Advanced strategies for agency teams to understand and engage client target audiences using audience intelligence

Being first introduced to a client’s audience is like being introduced to someone briefly at a party. 

Unless you go digging, ask the right questions, and take the time to really learn about the person, all you have to go off of is your first impression of them which is usually based on what they look like and what they are wearing - which we know is never an accurate picture of who that person is. 

Unfortunately for marketers people are a lot more complicated than that. 

So how do you go from “first impression”, to truly knowing who your client’s audience is, and most importantly how do you find out what their deepest needs and wants are? 

Many agencies are still trying to figure this out.

Lucky for you, you have us ;) Let’s dive in.

The challenge of trying to understand your client’s audience 

Technology has come a long way, and so much audience information is now available online or collected within CRM systems, but agencies still struggle. Why? 

The amount of data available to them in these CRMs or online can be overwhelming and it can be hard to surface or decipher what’s important from what’s not. 

Not to mention this takes time and if there’s one thing we know about agencies, they are usually under a time crunch. 

Information found online or in CRMs can also be outdated which makes it hard to keep up with trends and changing audience preferences. 

Then there are compliance issues. Navigating privacy laws can be challenging when sifting through first-party audience data. 

Many agencies use analytics tools but a lot of the time the quality or depth of the data is not what is needed to create winning campaigns. So what is needed?

Audience intelligence is the best solution 

To cover all their bases, agencies need a suite of audience intelligence tools that get to the heart of what their client’s audience truly needs. 

Audience intelligence tools like the ones mentioned in the graphic above, remove the guesswork and time needed to sift through data. They eliminate human biases and organically surface the richest and most important insights on an audience - the ones needed for effective campaign development. 

But even with these tools, strategies are needed to make the most out of the insights they surface. 

In this blog post, we’re going to cover 5 advanced strategies to use when you need to understand and engage your client’s audience with the help of audience intelligence tools. 

Let’s get to it!

Strategy #1: Leveraging psychographics for deeper insights

Psychographics are an audience's beliefs, goals, desires, needs and values. 

These data points are what give the audience substance, they explain their lifestyle and help agencies create campaigns that resonate with that lifestyle. 

You can’t create successful targeted marketing, personalized messaging, or products without knowing the psychographics of an audience. 

Agencies use this data to align everything that comes from the brand, with the values and lifestyles of the target audience.

Creative teams thrive off psychographic data, as it is a major source of inspiration for ad copy and creative. 

Audience intelligence tools instantly put psychographic data into the hands of marketers. But it’s up to marketers to know how to use it. 

Let’s use the audience of the pet toy brand Chewy as an example here: 

An agency working for Chewy must know that all animal owners aren’t the same, people have pets for different reasons, and they have different opinions on how animals should be cared for or trained. Some choose a dog based on an active lifestyle, while others may choose a dog based on their living situation. 

All of these details matter when marketing to these pet owners.  

The “Conservative Sports Lovers” segment of Chewy’s audience is a group of people who are active, social, and friendly. 

“They are deliberate: they carefully think through decisions before making them. They are dutiful: they take rules and obligations seriously, even when inconvenient. And they are philosophical: they are open to and intrigued by new ideas and love to explore them.”

“Their choices are driven by a desire for organization.”

“They consider both helping others and tradition to guide a large part of what they do. They think it is important to take care of the people around them. And they highly respect the groups they belong to and follow their guidance.”  

Based on these insights alone, the agency can play on their need for organization, and serve this audience with ads for things like a Car Seat Back Organizer, or a Portable Horse Grooming Organizer. 

The campaign can depict a person who lives an active lifestyle to resonate with this active audience. 

These are just simple examples but you see how psychographics can direct the way you engage with an audience. 

Notice how there was no mention of demographics? Demographics mean nothing when it comes to creating ads that resonate - but wants, needs, desires, and values do. 

Here’s where to gather psychographic data in the Audiense platform: 

Interest Categories

The interests categories tab is a great starting point. Based on these insights we know that the “Conservative Sports Lovers” like sports, work, pets, science and education. 

But we can filter these so that they are more granular. For example we can see what they are interested in in terms of hobbies: games, guitar, reading and astrology. 

Personality

The second key tab is the personality tab. This section highlights the needs and values of the audience: 

This section goes even deeper to highlight details like if they are good under pressure, empathetic, confident, down to earth, bold, accommodating, the list goes on. 

Now you’re really getting an idea for who this person (or group of people rather) are. Then there are further details on their needs and values. 

These two sections are where agencies go within the Audiense platform to surface psychographic insights and use those insights to create winning campaigns. 

To learn more, read this case study and find out how social media agency Ideagoras used Audiense psychographic data to build a successful campaign. 

Strategy #2: Advanced segmentation techniques

Demographics are limiting, and agencies that still rely on demographics for audience segmentation are guaranteed not to create unsuccessful campaigns for their clients. 

Demographics can be such an easy fallback but if you’re going to win over an audience, you will steer clear of using them to create your campaigns. 

Instead, audiences need to be segmented and understood through their behaviors, interests and attitudes. 

Universal Music Group uses many strategies to better understand their customers, and they are especially big on consumer segmentation. 

They use Audiense to segment their artists' audiences based on their interests. Audiense then surfaces rich insights on each segment that UMG uses to create relevant campaigns. 

They execute campaigns with high levels of personalization that keep fans at the heart of each artist’s communications. 

UMG is always hitting the right audience with the right messaging because they use behavioral segmentation. 

Segmentation 101

To segment an audience you need: 

• An audience list (a list of your client’s audience members) 
• Data on each audience member’s interests and affinities 

From there you can let a tool like Audinese organically segment that audience and group people together with the same interests and affinities. In fact, Auddiense doesn’t even require you to come with any data at all, all you have to do is type out the audience you are trying to segment, and we’ll source that audience list and their interests data for you. 

By segmenting your audience this way, you are able to  market to each individual segment based on what they are most interested, which results in highly impactful campaigns. 

Take a look at two segments from the Billie Eilish audience: 

Marvel fans universe

Hip Hop Enthusiasts 

After analyzing these two segments you should have a better understanding of why segmentation is so important, and it should reinforce that no segment should be treated/ or marketed to the same. 

Strategy #3: Utilizing social listening for real-time insights

Psychographics and behaviors remain somewhat consistent for most people. Going back to our Chewy example, The “Conservative Sports Lover” has a need for organization today, and will have the same need a year from now. 

Things that do change amongst an audience are things like current audience sentiments and of course trends. 

This highlights the need for agencies to have access to social listing data and real-time insights. 

Social listening tools allow agencies to search up everyone using specific terms, phrases and keywords on social media.  

You can see above that Audiense allows agencies to collect audience members based on their recent use of things like hashtags, keywords and URLs. 

Social listening tools provide agencies with immediate audience feedback, and they can highlight what audiences like or dislike about a brand. They are also very good at highlighting what’s trending amongst an audience. 

These insights help agencies keep their clients' brands relevant and responsive in today's fast-paced world, ensuring campaigns stay aligned with the latest trends.

Duracell knows this all too well. 

Back in February, when most of America was talking about a cheating scandal between two reality cast members Ariana Madix and Tom Sandovol, Duracell listened and hopped onto the trend.

They created a commercial with Ariana (the cast member who was cheated on), and it poked fun at the cheater (Tom Sandovol). 

This ad was such a hit because it was so relevant. 

Agencies looking to understand the audiences behind current trends can quickly create a social listening report within the Audiense platform:

And view the audiences talking about this online: 

Setting up a social listening report is made easy with Audiense, here’s a step by step: 

And analyzing the data is even easier, take a look: 

Strategy #4: Creating data-driven personas

The more an agency learns about a consumer group the better, and the best agencies know that understanding an audience is an ongoing practice. 

Data-driven personas are the best way to summarize and constantly update what you’ve learned. 

The most accurate personas are a combination of insights derived from social media, CRM, and web analytics data. 

Personas are the blueprint for creating an effective campaign. 

They inform media planning by summarizing their top media affinities. Personas highlight the audience’s interests that are then used to develop ad creative that resonates. They also highlight things like an audience's top social channels so agencies know where to place the majority of the ad spend. 

All of these data points help agencies get closer and closer to their client’s audience. 

The key takeaway here is the personas are extremely important, but if they aren/t updated regularly then you are working from old data. 

Read our blog on how to create buyer personas with the Audiense platform. 

Strategy #5: Integrating audience insights across channels

Insights are powerful when applied to a campaign, but audience insights must be used across all marketing channels for the strategy to work. 

Audience intelligence tools like Audiense and SOPRISM make it easy to apply insights across social media marketing, email marketing, SEO, content marketing etc. 

The psychographic insights on the “Chewy” audience from earlier can be used to create social ads that feature pet organization products and used to create a customer newsletter that features “5 tips for organizing your pet products”. Words like “pet organizer” can be used frequently on the website for SEO purposes, and Chewy can create video content that features all the “Chewy pet organizers for the car”.

Agencies that use audience intelligence tools have to take what they learn and spread it across the board if they want to see real results. 

And the insights we’ve discussed can be applied universally to all marketing channels. 

Let’s see how easy it is for all different marketing teams to use Audiense insights to inform a multi-channel marketing campaign: ´

Keep your finger on the pulse  

As you can see, audience intelligence tools really are the greatest asset when it comes to understanding an audience, and going past that “first-impression” stage. 

Psychographics, behavioral segmentation, social listening insights, and data driven personas, when combined, create some of the most successful audience campaigns, and it’s not hard to understand why.  

Agencies who always have their finger on the pulse when it comes to what their client’s audience wants and needs differentiate themselves from the competition. 

Most of those agencies use Audiense, and you want to know the most about your client’s audience, you should too. 

Try Audiense today.