How to Stay Updated on Your Audience’s Needs
People can stick with a product they love for many, many years. Back in the day, changing their minds used to be harder. Now, all it takes is one convincing TikTok, a Reddit thread full of recommendations, or a single frustrating experience to send them scrambling for alternatives.
That doesn’t happen because your product suddenly got worse, but because your audience’s needs change. Even if they’re thrilled with your product today, options are everywhere and they’re not immune to trying something different.
Before their flip switches, you need to start asking questions like:
- Am I keeping up with my audience’s needs?
- How can my product accompany their changing needs?
- Which competing products could they gravitate towards, and why?
Knowing these things in real-time gives you an edge. You can adapt, improve, and engage as your audience evolves. This guide walks you through the best ways to track audience shifts, monitor trends, and stay relevant in an industry where preferences change fast.
Cover All Your Listening Bases with the Right Keywords and Tools
There are a million ways to start addressing your audience’s needs, but the first one is to listen.
Don’t overthink it. I’ll walk you through my process using a pretend product as an example: a productivity tool for bootstrapped startup founders.
The first few things I’d like to listen to are:
- Chatter around my product/brand
- Chatter around my competitors (useful for smaller brands, where your name might not generate much noise)
- What my audience likes and dislikes about solutions like mine
- Solutions they’ve tried before or are currently trying, and why those worked (or didn’t work) for them
Those are great starting points, but they aren’t the research itself. To trigger those conversations, we first need to find and track the right keywords.
Which Keywords Are Worth Tracking?
While you can add or remove certain keywords depending on your research goals, here are a few staples I never miss out on:
- Product category: Broad terms like “task management for startups” or “productivity tools for founders.”
- Customer objectives: What my target audience wants, like “how to manage tasks as a solopreneur” or “tools to stay focused while bootstrapping.”
- Pain points: Specific struggles, such as “alternatives to Notion” or “simpler task management for busy founders.”
Sure, I could pop these into a Google search, but if I want the raw stuff, social media (particularly Reddit) is where I’ll find it. People are often more candid on platforms like Reddit, where anonymity encourages honesty.
Plus, I need to focus on recency and accuracy. A blog post from 2020 won’t do justice to an audience that changes its mind day after day. In this case, it’s best to stick with the socials.
Tracking the Right Keywords with the Right Tools
Manually keeping track of these keywords every day is a hard pass, even on social media. I’m busy, you’re busy, and automated keyword tracking makes it all doable. It also ensures I’m not missing anything, even if it was mentioned weeks ago on a niche subreddit or buried in a TikTok comment thread.
To make sure I’m catching all the conversations that matter, I automate my social listening across multiple platforms:
- Reddit → GummySearch: GummySearch makes it super easy to catch honest and often brutally raw Reddit threads. We’ve created this tool so it can filter through millions of Reddit posts using AI, save tons of reading time, and only dive deep into the most important conversations. Because I’m looking for likes, dislikes, and other potential solutions, the “I love”, “Looking for”, and “I hate” keyword filters are extremely helpful.
- Instagram & TikTok → Brand24, Mention: You can use these tools to track comments and discussions, not just tagged posts. While posts could be paid partnerships (read: polished and biased), the comment section is where real conversations happen.
- Google Reviews & News → Google Alerts: You can set alerts for your brand, competitors, and industry keywords. It’s a great way to stay on top of what’s being said outside the social bubble.
- X → TweetDeck (Now X Pro), Hootsuite: You can keep an eye on industry conversations, relevant hashtags, and direct mentions. People often use X as a stream of consciousness, which is exactly what you need.
Any Social Media Platform Is Great for Keyword Tracking. But Here’s Why Reddit Is the Best
More often than not, I can hit all four of my key tracking areas in a single search.
For example, if I search for something like “productivity tools for startup founders,” I might land on a post where someone is actively looking for advice, laying out their whole backstory, what they’ve tried, what they’re struggling with, and what they need.
Take a look at the following example:
The above user is asking for productivity tool recommendations to help them work faster. In a single post, they…
- Give me context on their situation: they’re 24 years old, juggling multiple projects, and looking for ways to be more productive.
- While they don’t explicitly list struggles, I can infer that time management and efficiency are challenges since they’re looking for tools to help them work faster.
- Specify they’re looking for apps, software, or strategies that help with staying on top of tasks and boosting productivity.
Then, the replies roll in. Other founders jump in with their experiences, recommendations, and critiques.
And suddenly I know what tools similar people use, what they love about them, and even the best features of each. I can dig even deeper by going over to GummySearch’s Product Report and triangulating these insights with the tools my Audience already uses. I just need to type in the word “productivity” to start looking for discrepancies and overlap between productivity tools. (Don’t worry, we’ll be talking about GummySearch up next.)
This way, I get rich, discussion-driven data instead of scattered one-off opinions. That depth is hard to find anywhere except for one-on-one customer interviews.
By the way, check out my social listening article if you’d like to get more out of your audience insights!
Practical Example: How I Track Important Keywords Using GummySearch
First, all I need is to create an Audience using the subreddits that resonate with my ideal users. In my case, my audience is called Startup Founders and it’s made up of 16 subs which accounts for 12.5M members. This should bring up a lot of interesting conversations.
Next, I start tracking keywords that match the previous criteria. So, if I’m running a search on “best productivity tools” and decide this keyword is worth watching closely…
…I simply hit the “Track 🔔” button in the upper right after running the search.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll want to make sure every notification counts so that you’re not getting pinged for lukewarm conversations. When I want to be extra sure, I fill in the “AI Match Criteria” field, as it helps me specify the types of posts I want to see. While this filtering might generate fewer results, those will be much sharper when compared to the outputs from a broader search.
This is important: Before tracking any keyword, I double-check that it makes sense in the first place.
- Are they relevant to my audience?
- Are there enough mentions to be worth tracking, but not so many that I’ll get overwhelmed?
If I’m happy with the way things might go, I add the keyword to my tracked list. From that point on, anytime a new conversation pops up containing that keyword, GummySearch will notify me inside the app.
All tracked keywords live in the Conversations 💬 tab. If I want to go beyond just tracking and actually analyze performance, I toggle the “Stats” view. This lets me see how often any keyword is mentioned and how active those conversations are.
Stay in the Loop About Your Audience’s Interests, Even Outside What Your Product Category
It’s easy to think that audience research starts and ends with my product. Shouldn’t I just focus on addressing their needs by tracking product mentions? Isn’t that more efficient?
Not quite!
My audience is made up of real people with full, complex lives. First and foremost, I should know that bootstrapped startup founders most likely don’t wake up thinking, “I wonder which productivity app I’ll use today…”
Nope! They wake up thinking, “I have 15 things to do before noon, I barely slept, and I need to figure out how to grow this startup without losing my mind.”
Knowing what they’re talking about (funding struggles, mental health, AI tools, even TV shows!) gives me an unfiltered look into their world.
If I only focus on conversations about, say, time management skills, I’ll be missing a much bigger picture. On the flip side, if I’m tracking discussions like “Is bootstrapping worth it?” or “I can’t find time to build and market at the same time”, I suddenly understand their deeper struggles, desires, and interests and how I can continually meet their needs.
“But How Do I Find Out What People Are Saying Within Four Walls?”
The truth is, I can’t be sure. I can’t truly be 100% sure about anything when it comes to product development – I can only go with my most data-driven insights and make adjustments as I go.
GummySearch will give me data-driven insights by telling me what the current “buzz” is within my ideal audience and how popular those topics are. There are two special features for that: my Audience’s Hot Discussions🔥 and Top Content 👍 – two of the scoring-based themes from GummySearch.
The great thing about these themes (or any Theme inside GummySearch) is that they give me an accurate AI-generated summary of the top conversations. Of course, I can always click the “Browse All” button to jump into individual posts when I have the time.
I can also extract Patterns from these conversations if I’m short on time (which I often am)…
And I can also ask GummySearch’s AI pointed questions if I want to discover something more specific. And for each answer, I get every single source.
GummySearch gives me well-rounded, year-round updates, simply because Top Content gives me the top posts of the month…
…while Hot Discussions gives me the top conversations of the week.
If I take a peek at the Startup Founders’ Hot Discussions every week and their top posts every month, I’ll stay up to date with their shifting needs at all times – with very little effort.
Stay Updated the Easy Way with GummySearch’s Monthly Email Summary
Even if I follow all of the above steps, I’m only human. Some insights can and will slip through my fingers. The good news is that GummySearch will pick them up for me and pack them into a monthly rundown of key discussions based on my tracked keywords.
Just so you can have an idea of how detailed this is, here’s everything it tracked for my Startup Founders Audience.
- The top 10 growing topics within my Audience
- All of the keywords I searched for
- The most common themes throughout conversations
- The most popular posts that month
- The fastest-growing subreddits (great if I need to cover more ground)
- And lastly, the similar subreddits I can include to my Audience
Having a roundup like this can keep me in touch with my audience even during crazy-busy months. And I’m sure it’ll do the same for you.
Don’t Remove Yourself From the Process (Your Audience Notices!)
Yeah, automation is incredible. This entire article is about how to stay on top of your audience’s changing needs in the smartest way possible.
That said, if you automate everything without being intentional, you lose sight of the reason you built your product in the first place: to connect with people. This is overly cliché, but the only goal of automation is to help you quadruple down on the human side of things, like…
- Replying to their comments and engaging in discussions.
- Reposting user content and highlighting community voices.
- Acknowledging and fixing concerns.
- Interviewing them face-to-face.
Those methods are even more effective in helping you stay updated on your audience’s needs. That’s them, handing you the data on a silver platter!
Anyway…the question isn’t if your audience will change – they’re quite literally changing as you read this. The question is, will you change with them? And the answer is always yes.
