Audience intelligence is classified as everything your company knows about its target audience. Historically this knowledge was gathered through surveys, focus groups, and customer feedback. While these techniques still remain valid and in some cases useful, they rely on people telling you the truth. They are also quite time-consuming and expensive.
Businesses nowadays can understand their customers holistically thanks to social media. Specifically, they can go beyond demographic data and understand their customers’ hobbies and interests, who they follow, what media they read, who they listen to, and what their values are, all based on their online activity.
Audience intelligence is vital for success, it enables brands to cut through the noise and zero in on their target audience and play to their habits and preferences. It is the key element in creating your Ideal Customer Profile which you can then use to base every business decision and marketing strategy around.
If you want your marketing to succeed you need to buy into using an audience intelligence tool. Here are all ways your business will benefit from better insights once you do:
The deeper the insights into your customer, the more successful your advertisements will become. What does your audience love, what do they have in common, what media sources are they interested in, and what do they discuss amongst themselves>
An audience intelligence tool like NOW Affinio can help you in your creative planning research by tapping into your audience’s mindset, viewing their top content consumed, and viewing the media that resonates - all insights that can be translated into your own winning creative strategy.
Similarweb provides web analytics that can tell you how audiences use the web, which divides they use, which websites they visit, how long they stay on each page, and what their conversion paths are on those websites. This can help you pick the best marketing channels to use to lead people to your site, and aid in creating calls-to-action (CTAs) on your site that convert.
Go beyond demographic segmentation, and segment your audience based on their shared interests, needs and behaviors. This helps you create a marketing strategy that isn't “One size fits all,” and allows you to personalize your efforts to each segment. It is astonishing how many brands don’t have any idea of the groups that make up their audience, and this changes over time, so having a tool like NOW Affinio that can show you on demand how your audience looks is imperative. Most of the time, tools that take you through this exercise will surprise you, and niche audiences you didn't even know existed will show up in your customer base - it’s important you’re giving them the attention they deserve.
Understanding the changes in your target audience’s preferences is also crucial. As they evolve, make sure your marketing strategy is growing with them. You need a tool on hand that can give you the most up-to-date audience data, like what new media types does your audience prefer? Are there certain hashtags that they are using right now that you need to be aware of? What sort of information appeals to them at this moment and what intrigues them in the next moment? All of these new marketing opportunities to further increase reach, engagement, and ROI can be found with the use of instant, and up-to-date audience intelligence.
Traditional market research could take months or even years to complete. This often includes creating a research plan, gathering data, interpreting this data, etc. But these time-consuming activities are no longer necessary if you have an audience analysis tool. These tools can give you immediate access to the same (if not better) information. They also come at a fraction of the cost.
You’re not just limited to analyzing your own audience, with certain tools you can dissect your competitor's audience as well. As a result, you can keep up with your rivals and learn how to win over certain sections of their following. NOW Affinio makes it easy to run a quick report on your competitors, and view how their audience breaks out - you can even discover the overlap between their audience and your own.
Once implemented, your entire organization can run on audience intelligence. Having the most up-to-date, and rich insights into your audience's behavior and interests are what will keep your brand in the lead and enable everyone to create winning marketing strategies. Sign up below to start using audience intelligence to propel your business.