Audience insights are one of the most important aspects of a marketing strategy. Well defined audience insights can give a company a distinct advantage over their competitors, and this information is vital for understanding your audience. But what exactly are audience insights?
Audience insights can be categorized as anything that can convey unique information about a particular audience. These unique insights point to specific information about the views or behaviors of the consumers. By going beyond basic demographics and asking the right kind of questions you can learn what your audience is thinking, feeling, and doing and learn why this is the case in the process. Next let’s take a look at some of the highlights of different types of audience insights.
Types of Audience Insights
There are hundreds if not thousands of different audience profiling points that could be used to acquire essential information about a target audience. However, we will only cover some of the more common highlights for reference.
- Aspirations
- Behaviors
- Attitudes
- Hobbies and interests
- Life milestones and priorities
- Media preferences
- Platform/channel preferences
- Price sensitivity
- Product and brand preferences
- Social media habits
- Retail touch points and shopping habits
- Views and opinions
These are just some of the more common audience insights that will help you create a picture containing all the important types of consumers that are interested in your company or brand, and how to target them successfully. This will help you create meaningful messages that can be delivered at the right time to your target audience.
Why are Audience Insights Important?
When time and resources are limited, it is important to ensure you are appropriately allocating your efforts into the right places. This is one of the most important benefits that a detailed audience insights can provide you. One approach that a lot of brands take is relying on first-party data sources like browsing habits on their website, mobile app behavior, and transaction history. The issue with this approach is that it doesn't paint the whole picture, there is nothing to validate the data or compare it too. This leads to you only knowing what the audience is doing, but missing the important factor of “why” they are doing it. Ensuring that you include measures for audience motivations, attitudes, and perceptions will allow you to understand the “why” behind your audience's decisions. All of these audience insights will help you to create high-performing campaigns, which can lead to better products and services and guide the marketing strategy in a direction towards success.
Understanding Customer Needs and Preferences
Trends often leave as fast as they come, and for marketing strategies this can be particularly frustrating when attempting to keep up with all the current trends. Audience insights can build a clearer picture for your strategy by identifying what customers love, hate, want, and need at any given time. So as things change fast you can quickly analyze the key target areas that must be hit to reach and engage the audience. Additionally another great way to figure out what the audience wants is through consumer surveys. A well structured consumer survey can tell you exactly what audiences care about. These insights can lead to potential new revenue streams and opportunities. By using audience insights, you can better understand and anticipate what the audience needs. The biggest takeaway is listening to your audience, and listening to the data!
Improving Customer Experience
Audience insights aren’t just important for attracting new customers, but is equally important for retaining existing customers as well. The customer experience should be at the forefront of your thinking. Whether you are a large corporation or a small business, You want to tailor the perfect customer experience for the specific target audience you are trying to reach. For example, you may have a big time business, but through personalized marketing to individual customers, the customer experience can feel authentic and more personal to the target audience. The more you can improve the customer experience, the better for your business, and retaining loyal customers. One of the most valuable pieces of information a company can receive to improve the customer experience is customer feedback. By analyzing customer feedback you can help your brand recognize unmet needs or areas where they can improve, as well as understanding what areas customers love, all in which can lead to the proper adjustments to continuously improve the customer experience.
These were just a few examples of how audience insights can improve marketing, however this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of all the benefits that audience insights can provide for a business’s marketing strategy. The M.S. Integrated Marketing Communications offers a “Audience Insight” course that is designed to give an in-depth look at consumer behavior and its role in IMC. The course examines consumer behavior in terms of internal influences, external influences, the consumer decision-making process and consumers and culture. This course will prepare you by providing you the most important and fundamental knowledge needed to understand audience insights and how to incorporate these insights into an integrated marketing communications strategy. For more information on this course, click here.
Marketing Communications Online Programs
The marketing communications landscape is constantly changing. Our programs are focused on what is happening next in marketing. Learn more about our innovative programs.
Meet the Author
Erik Rudolph
Marketing Assistant Student Worker
Erik is a senior advertising student with a minor in communications, he also is a part of the MSJ 4+1 program at WVU. He is currently the marketing assistant student worker for the WVU Marketing Communications Graduate Programs. Erik loves the sport of boxing and works closely with a local boxing promotion in Morgantown, Real Fight Promotions, as a color commentator and a social media manager.
Marcom Today
Marketing Communications Today is a collection of resources for marketing communications professionals filled with industry research, marketing trends, and career information about integrated marketing and data-driven communications. Learn industry insights through the Marketing Communications Today blog, podcast, as well as Integrate Online.
Subscribe to get the Latest Trends in Your Inbox