We all know that understanding your customers is the key to successfully building your brand. But what if you could REALLY get to know them - their values, their interests, their affinities - beyond the tweets?
Audience intelligence is your secret weapon. It involves getting insight into your customers using data which can be fed into your wider marketing strategy. Many brands are already using intelligence through social listening, but with so many brands trying to join the conversation, cultural context is often overlooked.
Incorporating cultural insight into your data will give you a competitive edge that can help grow your business beyond your home market. It gives you the power to craft campaigns that truly resonate by tapping into shared beliefs, interests, lifestyle choices, and affinities. In this article, we explore four ways audience intelligence can help you better understand other cultures.
1. Go beyond demographics
Segmentation is a huge part of what we do as marketers. It helps us personalise communications, build more meaningful relationships, and identify our most valuable and engaged customers. With audience intelligence, you can go deeper than ever before to truly understand the cultural drivers and interests that spark your audience.
Audience intelligence provides an understanding into everything you could possibly want to know about customers. Gathering information about their passions, their interests, and what matters most to them can help your marketing team develop high-impact campaigns that strike a chord with your customers, every time.
For example, demographic data might show you that young people based in a major city like your brand. But what is the glue that connects them as an audience: Is it a shared love of Animal Crossing or peanut butter? Is it a lifestyle choice (#furbabies)? Is it a language they speak or a place they call home? Go beyond face value demographics to understand them better and create campaigns that build trust, invoke a sense of community, and develop real connections with your audience.
2. Create clusters (not the crunchy kind)
Once you start to understand what really makes your audience tick, you can build clusters that will allow you to focus your marketing efforts on your most valuable segments. Supplement your existing social data with deeper audience intelligence to connect and define your niche (or not so niche) audiences using their interests, affinities and even lifestyle choices.
With this knowledge at your fingertips, you can start to build more detailed personas that will help you figure out where to reach them, what they respond to, and what is most important to them. Through building clusters based on cultural factors, you can strengthen brand affinity with campaigns that will truly resonate, no matter where in the world your customers are. Less embarrassing cultural slip-ups, more customers! It’s a win-win.
Even better, audience intelligence can help you understand what’s going on in the world of your competitors. Let’s say a competitor just launched a product in a new territory… what can you learn about their audience? How are the customers they’re targeting connected? And what can you do as a brand to steer them in your direction?
3. Get the inside scoop
Everybody loves a good listener. But what about the customers that aren’t speaking to you? Still waters run deep, and some of the most valuable customers are the ones that spend more time lurking and scrolling.
Just because they’re not joining the online conversation, doesn’t mean you can’t learn more about them. Lurkers leave digital trails - content they’ve liked, people they’ve followed, cookie crumbs across various websites - you can follow to learn more about their digital behavior and ultimately, understand their culture and values.
Audience intelligence can reveal the macro and micro-influencers most embedded in the culture of your intended audience, by examining affinities of audiences you’re interested in. This will empower you to approach partners and influencers perfectly placed to tap into this audience and share key messages tailored, authentically connecting with your customers.
4. Build a relationship made to last
Our cultural environment is ever-changing, as demonstrated by the pandemic. With customers spending more time online than ever, brands saw a shift in how they chose to communicate with their friends, their loved ones, and the choices they make.
Trends come and go, but cultural values are here to stay. Developing an understanding of culture as part of your audience intelligence will help you monitor changing interests, lifestyle choices, and perhaps even their needs. This is more than just trendspotting; this is getting to know your audience like never before.
Placing the values that connect your audience at the heart of your marketing campaigns not only shapes how you fit into their lives, but helps you keep a finger on the pulse of your audiences and how they’re feeling to build relationships that were made to stand the test of time.
Are you ready to dig deeper? Audiense is trusted by thousands of brands and agencies online, and not only can we help you understand other cultures, you can get to know your customers on a whole new level. Try Audiense Insights for free.
