Big brands are increasingly choosing to work with small agencies, leading to significant growth in the number of small agencies. In fact, 68% of advertising and PR firms have fewer than five employees.
Brands appreciate the personalized experience that small agencies offer. These agencies are known for their flexibility, innovation, and outcome-driven approaches. Many small agencies have also carved out niche industries in which they specialize, further enhancing their appeal. Additionally, small agencies are often more cost-effective for clients due to lower overhead costs and greater resource efficiency.
However, this cost-effectiveness comes with its own set of challenges. Small agencies typically don’t have the budget or time for "fluff" tools. They need a multipurpose, user-friendly platform that can handle a variety of marketing tasks efficiently.
In this guide, we will explore how audience intelligence tools have been instrumental in the success of small agencies. We will also provide practical steps on how to leverage these tools to enhance your marketing strategies.
Audience intelligence is the practice of deeply understanding your target audience by aggregating and analyzing a wide range of data. This includes digital footprints, such as social media interactions and behaviors on various websites, as well as in-person engagements recorded in a company's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
When all this data is combined and analyzed, it becomes audience intelligence. This comprehensive insight helps you understand an audience's needs, values, interests, likes, and dislikes. It allows you to feel as though you know the customer on a one-to-one basis, even without ever meeting them.
Audience intelligence goes beyond basic demographics, uncovering psychographics, behavioral patterns, sociographics, and the underlying needs, wants, and values of any audience.
This personalized intel enables you to tailor marketing strategies with precision. Small agencies leverage audience intelligence to win clients by showcasing their ability to gather detailed insights about their audience.
Audience intelligence is responsible for creating better ads that achieve higher engagement and conversion rates.
Click on the image below for a quick run-through of an audience intelligence tool.
Small agencies are the biggest beneficiaries of audience intelligence tools, as these platforms handle numerous marketing tasks with a single, cost-effective solution. These tools capture client audience data, analyze it, and present the insights through intuitive dashboards and visuals. This makes it easy for the entire small agency team to understand their audience on a deep level and apply these insights to create successful marketing campaigns.
Without audience intelligence, small agency campaigns face several challenges:
Now that you understand the need for audience intelligence, let’s explore the benefits in greater detail.
Audience intelligence tools make segmentation a breeze.
Audience intelligence tools simplify segmentation, making it an effortless process. With just one click, they can automatically segment your client’s audience in an unbiased way, based on shared interests and behaviors. This enables small agencies to quickly grasp the overall audience and the makeup of smaller segments within it.
Knowing the makeup of the smaller segments allows for tailored marketing strategies for each one, making sure each gets treated differently and specific to their needs and values.
Insights on each segment (like in the tab above) include their demographics, socioeconomics, top influencers and brands, their main interest categories to relate to, their top media outlets to reach them through, their favorite content to engage with, personality insights, how they buy/what influences their purchases, and their online habits.
All of these data points work together to help you build out the most detailed customer personas. These data points help build detailed customer personas. These personas act as roadmaps that your small agency team can refer to and work from.
Through segmentation, your small agency can identify the best segments to target. By understanding who has the most interest in your client’s brand, you can focus on these segments to attract more similar individuals, ultimately growing the client’s audience and saving money on targeting audiences who won’t convert.
Additionally, audience intelligence tools save small agencies money by eliminating the need for lengthy and costly market research. They expedite the audience research process by surfacing insights in real-time.
Audience intelligence tools surface insights that can completely shape and direct a marketing strategy.
These insights, such as top media channels, inform media buying decisions. By identifying the top media outlets for your client’s audience, you can always choose the best channels to reach them, ensuring a high ROI and avoiding less effective ones.
When it comes to influencer marketing, audience intelligence tools help you select the best influencers for different client campaigns. Instead of choosing influencers based on follower count, you can now select those who resonate most with the client’s audience, all backed by data.
These tools also reveal the type of copy, messaging, and visuals that your client's audience is most drawn to. This enables you to create content that is guaranteed to resonate with the target audience.
Audience intelligence tools can also direct the type of brand partnerships you encourage your client to get involved in by surfacing the top brands the client's audience has the highest interest in (ie. e.l.f. Cosmetics and Chipotle; this partnership was very successful, and it was between two unseemingly related brands, but both brands had a high audience overlap.)
Additionally, you can track campaign performance and understand which audiences are brought in by each marketing campaign. This helps you determine if your campaign is attracting the intended audience or if adjustments are needed. The faster you can figure this out, the fewer resources your small agency will waste on the wrong audience.
One of the most enticing benefits of audience intelligence for small agencies is its potential to help grow your book of business.
During the pitching stage, audience intelligence tools enable quick and thorough audience research. You can uncover impressive and exciting insights about the client’s audience, helping you stand out from the competition and demonstrating a deep understanding of the client's audience.
Using an audience intelligence tool also shows that your small agency relies on data-backed decision-making. This instills confidence in potential clients, reassuring them that your strategies are informed by solid data and insights.
Client turnover can be a significant stressor for small agencies, as maintaining and growing your client base is crucial for your agency’s success.
Clients want agencies that go the extra mile and provide additional value. Audience intelligence tools help you achieve this.
Use audience intelligence tools like Audiense or SOPRISM to track and assess changes in your client’s audience. Regularly share these insights with your clients, helping them adapt to evolving audience preferences and positioning yourself as a valued partner.
By surfacing audience trends that present new market opportunities and presenting these insights to your client on a monthly basis, you demonstrate your commitment to their success.
Monitor competitors using audience intelligence tools to perform in-depth competitive analyses. Understand which marketing strategies are working for them and identify the audiences they have won over that your client could target.
Constantly assess your client’s market share, showing them which audiences they dominate and which ones they need to target for expansion.
All of these practices are facilitated by audience intelligence tools and will be the reason your clients stay with your small agency over time.
Now that you understand the benefits of audience intelligence tools, let’s provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to select the right tool and ensure you are getting the most out of it.
First things first you need to find the audience intelligence tool that is right for you.
Not all audience intelligence platforms are created equal and some are better at surfacing insights than others.
Here are the top 5 to consider:
Audiense is an audience intelligence platform known for helping small agencies understand what inspires, motivates and influences any audience.
Audiense helps agencies segment these audiences by their interests, and surface rich cultural insights that are used to build personalized marketing strategies.
Agencies use Audience to understand niche audience affinities and create better personas to work from. Audiense reports surface everything from what influencers their clients should be working with to which content to create to resonate with their audience.
Users love this platform because it helps them understand which segments of consumers are worth targeting, and it surfaces the insights needed to improve connection, conversions, and customer experience.
Sign up for a fast walkthrough of the Audiense platform.
Brandwatch gives agencies the ability to monitor their clients' brands, competitors, and industry trends across more than 100 million online sources.
More specifically, it allows agencies to monitor and decipher online conversations that people are having about any brand, across the globe, in 30+ different languages.
Brandwatch also acts as a social media management tool, where you can create, schedule, and monitor posts across all networks and channels, from one place.
Agencies use this platform for “sentiment analysis”, and users like that it gives them the ability to surface the audience behind any topic, across multiple different content sources.
Pulsar helps agencies measure and optimize performance across client owned websites and social channels.
Agencies use this platform to access and analyze digital audiences all in one place. It helps them connect the dots between online conversations and consumer trends.
Pulsar helps with brand tracking and campaign measurement, and the insights surfaced are typically used to inspire the creative for marketing campaigns.
StatSocial allows users to understand what makes an audience unique.
Agencies use StatSocial to conduct deep research on the audiences of their client, or their client’s competitors.
The insights surfaced by this platform help agencies pick the top influencers and media channels to partner with to reach and resonate with any audience.
StatSocial also has the ability to enrich any first-party or third-party data set, to shed further light on audience affinities and preferences.
Helixa is an audience intelligence platform that uses AI and machine learning to connect and analyze audience data.
This platform helps agencies create detailed customer personas for their clients' audience by surfacing things like personality attributes, demographics and consumer behavior.
The data surfaced by Helixa is organized into summarized reports that are easy to understand and take action on.
Agencies like Helixa’s user-friendly interface and visually appealing dashboard. Helixa makes it easy to gather insights quickly on any audience, and it is often used for early stage strategic development for new products, ads, and brand offerings.
Choosing a platform doesn’t have to be rocket science, go with the top rated, or the one with the best reputation amongst small agencies - but always do a trial. That way you can see if the platform you are considering has all these features (which are imperative to small agency success):
Make sure the audience intelligence tool has:
This section is a bit of a bait-and-switch because the truth is audience intelligence tools do most of this work for you. They collect all the audience data just from you typing in which audience you wish to explore, and then they surface all the insights on that audience.
Using the Audiense platform, we are going to review the best way to analyze an audience:
As you’ll see in the video, properly analyzing an audience means getting to know them through their socioeconomic, interests, behavioral, personality, psychographic, demographic, and affinity insights.
Segmenting with audience intelligence should be an automated process.
The limited steps involve:
From there you can let a tool like Audiense organically segment that audience and group people together with the same interests and affinities. Audiense doesn’t even require you to come up with any data, 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 for you.
By segmenting your audience this way, you can market to each segment individually based on what they are most interested in which results in highly impactful and winning marketing 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.
So with all these insights, how can you apply them to create winning marketing strategies?
Our roadmap explains it best. But here’s a summary:
1. The key is to take actionable insights (what an 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.) and turn it into strategy.
Below are examples of actionable insights that the Audiense platform surfaced on a “Vegan mom” segment in Just Egg’s audience:
Broad actionable insights: “The majority of the audience is made up of single moms aged 30-35, who love running and live in Seattle.”
Granular actionable 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. They want to spend more time with their family and less time cooking.”
2. Then you build a strategy based on those actionable insights:
Using the actionable insights from above you might create an Instagram ad that is targeted at single moms aged 30-35. In the ad, you could use their top influencer Lauren Toyata to post about using Just Egg in her “5-minute easy recipes”, so that moms have more time to spend with their family and less time cooking healthy meals.
This is a simplification, but it shows just how easy it is to apply insights surfaced from an audience intelligence tool, to create ads that are guaranteed to resonate.
Small agencies have long been fans of the Audiense platform. They love the ability to understand their client’s audience on the deepest level instantaneously. Here are some of their stories:
Convosphere, an insights and intelligence agency, successfully helped a multinational edutainment company expand into three new educational markets: Germany, France, and Japan. Their client aimed to provide digital learning systems to reduce inequalities in education, a significant opportunity given the $10+ billion global edutainment market projected by 2027. However, Convosphere faced numerous challenges, including varied cultures, demographics, and educational systems in the target regions.
To address these challenges, Convosphere employed:
Through their rigorous process, Convosphere identified key data points, such as student psychographics, prevalent educational topics, and the adoption of ed-tech in each region.
They used the Audiense platform to segment the audience and determine the largest potential customer bases, including parents, educators, and industry experts. This segmentation was crucial in understanding the context and nuance of each market, highlighting disparities in technology access and digital literacy among students and educators.
For example, while online safety was a significant concern in Japan, connectivity issues were more prominent in France and Germany.
Convosphere's comprehensive analysis provided their client with actionable insights, enabling a confident and strategic approach to market expansion. Their findings revealed that the primary challenges in these regions revolved around outdated teaching materials and uneven access to digital education resources.
With these insights, the client could tailor their offerings to meet the specific technological and educational needs of each market, ensuring a focused and effective entry strategy. Ultimately, the use of audience intelligence and tools like Audiense was instrumental in validating the viability of the expansion and targeting the right segments for long-term success.
Relevance, a luxury digital marketing agency, successfully helped a yachting client target ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs) by leveraging audience intelligence and segmentation.
The agency faced the challenge of marketing multi-million dollar yachts to a niche audience, requiring careful timing and messaging.
Using Audiense, Relevance segmented their target audiences, including yacht advisors, UHNWIs, and yacht personnel, and analyzed their behaviors and affinities to uncover effective marketing opportunities. This approach allowed them to identify key messages and platforms that resonated with different segments, ensuring precise targeting throughout the customer journey.
Relevance's analysis revealed that UHNWIs and yacht advisors were heavily influenced by recommendations from friends and family, emphasizing the importance of testimonials and social proof in their marketing strategy.
By examining how audience segments intersected, Relevance identified common threads and tailored their campaigns accordingly. They discovered that certain segments were more digitally engaged, while others preferred traditional media, allowing the agency to optimize their organic and paid targeting strategies.
The use of Audiense's Targeting Pack feature further refined their approach, enabling precise ad placements across various platforms.
The campaign's findings highlighted distinct preferences among UHNWIs, with some segments responding to business analogies and others viewing yachting as part of their work-life balance.
Relevance developed a messaging map to target these segments effectively, focusing on B2B communication for organic social media and using paid targeting to reach ultra-wealthy consumers.
The strategic direction provided the client with a clear path forward, backed by data-driven insights. This case demonstrates the importance of audience intelligence in crafting successful campaigns for niche, high-value markets.
If you want to see success just like the small agencies above, we have some best practices for you to follow:
For optimal results, audience segments should be updated regularly. Just as individual preferences can change, so can your client’s audience. Running monthly reports or setting up automated monthly monitoring can highlight any changes.
Regularly surface audience segment trends to your client. Key questions to consider include:
These insights can be discovered through the Audiense platform and sent over to your client or team to be actioned on. Consistently updating and refining segments ensures that your marketing efforts remain relevant and effective.
This is another big one. Small agencies that find success are the ones who integrate these insights right into their campaigns or business strategies.
Competitive insights are a good example of this. What can you learn about an analysis of your client's competitor that they can use to their advantage?
BY performing an in-depth competitive analysis you can understand which marketing strategies are working for them that your client could attempt. This also allows agencies to understand which audiences a competitor has captured that their client has yet to consider/ target, and which audiences their client is dominating and why.
You can also assess client market share, by showing which audiences within the entire industry the client has dominated and which ones they need to target to expand their reach.
Big business decisions can be based on the insights learned from your client's audience or your client's competitors - and both need to be constantly monitored.
Now that we’ve got you excited about audience intelligence, what does the future hold? We believe that tools will become quicker and more detailed in providing audience insights, with Audiense leading the charge.
To stay ahead of the curve, small agencies need to:
Brands will continue to choose small agencies that can demonstrate a deep understanding of their clients' audiences. This is made possible with the right audience intelligence tool.
Small agencies that invest time in analyzing insights and maintaining a comprehensive, updated picture of all audience segments will consistently create winning ads.
We hope this guide has shown you the importance of audience intelligence and helped you on your way to choosing the right platform for your small agency.
Sign up now to try our audience intelligence platform, which has already helped many small agencies like yours succeed.