only by their desire to learn.
Next time you see complacency setting in, take a reset by asking the hard questions. There is an answer: You can find it in the data.
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Alexandra Bjertnæs is chief strategy officer at Meltwater, a global leader in media, social, and consumer intelligence. With over 30 years of experience in corporate strategy marketing, corporate communications, business development, and sales, she leads Meltwater’s corporate strategy, marketing, communications, and community/education teams.