Audience Intelligence: The Missing Link To Customer Insights

As the digital landscape evolves and innovation continues to transform the industry, marketing strategies must continually adapt to become more effective, and employ new tech to optimize performance. Audience intelligence is one area where innovation is taking marketing performance to new heights. 

Access to an audience intelligence solution can give you a better understanding of exactly who you’re selling to, even as third-party cookies are being phased out. A variety of solutions including behavioral data or even identity-free solutions can help you hone in on what audience segments perform best for your campaigns. By understanding your audience more deeply, you can adjust your messaging and even shape business decisions, making strategic choices that align with the needs and interests of your target demographics.

How AUDIENCEX’s Partnership With Dstillery Can Help You

AUDIENCEX recently announced our new partnership with Dstillery, a leader in advanced custom audience solutions, to help midmarket brands and independent agencies access and leverage audience intelligence data throughout the omnichannel landscape, creating our new Audience Insights solution, which we offer at no additional cost to our clients.

Thanks to Dstillery’s audience solutions and our unified tech stack’s media access and suite of integrated tools, our clients can now gain a new level of insight into who their audiences truly are, how to reach them, and how to identify and build relevant audiences to expand into effectively.

Audience Insights can empower your marketing strategy, as our teams can more effectively leverage capabilities to maximize performance throughout the digital landscape.

Develop Key Personas

It’s important to know that an audience isn’t just a group of numbers waiting to hear your message. They’re people, and each of them have their own needs, goals, and reasons for taking advantage of your services. It’s important to understand the key personalities that keep your business headed in the right direction. 

With Audience Insights, your first-party data can be analyzed to get a deeper understanding of what the key personas within your audience are looking for, and to understand their journeys, their needs, desires, and behaviors. Instead of making speculative decisions based on who you imagine your audience might be, you can know for sure who you’re speaking to – and who’s most receptive to your messaging.

Frequently, brands find surprising information within their existing audiences – by employing insights, you can discover that there are people in your highest-performing audiences that you may not have expected, helping you to identify emerging markets and expand your growth.

Understand Audience Behavior With URL Level Insights

Do you know exactly how your audience interacts with your website, or throughout the internet? You likely know metrics like your conversion rates, but audience behavior relates to far more than a static conversion rate. 

You can gain a deeper insight into your consumers’ unique journeys with your brand through URL-level insights, which can grant a granular view into how your target demographics behave across the web.

By learning these details, you can make small changes to your touchpoints to tailor them to the stage of the journey in which they’re most relevant. You can adjust tactics to address your consumers more effectively and adjust your overall customer experience to better suit their needs.

Create Custom Audiences

Once you develop an understanding of your existing audiences’ behaviors, interests, and needs, it becomes easier to identify segments into which you can expand. Audience Insights lets you use data gathered from your campaign performance, first-party data, and existing audience profiles to identify custom audiences that are similar and target them effectively, making it easier to get your message in front of new consumers who are more likely to convert. You can also target different audiences with different creative – for example, if you have multiple products that may interest different groups of people, or messaging that resonates better around a specific characteristic or interest.

This gives your campaign distinct advantages:

  1. Higher Marketing Effectiveness. By separating audiences by the factors that make them tick, you can send marketing materials that are more likely to lead to conversions to each different segment, increasing the overall effectiveness of your campaigns. 
  2. Lower Marketing Costs. If you segment your audiences by interest, you can avoid the additional costs of sending marketing materials surrounding the wrong products or with the wrong messaging to the wrong audiences. When your segments are fine-tuned, your spend is optimized toward audiences that have a high chance of conversion. 

Some of the more common types of audience segments are:

Geographic Location

As an obvious example, customers in colder climates are more likely to buy jackets, while customers in warmer clients are more likely to buy swimsuits. The simple fact is that audiences in different geographic locations have different needs. 

When you create geographically segmented audiences, you can fine-tune your marketing messages to each audience based on the likelihood of the consumers in those locations purchasing different products or services. 

Moreover, you can increase your conversion rate by mentioning something about your customers’ locations in your marketing efforts. This makes the message feel more personalized for the end user. 

For example, you may want to adjust your messaging to cite current or recent events in specific regions – consider a beverage company positioning a product in relation to a heat wave, or a contractor offering a message of support and donating services after a hurricane. Because the message is relatable and personal, there’s a stronger chance of it resonating with the audience. 

Interest-Based

Segmenting your audience by interest means you can make your marketing efforts even more relatable. For example, send a message to an audience that’s interested in pets by welcoming them and their furry friends to your community. The brand loyalty this results in will likely amaze you.

Even if it’s not a directly tailored message, you can still use common interests held within your existing audience to reach out to similar individuals. If you find that your campaign is resonating more strongly with those who have an interest in gardening, for example, you can shift your budget to spend more on reaching audiences that share that interest.

Demographic

It’s always been popular to segment audiences by demographic data, such as gender or age group, but in the past, this has largely been a practice built around assumptions. With audience insights, opt-in consumer data is used to show you how your marketing is actually performing with different demographic groups. Often, the results are different than what was expected. 

Make Data Driven Decisions With Audience Recommendations

Human beings have natural biases that can make marketing-related decision-making less effective. After all, if you’re predisposed to thinking one audience is better to target than another, but the data says otherwise, the audience you choose may come with lower conversion rates. 

With Audience Insights, your campaigns can benefit from unbiased audience recommendations based on hard data rather than preconceived notions. Each performance insight is actionable, with recommendations and data-driven custom audiences ready to be activated and leveraged throughout the digital landscape.

How To Get Started With an Audience Intelligence Platform

Audience intelligence solutions, such as Audience Insights, offer an effective way to get to know your audience better which will likely result in increased sales and profitability. 

Each audience intelligence platform will come with its own pros and cons. Although some companies design their platforms to be wide-reaching, giving insights to all business owners, other companies provide niche platforms with services built specifically for businesses in certain categories. 

Moreover, each platform comes with its own unique capabilities and tools. So, it’s important to do your research and find one that fits well with your business. 

Gather Your Audience Data

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, your target audience should be at the center of just about every business decision you make. If you have a better understanding of your audience, you’re better prepared to take care of them effectively. 

Even outside of an audience intelligence platform, it’s important to learn what you can about your audience. Ensure that your website is pixeled and leveraging analytics effectively, so you can gain more visibility into your existing users and their interactions with your brand to bring with you. Leverage what data you can from your social media channels as well, as your followers – and their rates of engagement – can be indicative of your larger audience. 

When you’re getting set up with Audience Insights, your zero-party and first-party data is invaluable; the more data you have available to analyze, the more insights you’ll gain. As we’re still awaiting the deprecation of third-party cookies, it’s also possible (for now) to leverage third-party data alongside futureproof solutions, to track performance and gain learnings that you can carry with you beyond deprecation.

Know Your Goals

It’s always important to know the ultimate goal of any campaign, whether it’s awareness, sales, lead generation, or something else. Knowing what you’re looking for can help you identify what type of performance, and therefore what type of audience, you’re after. Pay attention not only to which audiences perform best with your brand, but also with what types of campaigns.

Consider what stage of the journey your campaign fits into; with URL-level insights, you’re able to gain a better understanding of where customers are in their journey, and what characteristics are most relevant to each stage of the funnel.

Partner With Experts

While there are self-service solutions available, not all marketers have the time or inclination to get up close and hands-on with insights. Especially for those who are at smaller, midmarket brands or independent agencies, this may simply not be possible.

Even if you’re all set to go digging in your data, it can always be valuable to bring in an outside, unbiased perspective. Expert assistance exists to make our lives easier, so consider working with a marketing agency to effectively gather and leverage audience intelligence.

At AUDIENCEX, we provide Audience Insights at no additional cost to our clients, to help them maximize their spend as we work to deliver true performance results.

Deep Dive Into the Wide World of Audience Insights

Thanks to AUDIENCEX’s partnership with Dstillery, our expert campaign teams are able to gather, analyze, and immediately leverage Audience Insights for our clients. This complimentary service integrates Dstillery’s custom audience solutions into our holistic, omnichannel tech stack, providing seamless media access alongside numerous products, solutions, and integrations to help continually optimize your performance marketing.

You can learn more about Audience Insights on our recent webinar with Dstillery, Finding the Right Holiday Audiences Through Meaningful Insights. During this event, we discussed how audience solutions can be leveraged to improve your marketing performance in a uniquely challenging and competitive holiday season. We discussed these solutions and this moment, including details on why right now is the perfect time to start deploying new ID-Free solutions.

If you’d like to learn more about everything AUDIENCEX has to offer, including Audience Insights and our full tech stack, feel free to reach out for a free consultation and connect with a member of our team.