Turning insights into strategies that yield positive results and increase ROI is the number one goal of all businesses. And the number one way that those businesses can achieve that goal is by listening to their consumers and giving them what they want. But matching the right content to the right consumer at the right time can be a tricky endeavor. That’s why a lot of companies are committing to sustained insight research through dedicated departments and/or partnerships with market research firms that monitor consumers in real-time across a variety of engagement platforms. The knowledge gleaned from the process is called “audience intelligence,” and it informs today’s businesses of the demographics, interests and intents of their target audience(s).
Here are four ways that audience intelligence can help bolster market research:
By Determining Specific Audience Segments
Monitoring consumers that mention your brand, product or your industry across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, chat rooms, or even the web as a whole, can help you pinpoint any shared characteristics that they may have with one another. Find the people who are using similar terms to describe themselves and following similar companies within your industry. Look for the people who are mentioning the same “trigger” words (words indicative of an interest in your company’s line of business) and sharing comparable stories and articles. Then use any patterns that you see to group these people by shared characteristics. Once you know that the Wall Street banker and the Midwestern soccer mom both have an interest in your product or service, you can begin building buyer personas and developing specific strategies to reach each one.
By Identifying Key Buyer Personas
Audience intelligence doesn’t just provide the means to divide an audience in to segments; it also helps define each one. By focusing on the ways audience members expose themselves while online – details about where they live, the people influencing them, the ideas and products and other items shaping their habits – you gain valuable audience intelligence that then can be used to create detailed buyer personas. And detailed buyer personas mean you can target specific audiences through a variety of specialized campaigns, highlighting what truly matters to each.
By Spotting Industry Trends
Things change, and audience intelligence provides dynamic data as a way to keep abreast of changing times. By continuously tracking consumers and how they change over time, you can uncover the activities and attitudes influencing your buyers and act on them. Evaluate how people use hashtags and trigger words from one month to the next. Compare content that’s responded to or shared from one point in time to another. This data will enrich your market research by uncovering ways to optimize your marketing efforts in a changing world.
Exposing Potential Markets
Having people you didn’t know about interested in you or your industry can be the type of audience intelligence that you need to expand in to additional markets. Evaluate website traffic for new prospects. Consider their location. Use the information to direct new media campaigns their way or to determine where to situate future stores or plants.
Learn More
Audience intelligence is more than social media monitoring. It’s research that explores the emotional reasons consumers commit to a product or company. To harness actionable results from it, market researchers need to dig deeply in to consumer psyches and harness the reasons why people do what they do. Communications for Research (CFR) has 20 years experience gathering audience intelligence. Contact us to speak to our co-CEO Colson Steber about how to develop the audience intelligence you need to improve customer satisfaction and increase your ROI.
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