Why audience intelligence beats traditional market research every time

We all have that friend, the one who sends you that meme that was funny 3 months ago - or they text you “have you seen this?” and it's a video that went viral last year. They’re never up to date with what's current on social media.

This friend is a lot like market research in a way. Market research, in the traditional sense, provides old outdated information - stuff that was relevant months ago, but isn’t anymore. 

Why? Because market research, in the form of surveys, focus groups, experiments etc. takes time - a lot of time. When it’s all said and done, and the data has been collected, documented, and organized - the insights one can derive from it is already yesterday's news. 

So, in a world where it seems like things are changing constantly, especially online, you can’t use old insights from months ago to sell something to someone today. 

Which is why most marketers use audience intelligence. Audience intelligence is the more modern approach to market research - it’s the friend that spots the trends or funny memes before anyone else. 

Audience intelligence is everything market research aims to be, but it’s better, faster, more dynamic, more actionable, and more affordable. 

In this blog post, we are going to explore all the ways in which audience intelligence beats out traditional market research, and why your brand needs to be using it on the daily. 

Don’t be the friend sending around old outdated memes, and don’t be the brand using old outdated ways to market to your audience. 

So what is traditional market research? 

Traditional market research, much as the name implies, is an old way of conducting research on an audience. 

It’s the offline method meaning it takes place in person so to speak. When we talk about traditional market research we’re referring to things like a focus group, in-person interviews, experiments, and surveys. 

Usually the researcher, or marketer will start with some sort of hypothesis and use the research to prove the hypothesis, so right from the get-go you can see that there is risk of biases. 

These activities might seem like the best way to get into the minds of the customer or target market, but they have a lot of drawbacks. The first being that it takes a lot of time and money to orchestrate most of these “experiments” or research projects. On average a focus group can cost between $4000 to $12,000, or even more depending on how big your focus group is and how much time you need to conduct it. 

Prep for a simple focus group can look like this: one day to prepare, three weeks leading up to, four hours to deliver the focus group, and 4+ hours to review the data collected. 

When you need answers to your questions now, waiting four weeks for your answer just isn’t going to cut it. 

Most of these methods obviously use a small sample size of people to survey or interview, which can be limiting as they don’t represent the full target audience, so insights could get missed. 

Also, anyone leading the focus group is going to come with their own biases and look for things that prove what they already believe to be true. 

Finally, we know as humans that sometimes we lie or bend the truth, and it’s no different when we are taking a survey or being interviewed - we want to show the best side of ourselves. This means that the data collected by people in person or recorded through a survey can be inaccurate, you’re counting on everyone to tell the truth 100% of the time, and that’s not realistic. 

So, you can start to see where things get foggy. The insights you are left with after traditional market research can be completely inaccurate, and what’s worse is you have wasted significant time and money to get to those insights. 

It would be a lot easier if when you had a question about your audience you could ask it right away, and get the accurate answer from your entire audience, for a fraction of the cost. Luckily, with audience intelligence, you can. 

What is audience intelligence? 

Audience intelligence is market research but on steroids. Let me explain. 

Let’s say that you and your team are trying to develop a new product (in this case an energy drink) specifically for your ‘female millennial moms’ target audience based in the US. 

You want to understand what kind of energy drink they are going to buy - what will it taste like, what benefits will it have, how much caffeine will it contain etc. etc. 

By using an audience intelligence platform, all you would have to do is run a report on that audience and the report could surface insights that could be used to inform the creation of the energy drink itself. For example, you might discover that this audience is talking about trying a low sugar diet, so you could make and advertise the energy as drink sugar free. 

Audience intelligence refers to the insights derived from an audience in real-time. The insights are pulled from various digital sources like your audience’s social media accounts, CRM data, purchase data, their online behavior, personality traits, and interests. 

An audience intelligence platform sifts through all of this data and surfaces the richest insights that can then be applied to any project you are working on. 

Audiense for example surfaces personality insights, interests, media affinities, online behaviors, demographics, psychographics, the list goes on. You will always know what motivates your audience, what their needs are, and what moves them to buy.

SOPRISM takes a deep look at an audience's online activities on Facebook and Instagram - two very powerful sources of insights (think of how long you spend on either of those platforms each day), and it translates it for you in a way that feels like you are looking inside the mind of your audience. 

These insights are presented in easy to read and easy to use dashboards, making sure everyone on your team can work with the insights immediately. 

Take a look: 

If you need further convincing

Sometimes we do something because that’s the way it’s always been done. Most marketers and brands have realized that they need to use an audience intelligence platform in order to stay competitive and keep their finger on the pulse. 

But just in case you are stuck in your old ways, and traditional market research is your primary source of audience insights, here are five points to convince you that you should be using an audience intelligence tool instead. 

Speed and real-time insights 

This is a big one. Time is money as you know, and waiting 4+ weeks for answers to a simple research question means your competitors who use audience intelligence will always be two steps ahead. 

You need insights quickly to tweak that campaign that is underperforming, you need insights quickly because you need to create a pitch deck by next week - there are hundreds of scenarios in the marketing world when you need the insights now, not tomorrow. 

Audience intelligence reports are generated within minutes which means different things:

1. You are always working with the most recent and most up to date data
2. You can action on the insights right away, you don’t have to wait for decisions to be made
3. You can run hundreds of different variations of a report, so you’re never stuck trying to prove one hypothesis through one single study - you can be very experimental with your reports because again, they take seconds to run. 

To put things in perspective, let’s say you are running a social ad campaign that is costing your brand $1000 a day, but you aren’t seeing any positive results. You need to know what changes to make to the copy or creative, or audience build, and you need to know that now. Every day you wait is costing you $1000. 

If you were to rely on a survey or focus group, you could be waiting almost 30 days until you knew how to tweak the ad. That’s $30,000 plus the cost of the focus group. 

Or you could run an audience intelligence report that day, and surface the exact insights you needed to then create an ad that would resonate. 

*above is an image of insights surfaced by Audiense, on how to create effective messaging for your audience, based on their personality insights.

And maybe it's a stretch to think that you would run a focus group to figure out how to tweak an ad, but focus group or not, if you don’t have access to the insights you need to fix the ad that day, it's $1000 dollars a day until you get it right through trial and error.

Depth and granularity of insights

Traditional market research often provides what we call “surface-level” insights. Anyone can tell you their preferences, or give you demographic data. Audience intelligence dives a lot deeper than this. 

It can uncover personality traits that people might not even be aware of themselves. It can show content preferences that would be hard to summarize or describe in person. It also can highlight who an audience is most influenced by or what type of copy/ creative they are most drawn to. 

Audiense’s platform can take an audience that you might have buckleted all together in a focus group (ie. female millennial moms), and segment them out into different more specific audience groups, based on their shared interests and behaviors, like so: 

It can take that group of female millennial moms and uncover sub segments like “Reality TV and fast food moms”, “Vegan running moms”, “Full time working moms on the go”, “Stay at home moms who craft”, and “Creative moms who homeschool”.

These are groups that should all be treated differently, but aren’t when they are only categorized by their demographics in a focus group.

Audiense highlights these groups, shows their differences, and guides you on how to market to each one individually. 

Unbiased data collection

The biggest drawback of traditional market research methods isn’t the cost or even the time it takes - the biggest downfall is that they are prone to bias. 

So after all is said and done, the answers you get back are likely inaccurate. 

This is because you are relying on someone to provide you with the truthful answer, but even if a respondent is trying to be truthful they might not even be aware of the biases taking place. Like if your answer is worded a certain way. 

Your survey questions to a group of mothers for example, could be leading: “Don’t you agree that breastfeeding is the best way to bond with your baby?". 

OR “How often do you enjoy spending quality time with your children?”. The assumptive bias is that mom always enjoys spending time with her children. 

Also, in both cases a mother might feel pressured to give a socially acceptable response. 

Audience intelligence tools remove this bias. It collects data from actual user behavior, so there is no mistaking what the real answer is. It basically tells you who that audience is based on factual data vs. allowing the audience to tell you who they think they are. 

For example, if someone asks me what my interests are I might say reading and writing - but if you were to look at my actual behaviors you would find out that I spend the majority of my time watching baking competition shows, and reading funny subreddits. The first answer makes me look better, and it’s somewhat true, so that’s the one I am going to give but it doesn’t really tell you how you as the marketer can effectively market to me. 

This image was taken from a SOPRISM report, it is a list of interests for an audience of “Full time working moms on the go”. These are their actual interests (based on their online behaviors) : 

Cost-effectiveness

Traditional market research is not cheap. Like we said earlier, it can cost $4000-$12000 for one focus group session. 

You have to rent a facility, you have to recruit participants and then incentivize them, there is a long list of overhead costs related to this type of research. 

Typically most audience intelligence tools charge a yearly or monthly subscription, but once that investment is made, your team is free to run reports right away, anytime, anywhere, for no additional cost. 

It makes it a lot easier to fit this into the marketing budget, because you know the cost, vs a focus group that could easily go over budget. 

Plus, a platform like Audiense offers more value overtime with continuous, automated insights. 

Dynamic and continuous learning

People are always changing. Something that excites them one day, might bore them the next. Audience intelligence tools allow brands to continuously monitor their audience and their preferences so that they can adapt to these changes. 

Traditional market research is static, its data from a snapshot in time. You can see how quickly that data becomes outdated. 

You need to be able to keep your finger on the pulse, hop on the latest trends, and be flexible and willing to pivot when you need to.

That’s how you stay competitive. 

Going back to the energy drink example, if your team was developing a product based on insights from a focus group, maybe at the time the focus group took place the trend was to have an energy drink that contained 7 different vitamins and is low cal. Months pass by and now it might be the case that this audience is more interested in an energy drink that supports gut health specifically. If you use the insights from the focus group, you’re creating the wrong product. 

Addressing common objections

After reviewing these 5 key benefits of audience intelligence tools, you might still have your hesitations. Maybe you think this tool is only beneficial to big named brands, or you are worried about data-privacy and compliance. 

We’re here to ease your mind. Not only is a tool like Audiense 100% data-compliant, but no sensitive PII data is ever exposed. Yes you are getting the richest audience data, but you are never compromising the privacy of the audience it is sourced from. 

Audiense is also not just for big named brands. Although we work with hundreds of big named brands, we also work with small agencies, smaller scale businesses, and consultants. No matter how big or small you are, every brand needs audience intelligence to be successful. 

Market research on steroids

Audience intelligence is market research on steroids. Meaning, it surpasses traditional market research in every way: it provides real-time, actionable insights directly sourced from audience behavior. Traditional methods are slow, costly, and prone to bias. By the time data is collected, all it can offer is outdated information. 

Audience intelligence tools deliver fast, rich audience insights that allow brands to continuously create winning strategies, and pivot when they need to. They are always up to date on audience changes and trends. 

It’s the most affordable, dynamic and modern way to do market research right. So what are you waiting for? 

Transform your understanding of your audience. Watch a demo and see for yourself.