What is audience intelligence and how can it benefit your business?

How many times have you wondered how Facebook knew you needed a particular product or service when you see an advert? We've all been there right. Well, this is 'audience intelligence' in its most obvious form.

With this blog, we will dive deeper into the fascinating world of audience intelligence, understanding how it can be used to benefit your business.

What is audience intelligence?

Audience intelligence quite simply put is the knowledge that a company has about their target audience (customers/prospects). It can be collected in many different ways, traditionally it would have been collected in the form of surveys, focus groups and feedback. Whilst this is very useful information and all are still valid methods of collecting audience intelligence, its weakness is that it depends on the individuals telling you the truth, not that we are suggesting people would lie, but often people will tell you how they would like to behave, rather than how they actually behave.

Fortunately, we are no longer totally dependent on the traditional methods of collecting audience intelligence. According to a McKinsey survey, respondents say that at least 80% of their customer interactions are digital in nature.

The digital age has allowed businesses to uncover the behaviours of consumers and how they move through different digital spaces. . Thanks to audience intelligence, we can learn much more about our consumers. Apart from demographic information, we can discover more about their interests: who they listen to, which media they read, who they follow, their lifestyle preferences, and beliefs.

Audience intelligence allows companies to extract and collect valuable insights about audiences through data from various sources. This allows you to build a detailed picture of your target audiences so as to better plan your strategies and inform your business decisions based on real-time data. To do this, audience intelligence uses some of the most innovative technological tools.

We often think that this type of information is only available to billion-pound businesses or for the business to consumer market alone. However, audience intelligence solutions such as Yaudience, have made it far more accessible and have opened insights up to the B2B world.

Marketing leaders across the globe have access to audience intelligence giving them better, faster and more cost-effective ways to deliver more meaningful messages and products/solutions across the channels that matter most.

How can audience intelligence benefit your business?

If you do not know your audience, how do you know if your marketing campaigns are reaching those who are most interested in your products or services?

Audience intelligence helps you to ensure you get noticed by your target customer and give you the insights and edge to better engage them.

Depending on the types of information you gather, you will be able to create appropriate strategies that will help you to reach your customers more effectively.

Audience intelligence is fundamental if you want to achieve the following:

1. Boost audience engagement

By applying audience intelligence, you will discover how your visitors navigate the internet and in some cases your specific website, what devices they use, how they access the information, what pages they like, and, most importantly, their conversion path.

Once you have this information regarding your audiences’ online habits, you will know how to engage with your audience and which channels to use. Businesses that make the most of audience insights can engage with their audience on a personal level, attracting their interest quickly and more effectively.

2. Identify marketing opportunities

If you understand more about your audience, including the channels they use the most, the content that attracts them, and their interests, you can identify new marketing opportunities to boost reach and ROI.

Whether it is finding influencers, a speaker that will get the most bums on seats at your event, where best to allocate your budget for paid media, improving your PR by knowing the publications and news your audience reads or even where your audience is most likely to be based to select the locations for your next roadshow, audience intelligence when used effectively provides a plethora of insights to better leverage your marketing spend.

3. Practice audience segmentation

When you are analysing your audience through audience intelligence, you are going through the process of “audience segmentation.” This is a crucial activity that divides a large audience into smaller groups - or segments - who have similar interests, needs, and characteristics. Consequently, audience segmentation helps you to deliver more personalisation in your marketing.

4. Have a more efficient marketing department

Audience intelligence allows marketers to put to bed that finger in the air approach to marketing, making much more purposeful decisions that will ultimately increase engagement. The use of audience intelligence tools reduces the amount of time taken by your team to conduct research, where it may have taken teams weeks and months to carry out surveys and conduct in-depth research, thanks to today’s innovative audience intelligence platforms, you will be able to know more about your audience while saving precious time and effort.

5. Speak the lingo of your audience

Speaking your audience’s language is fundamental. To capture your prospective client's attention and reach your target audience, you need to speak the language they speak, this isn't just in terms of linguistics, but using the same resources as them, sharing news from resources that resonate with them will make it easier for them to build trust with you.. Audience intelligence helps you to understand what your audience is talking about and the language they are using. By utilising a similar tone and similar words through your marketing campaign, you will be able to attract your audience and establish trust and credibility.

Yaudience’s intelligence platform allows you to acquire valuable insights into the habits and characteristics of your audience. If you want to know more about audience intelligence, contact us today!