A handful of leading marketers were asked to describe how agency life will change and evolve in 2024. The common theme among their answers was that “higher-level strategic thinking”, and the commitment to upskilling and staying ahead of the curve, is what’s going to separate the successful agencies from the rest.
To put it bluntly, Ben Fox (Chief Executive Officer from Fox Agency) said “Shit is going to get serious. Agencies will be forced to up their game or face the consequences.”
The only way agencies can really “up their game”, and become higher-level strategic thinkers, is if they have access to the right audience data - the type of data that sets a clear outline for creating winning campaign strategies. Agencies need what we call “audience intelligence”.
What is audience intelligence?
Audience intelligence is the practice of gaining a holistic understanding of your target audience. It involves aggregating and analysing audience data, which is collected from their online activity, and any customer engagements recorded in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.
The insights found during this audience analysis, is what paints the picture of who that audience really is, in terms of their desires, deterrents, and behaviours.
This level of insight is what equips marketers with the power to create personalised marketing strategies that lead to higher engagement, conversion rates, and customer loyalty.
You can see why audience intelligence is invaluable to marketing agencies who want to grow and become known in the industry for their winning campaigns strategies.
Whether or not your agency has a successful 2024 will be reflective of how well you implemented audience intelligence.
Let’s explore why.
Agencies need audience insights
Without audience intelligence, campaigns are built on human biases and theories rather than hard data and real insights. As a result, the wrong audiences get targeted, content lacks relevance, and audience engagement goes down.
This was the case for Ideagoras, an international social media agency, who was struggling to build an audience-first strategy for their client, a global medical technology brand.
They needed to understand the unique needs, values and personalities of their clients target audience while remaining GDPR compliant - they needed audience intelligence.
So how do agencies acquire this kind of audience intelligence needed to build successful strategies? Do they stock their client’s audience and record their every move? No, they use audience intelligence platforms.
360-degree customer view
These platforms do all the heavy lifting for them; they capture audience data, analyse it, and then present the insights through colourful dashboards and visuals, making it easy for everyone in the agency to understand who the client’s audience is.
When Ideagoras used an audience intelligence platform to analyse their client’s audience they instantly got a 360 view of this audience and were able to create a clear outline to build their campaign strategy around. They used these audience insights to create a winning strategy on social media, by using the right story, tone and creative.
Audience Insights in real-time
Audience intelligence tools can bring value to agencies right away because the audience analysis is done in real-time - much different than market research which takes months to conduct and months to decipher.
Imagine having to do a complete competitive analysis or map the customer journey for your client without an audience intelligence tool. It would take months of manual data aggregation and analysis, which would probably have to be done by a data scientist.
High return on investment
Luckily technology has caught up with us and it's rare that a marketing agency wouldn't have an audience intelligence tool in their tech stack.
The return on investment with audience intelligence tools is too high not to be using one, as they solve so many of the challenges agencies face.
Endless agency benefits
The list of the benefits of audience intelligence platforms is long, so we’ll summarise:
- they highlight the top media outlets an audience resonates with, automating the media planning process
- they make audience segmentation a breeze
- audience intelligence tools identify the best segments to target, saving the agency time and money they could be wasting on the wrong audience
- campaigns built off insights surfaced by audience intelligence platforms outperform those that aren’t
- they remove headache of having to worry about GDPR compliance laws, because the platform collects and analyses the data on the client’s customers in a safe and secure way
- audience intelligence tools are used firm-wide, because the insights they surface are done so in a way that they can be understood by anyone, with any professional background. Meaning insights can be shared across many different stakeholders and teams, removing data silos and allowing everyone at the agency to make data-driven decisions.
See the full list of benefits in our comprehensive audience intelligence guide.
Audience intelligence tools pave the way for agencies to grow and be successful. We’ve illustrated that in our step-by-step “roadmap to success” below.
The agency roadmap to success
Step 1: Data collection
Collect audience data to form a holistic view of your client’s audience
Audience intelligence platforms collect data on your client’s audience so you don’t have to. PII (personal identifiable information) is never exposed because the data and insights are presented back to you through colourful dashboards and visuals safely and securely.
Through the use of AI and machine learning, audience intelligence platforms automatically surface the most important insights from that data, in a way that everyone at your agency can understand.
Pro tip: Use this guide to select the best audience intelligence platform, to begin the process of collecting and analysing audience data
Step 2: Audience segmentation
Segment your client’s audience
Audience segmentation is key because it’s the first step in understanding your client’s audience on a deeper level. Segmentation is the process of taking the entire audience and segmenting them into groups based on their shared interests, behaviours, and affinities.
Audience intelligence platforms segment your client’s audience automatically. Having the audience broken down into different segments is what allows for tailored marketing strategies for each customer group because marketing should never take a “one size fits all” approach.
In the example above, we see the audience of the vegan food brand “Just Egg” segmented into 6 different groups, all whom should be targeted using a different strategy.
Pro tip: Regularly segment your client’s audience to keep you and your client up to date on any audience changes and emerging trends.
Step 3: Insight generation
Surface actionable insights
Audience intelligence tools surface the most important insights on your client's audience. They surface what that audience loves most, how they behave online, what encourages them to make a purchase, what content resonates with them, what they're discussing, what’s trending etc. It’s everything an agency needs to market effectively to that audience.
The insights surfaced can be broad or granular and both are important when creating a marketing strategy for that segment.
Below are examples of insights that surfaced on this “Vegan mom” segment in Just Egg’s audience:
Broad insights: “The majority of the audience is made up of single moms aged 30-35, who love running and live in Seattle.”
Granular insights: “This audience loves the TV show Succession, they do the majority of their shopping at Target, they are most active online on Mondays at 7 pm, they are heavily influenced by vegan cookbook author Lauren Toyota, they share a lot of vegan recipes online, they talk about wanting to find chemical free “Health & Beauty” products for their children, they are most responsive to ads that evoke feelings of empathy, and they spend 80% of their time on Instagram as compared to all other social media channels.”
Pro tip: Get in the habit of not relying on broad insights like demographics when “getting to know '' an audience. Instead, dig deep and practice summarising the granular insights as we did above - that’s where the real value is found, plus your client will be more impressed if you can present them with insights they didn't already have on their audience!
Step 4: Strategy implementation
Build a strategy based on the insights
Use the insights surfaced by the audience intelligence platform to build a winning, data-backed marketing strategy.
Use audience details like their top social media channel, influencer, ad type, messaging etc. to build a campaign that leads to high customer engagement and conversion.
Present the strategy to the client with confidence, because you have all the data and insights provided by your audience intelligence platform to back it up.
Streamline everything from media buying to content creation with the help of audience intelligence platforms.
In the example above, you can see how we’ve applied the insights we surfaced on the “Vegan moms” segment to build a highly targeted and personalised marketing campaign.
Pro Tip: Don’t doubt the data. It can be hard to change your original perception of an audience when the data tells you something completely different from what you initially believed. Let your strategies be data-backed instead of biases-backed, and create them with confidence.
Step 5: Performance analysis
Gain insight on how the strategy is performing and where to make adjustments
After the campaign goes live, use your audience intelligence platform to assess the results of the campaign. Monitor if the campaign is attracting the intended audience, and understand what elements of the campaign can be adjusted to increase conversion rates.
Use your audience intelligence platform to continue to monitor your client's audience, and segment it regularly to uncover new trends and any audience changes.
Pro tip: audience intelligence isn’t just for campaign creation, it's a vital piece in the whole campaign lifecycle. So use it to analyse and direct improved campaign performance.
Step 6: Reap the benefits
Watch audience intelligence grow your agency and lead you towards success
Follow this agency roadmap and put audience intelligence at the forefront of everything you do. Harness the power of audience intelligence platforms and reap the benefits: successful campaigns with higher ROI, increased customer engagement and loyalty, personalised marketing strategies that convert, stronger client relationships, and overall agency growth.
Pro tip: Sign up for Audiense and take the very first step towards agency success.
Agencies that have followed the “road map” to success [case studies]
Relevance
Relevance, a luxury marketing agency was asked to find and target high-net worth individuals for their client, a prestigious Yacht brand. This was during the pandemic, so the idea of selling Yachts was a big task.
The client asked Relevance to identify the key messaging, marketing platforms and influencers this high-networth audience should be targeted through.
With hardly any data on the Yacht brand’s audience, Relevance used an audience intelligence platform to source the data and insights for them. Using these insights, Relevance was able to segment the audience into smaller groups, distinguishing real yacht customers from yacht advisors and personnel.
The audience intelligence platform surfaced insights Relevance needed, and would otherwise not have, to build a highly targeted and personalised campaign for the “high-net worth yacht customers”.
Relevance was able to identify the exact ad types, tone of voice, organic content and other targeting criteria that would resonate and convert this audience.
“We developed a simple messaging map for the client, showing key angles to use to target the various segments on which platforms. We have a clear direction and findings to back up our strategy with a much-needed sense of confidence…the client is already very happy with the strategic direction.”
Niki McMorrough, previously the Commercial Director at Relevance
Read the full case study here.
Convosphere
Insights agency Convosphere was working with their client, an edutainment brand that owned a multinational education company. This client wanted to expand into three new markets: Germany, France, and Japan.
To do this, Convosphere set out to answer three questions about each region. 1) They wanted to know their needs and challenges when it came to education and ed-tech. 2) What was the potential reach of an edutainment company in each region based on things like internet access? 3) Which location represented the greatest opportunity in terms of potential customers?
The issue was Convosphere had no way of obtaining this type of data and answering these questions on their own, so they used an audience intelligence platform.
Specifically, they used an audience intelligence tool to analyse student conversations on social media, and separate these students into different market segments.
Through this analysis they were able to advise their client if it was worth entering each market and why.
Convosphere helped their client understand the interests, needs and concerns regarding education in each region.
Based on these insights, the client was able to narrow down which locations to enter and how.
Explore the full case study here.
Start analysing audiences now
As you’ve just learned, audience intelligence is crucial for agency success. No matter what the client asks, audience intelligence can surface the insights you need to do your job and build data-backed strategies that see real results.
By following the agency road to success and harnessing the power of audience intelligence tools, you can build winning campaigns and marketing strategies, and can continuously find new and valuable opportunities for your clients.
Run your first audience report today.
