What is your best ever approach with audience research?

It's funny but due my career I found out that most efficient way to know if people carrying about smth in a product - is to break it. If they soon stating to write you - they really care about it

We do a lot of surveys, user interviews and user tests with existing users, but to find external participants, we user paid tools that recruit respondents for us

For sure, breaking something is the quickest way to find out if people care about it or not! Another good approach is looking at usage data and analytics - seeing what features people use most can tell you a lot about what they value. User surveys and interviews help too if you can get direct feedback.

One-on-one communication and online surveys after product delivery. Although many users may not provide feedback, as long as the sample size is large enough, you will gather valuable information.