Researching an audience, whether it’s for a product launch or pre-campaign, during an ongoing campaign or trend, or after a shift in tactics or viral movement, whatever the cause, can be a strain and drain on your energy and time. Surveys aren’t easily scalable, casual social listening is wishy-washy, noisy and over-saturated. Then bringing it all together to make sense of it? A head-ache. And make it actionable? A dilemma. Until you started using Audiense.
Audiense is a leader in its field. (No, really! Check out our G2!) As time passes and digital progresses, more and more people are realising the value and importance of audience segmentation and insights.
I speak to users everyday, especially people just starting out on the Audiense platform. Audiense has so much to offer, and I’ve seen confusion on quite how to use the product, what it can help you to accomplish, and what makes the difference between a great report and a not so great one. Today, I’ll be helping you with that!
The magic of Audiense comes to life with its accurate and representative insights with which to understand your audience, as well as the actionability to do something with them in the real-world. Let’s get started!
Listed below are the ideas of searches you can try for yourself that I’ll be covering today, plus I’ll be sharing ways of making use of the data your search returns.
Look at ‘followers of’ your own business. This is straight-forward. It will show you the first segmented understanding of your audience, the ways they describe themselves, the social channels they spend their time on, the posts/publications they’re engaging with, and everything else in between. And at this level, it points you in other directions to better engage with your audience, for example partnerships and relationships worth forming, so use them!! Likely to be your supporters and cheerleaders of your brand, or have an interest in what you do at some level, these are the people to continue engaging with and use as vessels to share your content and message. Work with what you’ve got, and use it to your advantage.
Level up:
Search for ‘followers of’ and input a handle or few of your competitors. If you can’t beat them, join them. Imitation is a form of flattery. Say what you like, but scouring your competitors is a fantastic starting point for learning about your target audience with a shift in perspective. In Audiense, you can also view the individual members within the audience or segment. With all these insights, you can use these as criteria to build your next campaign.
Level up:
Buyer Persona. You probably already have an idea of what this means for you. In Audiense, it’s just a matter of feeding that through the criteria input. Take for example, you’re on the hunt for yoga mums. Bio keywords are great for this! Input bio-keywords such as: yoga, yogi, mum, mummy, mother, mumma. Bios are commonly used as self-descriptive compilations of our work, personal, attitudes, values, social presence, and more, always making it a great starting point when building an audience. In our free version of Audiense, conversational keywords aren’t available to create a report, but in full access, you can create a report using hashtags and keywords.
Level up:
If you’re looking to do lead generation or something more B2B, then building an audience through job roles is an option to try. Start typing in a job role such as CEO, Head of Marketing, or Designer, or a different role that you’re looking to find. Take a look through your CRM for most common job titles, then input those roles or similar into Audiense. I’d recommend trying combinations of the same role, as this will help you bring the profiles together. For example is someone a barista or a cafe team member or a Coffee Artist or a Roasted Bean Expert? There’s multiple names for similar positions, so take this into consideration. Don’t forget to select ‘country’ if your ABM/ABS strategy is more localised.
Level up:
Look back at top performing content, and the topics and interests that people focus on. Or, if you’re using a social listening platform, run a query to gather some buzzwords. Or, look at the demo reports in your account to get ideas of interest categories to use. Input your choice into Audiense to discover who is engaging with these areas of interest. These are the people you’ll want to target with similar and relevant content. Tip: you might also want to use the country selector for this one too.
In full access Audiense, you can take this up a step by running reports on conversations, e.g. keywords and hashtags.
Level up:
‘We need someone high-profile, we need …’ your manager drones on in each meeting, but if it wasn’t already pushing your budget, it certainly isn’t going to promise an audience that converts just because it’s La-di-da or SoAndSo. You run the search anyway, and you deliver the data. Then you run searches on your core audiences and find the high-profile influencers that ACTUALLY matter to your audience, and also where the ‘it’ profile ranks too.
Level up:
Your current Social Listening query is always a great starting point for defining an audience. Social Listening platforms could be anything such as Pulsar, Meltwater, Netbase, Brandwatch, Talkwalker, or others. Export a list of @handles and we can run it in your account for you to get a premium trial of how this full Audiense access function works, and the insights it can bring back. Contact us at help@audiense.com.
Level up:
Looking at our own data, I found out that many free audience report users only used single searches, and less than 50% used combined search terms! In the methods I’ve mentioned, there’s been examples of both, but perhaps the next report you try should be a combined search. All it means here is inputting more than one search term! In this example, I chose followers of @handles, job title, interest, and country. In full Audiense access, you can combine more criteria such as age, gender, cities, languages and more.
Level up:
Our insights will bring to light information and data points that you might not have been aware of or even considered before, you could even say they are surprising. So if you find a high-ranking influencer or a hashtag you know little about, don’t be shy to read into this, and create a report taking this into account in the criteria input. In the free access, you get 3 reports per month. You can even return to a previous report and update the content panel to see the latest engaging topics.
Level up:
Note: In full access, you can easily select ‘create a report with these segment members’ and resegment an audience! This is particularly great with large segments, or ones you want to dive deeper into.
Need more of a helping hand? If you already have a brief or a particular persona in mind, and you aren’t certain of how to translate it into Audiense, you can reach out to us, and we’ll tailor it on the Audiense platform with you. From parents, students, job roles, and more, check it out for yourself on our Airtable.
Level up:
Creating your first free audience insights reports can be quite simple in practice, and perhaps the hardest part is figuring out an audience to start with inputting; hopefully this will have given you some pointers.