March 19, 2020 Jane Menyo
All brands want to connect their products with the right customer. But without knowing who those customers are, brands are bound to lose out to digitally savvy competition. Why? Because winning marketing strategies make expert use of targeted data points, which accelerate audience insights and analysis.
With targeted data points, you can gain critical knowledge about who your audience is, what they’re interested in and which messages resonate best. The more detailed these insights are, the more you can target your audience and nurture better data.
The Basics of Audience Insights
Audience insights are based on preferences, demographics, location, interests and other metrics among a targeted group. Often, third-party platforms are used to analyze these insights to understand consumer behavior metrics and help brands craft usable personas for different buyers.
Marketers can also create composite profiles by measuring what works and what doesn’t for buyers at various stages of the purchasing process. As prospects and clients interact with products and services, insights will continue to grow, inform and improve upon a brand’s decision and interaction.
Audience Personas
Marketers use audience personas, abstract fictional characters that represent an ideal lead, prospect or customer, for each point of the marketing funnel. As tools, personas help marketers understand the need for distinct timing and content — not one-size-fits-all messaging.
Good data and insights are critical for both building good personas and understanding your cost of conversion. You’ll also understand what kind of content appeals to which audiences and when it makes sense to approach them.
Using Audience Insights to Inform Top-of-Funnel Marketing
Top-of-funnel marketing, where anonymous and casual leads first engage with a brand, is often costly. Money and energy are wasted when marketers attempt to draw too wide of an audience, and marketing resources are drained when irrelevant content is created.
Top of the funnel marketing can be effective, however, when combined with audience insights. With specific data points, you can increase brand awareness among niche audiences you may not even be aware of, without casting an indiscriminately wide net.
Audience insights ultimately allow marketers to understand which of your customers are ready to buy and which may require more time to learn about your company’s brand. Strong marketing analysis lets you tailor SEO and social media outreach according to where buyers are in their purchasing journeys. Because when consumers are presented with authentic, personalized messaging, they develop trust and loyalty in what your brand delivers.
To learn more about how you can develop and leverage audience insights, check out our new ebook, The Accelerated Buyer: How Personalized Content Journeys Impact the Buying Process.