How to use Audiense insights in the creative process

If you are a creative person, then you probably have no shortage of ideas when it comes to things you’d like to create for your audience. The problem though is that operative word “you’d”, we as marketers like to create stuff that we like, and that we’re interested in, and sometimes we mistake that for being the same thing our customers like too. 

But the truth is that YOU are not your audience. You don’t know what they want unless you ask them, or study them. 

So in this blog post we’re going to show you (all the creative marketers out there) how you can use audience insights in the creative process - ensuring that the cool ideas you come up with stem from what you first learn about your audience. 

That’s the best way to guarantee that all your creative ideas resonate with your audience. 

Audience insights should be the basis to all your “creative ideas”

Let’s start with your audience. What I mean by that is, let’s collect them, analyze them, and then all our creative ideas can stem from them. 

For example’s sake let’s pretend you are a marketer at Monday.com, the project management software.

The first thing we want to do is study our target audience, the one we are creating our campaign (or any marketing material) for. 

In this example, we are targeting a segment of “Tech Consultants”. 

So what can we learn about them that can help us with our creative process? Let’s focus on these main categories:

• their interests, 
• their influencers, 
• media and content they consume, 
• their personality 
• demographic and socioeconomic insights. 

*All of these insights that we are pulling on Monday.com’s target audience of “Tech Consultants” is coming from the Audiense Insights platform. You can view the full report here, or you can click here to sign up and run your own report. 

Interests

With any audience, I like to start with “interests” first. I believe that it’s these insights that really give us a look at who an audience is beyond whatever stereotype I picture if I only read the demographics. 

The interests category tab gives us a broad view of what any audience loves. In this case, for the “Tech Consultants”, that is work, sports and travel. 

Then I like to go a level deeper on those interests, and that’s when I discover that work wise, they are into “Telecommuting”, meaning the majority work from home. 

From the sports category, they love Basketball the most. 

Travel wise, they like going to popular “touristy” destinations, these aren’t the type of people to go “off grid” if you will. 

As we go through the insights you might think… why does this matter, but I promise there is a way to fold them all into the creative we create for this audience. 

Audiense also has a tab “influencers and brands” that lets you do a deeper dive into your audience’s interests, specifically looking at all the accounts they follow, which are obviously strong indicators of what a person is interested in. 

Watch as I navigate through these different audience interests, by clicking into specific interest categories: 

I’ve summed up some interests that stood out to me below (but you as a marketer know which insights you care about, so let this just be a light guide): 

• Books: they love authors like Tony Robbins, Tim Ferris, Malcolm Gladwell, and Deepak Chopra, and they read books like Freakonomics 
• Culture: love Goodreads where they can record what books they have read or want to read, they are into art (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 
• Entertainment: they watch Ted Talks and Sports Center 
• Events: they follow events like the PGA tour, and the WorldCup 
• Fitness wise: they are Fitbit fans (I’m noting that between this and GoodReads they obvious like to track their progress in things like fitness and reading) 
• Food & Drink: they like the usual suspects like Wendy’s and McDonalds… who doesn’t 
• Fun: they find Reddit funny, and they are really into GIFs and these accounts that post about facts (as a marketer I love knowing what an audience finds funny because this is easy to tie into your marketing, and humor resonates with so many people) 
• Media: this audience reads the New York Times, Forbes, and TechCrunch (great places to advertise if we want our ads to get in front of this audience) 
• Online shows: they watch YouTubers/ online content creators like Logan Paul and Ninja 
• Politics: nothing is really standing out here because they follow both Liberal and Conservative accounts 
• Technology: they look up to guys in the tech space like Tim Cook and Bill Gates (but we’ll get to their more niche influencers later) 
• Tools: other tools you might find in their tech stack include Hootsuite and HubSpot
• Top Brands: when we look at top brands, Slack shows up as the top, indicating that this group are big Slack users (Monday.com should then create a slack and Monday integration if they haven’t already) 

Finally, for fun, I looked at the interests in order of “Very High Uniqueness” to see if anything popped out at me, and one thing that did was the account “Product Hunt” - it’s a place where these Tech Consultants can be alerted about cool new products that help them with their job. Maybe this is how they first heard about Monday.com….and if not, Monday.com should make sure they are advertising or being mentioned on this site/ in their newsletter. 

You’ll notice that audience analysis is a lot about insights, but it also is about mixing in your instinct. If your audience is following Tim Ferris, you can instinctively know that they probably look up to him, and resonate with his business philosophies or motivational quotes. So the insight is what leads you to that instinct. 

Influencers 

Influencers are interesting because yes we can look at them as people who help persuade our customers to buy our product, but who your audience follows also indicates who they aspire to be like. 

So influencers are essentially people (in some cases) who your audience aspires to be on a financial level, fitness level, socially, character/ personality wise, healthwise, job wise, or even looks wise. 

What we're trying to say is that the influencers tab within Audiense can obviously point you in the right direction of a creator your brand should work with, should you choose to run an influencer campaign. But, influencers can also paint a picture of who your audience WANTS to be. 

Here are the top influencers for our “Tech Consultants” audience: 

So this “Tech Consultants” audience is influenced by (or wants to be like) big time entrepreneur Richard Branson, actor Leonardo Diaprio, CEO John Steinberg, YouTube content creator Luke Miani, global tech correspondent Tim Bradshaw, and tech video creator Brandon Butch, to name a few. 

This knowledge, as we mentioned before, can spark influencer campaign strategies and ideas. But, it can also be used to inspire content, brand positioning, and new products - because if you know that your audience aspires to be like an entrepreneur or a content creator for example, then you can work that into the type of content you create for them. 

Maybe that means creating a blog on “the top 10 habits of the most successful tech entrepreneurs”, or a video that talks about “the 5 best ways to set up your office to film content”. 

You get the idea. 

Media and Content 

Media Affinity and Online Habits are great tabs to visit when you want to uncover which media outlets to place your ads on, or how to divy up your ad spend on different social channels.  

Here’s what the Media Affinities tab can tell us: 

• This audience gets their news from BBC, and Bloomberg
• They listen to the BBC radio
• They read the Economist and the Wall Street Journal
• Time magazine and wired are another source of the articles they read 
• They follow events like ted talks and tournaments like Wimbleton 
• You can find them at Starbucks and Target
• They read the Gizmodo and Engadget blog 
• They watch Youtube channels like iJustine and Austin Evans
• Apps they’re using include WhatsApp, Apple Books and Apple News

In terms of this audience’s online habits, they are heavy users of Pinterest (surprising), SoundCloud and Spotify, LinkedIn (expected) and TikTok.

Content will direct how your social posts should look and what tone, emojis, creative etc. should be included in the content you create. 

Looking at their content consumption above, we can infer that they like articles and posts about the new GalaxyS25 Ultra (maybe they’re considering buying this new phone), anti-trump posts, lots of sports related updates and content, and posts about expensive car brands.

Personality 

This section is one of my favourites. It strips your audience down to their needs, values, and personality type. 

These summaries are so helpful at the start of the creative process because they tell you what is going to resonate with your audience on that deeper level. 

To their core, the Tech Consultants look like this: 

• They are analytical and social
• They enjoy a fast-paced and busy schedule with lots of activities
• They are philosophical and open to exploring new ideas 
• They are adventurous and eager to experience new things 
• Their choices are driven by a desire for organization (hence why they probably love a product like Monday.com)
• They like to set their own goals and decide how best to achieve them
• They think it's important to care about the people around them 

So at their core, you know what your audience needs and wants and what drives their decisions, so the copy/content/creative you make for them can speak to these data points. 

For example, maybe you create content that speaks to their desire for organization, or their need to be adventurous and try new experiences - both would resonate based on their personality insights above. 

Demographic and Socioeconomic insights 

These insights are important to finish the picture of your consumer in your mind. They help you spot things like, does your audience have kids, how much money do they make, where do they live, what job titles do they have. 

These are still things you can play up in your creative to help your audience resonate with that creative. 

For example, if your audience is made up of males aged 25-34, who live in San Francisco, and are married and are also new parents like the “Tech Consultants”, then you can feature that type of man in your commercial for example, so the “Tech Consultants feel seen” or can see themselves in that man in your ad. 

Here is a highlight of the demographic and socioeconomic insights on this audience:

How to transfer these insights to creative

So now you’ve got these insights on your audience, and it’s time to apply them to your everyday “creative” marketing jobs, like content creation. 

We’re going to go through some of the most common marketing outputs or tasks and show you how you would use the insights during the creative process for each. 

Let’s go!

Writing blog posts or articles 

Odds are you probably have a formula for your blog content already ironed out, if that’s the case then finding insights on your audience doesn’t mean you have to re-write your entire strategy, but you can find creative ways to fold them in. 

For Monday.com for example, they share a lot of blogs that talk about new tech, they give advice on project management, and they discuss different project management software options. 

So if I worked for Monday.com, I would refer back to the Content section of my Audiense report, where I would find that they are really interested in posts about the new Galaxy S25 Ultra phone, so I would take this insight and turn it into an article where I talk about the benefits of the new Galaxy S25 Ultra and all the ways that this phone will make a “Tech Consultant”, or project manager’s life easier. I would also fold in how the Monday.com app would work on the Galaxy S25 Ultra.

You see how I took that piece of insight and turned it into a piece of content. That’s how you can use insights in the creative process - as a starting point. 

To discover which content you should be writing for your own audience, sign up to run a free Audiense report. 

Email Marketing 

Personality insights can inform things like subject lines, pinpointing what your audience cares about most. For example, if we know our “Tech Consultants” choices are driven by a desire for organization, we’re going to hone in on that in our subject line to grab their attention. That could look something like “Organize, don’t agonize: Master your organization with Monday.com”

Interest insights can inform what you include in that Newsletter too. We know this audience likes Tim Ferris, Good Reads, Ted Talks, GIFs, and Fitbits… what if we took that and made a newsletter that included: 

• An article on “How to make the “Four Hour Work Week a Reality with Monday.com” (a play on Tim Ferris’s famous book called “The Four Hour Work Week”).
• Interesting tech related TED Talks
• Funny GIFs on what it’s like really like being a “Tech Consultant”
• Tips on how to make time in their schedule for working out, or how to sync Monday.com up with their Fitbit 

Five small insights can snowball into the creation of a full Newsletter.

What about outbound sales emails? 

Our insights have you covered for this task too. 

With outbound emails, we know half the time people don’t even read them or they skim them, so we need to get to the point quickly and we need to speak to their main business need. Based on the insights we know that is organization. Deeper than that we know that they look up to entrepreneurs like Richard Branson and motivational speakers like Tony Robbins. 

What if you created than an outbound email that read something like: 

Access the insights you need to craft marketing emails your audience actually wants to read. 

Landing page/ Website copy 

Maybe you’ve been tasked with creating or updating a web page or landing page - insights are a great place to start before you begin. 

Take this IT related page on the Monday.com website for example. 

To really tailor it our “Tech Consultants” we could again speak to what they value most: 

• They are analytical and social
• They enjoy a fast-paced and busy schedule with lots of activities
• They are philosophical and open to exploring new ideas 
• They are adventurous and eager to experience new things 
• Their choices are driven by a desire for organization 
• They like to set their own goals and decide how best to achieve them

And the header of the page could say “Meet all your goals, stay organized, and make more time for your life outside of work”, playing on their need to set goals, their desire to be organized, and speaking to their eagerness to experience new things and adventure”.

On the page you could also show how the product supports someone who works at a fast-pace, with so many things to schedule. 

You could also depict someone exploring new ways to work with Monday.com.

See how starting with insights in the creative process really gets you to brainstorm what is most important to include in a web page or landing page like this. 

Creating a new landing page or web page? Start with Audiense insights. 

Crafting social media posts 

I don’t know about you but when I go to ideate a social media post from scratch it takes me forever to get the ball rolling. 

Using Audiense insights as your starting point speeds up this process! The insights tell us that this audience has a love of organization, efficiency, tech tools, and sports. Their tech website/tool interests include Product Hunt, Slack, and HubSpot. They value working in fast-paced environments, and are goal-driven, social, and adventurous. 

Let’s fold all of that into creating a LinkedIn post for this audience (since we know that LinkedIn is one of their top used social channels), here’s what that could look like:

Want an image to go with it?

Showcase a man, age 25-34, wearing a Fitbit, working at his super organized desk, with his laptop open showcasing all the productivity tools he's using, and in the office have sports posters dawning the walls and a bookshelf with books by Tony Robbins, Tim Ferris, Malcolm Gladwell, and Deepak Chopra. On the desk have a couple framed photos of this man on different travel adventures, because remember they love travel; so pictures of him climbing a mountain in Switzerland, going wind-surfing in Australia… you get the idea.

Creating a social media ad 

The data tells us that this audience is also on Pinterest a lot, so let’s use the insights to help inform a Pinterest ad for Monday.com.

Here are the insights we’ll use to help us create this ad: they love travel, sports, and remote working, they have an admiration for productivity gurus, they like to track their goals. 

The ad could be a split-image carousel, where one side depicts a tech consultant working remotely in an airport lounge and the other side of the image shows an organized Monday.com dashboard, tracking all his meetings and projects. 

The copy could read “Master your workflow from anywhere - whether you’re courtside, on a flight, or working remotely. Stay ahead and meet all your goals, just like the pros, with Monday.com.

Media Buying

This is not really a “creative marketing function”, or at least it shouldn't be because whenever you buy media placements it should be backed by data… but regardless we wanted to include it. 

If I were choosing where to buy ad space for Monday.com, to get in front of my Tech Consultant’s audience, we’d use the Media Affinities insights. For a multi-channel approach we should: 

• Create sponsored articles, banner ads, and podcast sponsorships in Bloomberg & The Economist
• Create thought leadership pieces for the Wall Street Journal and Wired Magazine 
• Buy display ads in Gizmodo & Engadget, and pay for sponsored reviews 
• Run Monday.com ads before TED Talks on Youtube 
• Run radio ads on the BBC Radio 
• Sponsor TED Talk conferences 
• Buy in app ads in Apple News & Apple Books 

Don’t leave media buying up to “guess work”, find out the exact best channels to target your audience through. 

Influencer marketing campaigns 

Audiense users love our Influencers section of our reports, it quickly hones in on which influencers you should be working with, backed by data! 

Based on the top “micro” influencers for our “Tech Entrepreneurs” audience, it would make sense to work with:  

• Luke Miani: he covers Apple products, tech gear, and workflow optimization tools.
• Austin Evans: he reviews hardware, software, and tech tools for professionals.
• iJustine: she explores tech setups, apps, and software for productivity.
• Brandon Butch: he focuses on Apple ecosystem tools and integrations (great for targeting Apple News & Apple Books users).

We could get them to showcase Monday.com as the best workflow optimization tool on their channel.

Each influencer could create a sponsored YouTube video integrating Monday.com into a real-world productivity challenge that resonates with our tech consultants. The concept for the video could be “I Automated My Work for a Week - Here’s What Happened”, where each influencer would show how they replaced their messy workflow with Monday.com for one full week to test its real impact.

Get the insights you need to GET CREATIVE! 

Now that we’ve proven just how powerful audience insights can be in the creative process, it’s time for you to put these insights into action. 

Understand what truly resonates with your audience; from their interests and influencers to their content consumption and personality type. Then use that to create amazing marketing materials and campaigns, still using your own creativity but backing it with data and proof that it will resonate. 

Don’t leave your creative strategy to “guesswork” or a one-off team brainstorm session. Sign up for Audiense Insights and start creating content that speaks directly to your audience’s needs and values.