Audience Analysis Part 1: Segmenting and Clustering Specific Audiences
We teamed up with Michael Brito, Global Head of Analytics at Zeno Group, to bring you this two-part deep dive into using audience analysis to build a content strategy that will be a game-changer for your business.
In part 1, we’ll break down the three ways you can build and segment audiences, the 6 inputs you should use for your audience architecture, and how to use these data-informed personas.
Audience analysis is an evolution of social intelligence, and it enables marketers to segment-specific audiences into smaller groups.
Before delving into audience analysis, it’s important to look into the complexities of the B2B buyer’s journey. It’s complex because it doesn’t play out in any kind of predictable, linear order. It’s pretty much chaos.
Buyers weave in and out through their journey, revisiting each of the buying phases shown below multiple times during the process.
This is a challenge and opportunity for marketers. Every entry point and purchase factor can directionally inform a marketing program, advertising campaign, editorial approach, and content strategy.
Additionally, third-party validation can reinforce purchase decision-making and accelerate the buying cycle. In this context, third-party validation could be in the form of influencer marketing or peer validation.
Audience analysis sits right in the middle of the buyer’s journey.
The more you know about your customers and prospects, the better equipped you’ll be to intercept them in the right channels with clear and concise messaging.
In the old days, all marketers had at their disposal was social intelligence, often referred to as “online monitoring” or “social listening”.
Social intelligence is the process of using technology to monitor the internet for specific keywords, topics, brand mentions, competitors, and industries.
It gives marketers the ability to segment and mine online conversations by the news media, blogs, forums, and social media.
Social listening platforms like Brandwatch, Pulsar, Meltwater, Synthesio, Talkwalker, and Netbase have come a long way in recent years, integrating audience analysis, natural language processing (NLP), AI, machine learning, and linguistic analysis to decipher social media conversations.
Typically, social intelligence starts with building advanced Boolean logic to isolate and exclude specific topics, brands, phrases, and keywords.
Social intelligence is still common practice today, and while there is value in this approach, audience analysis provides more in-depth research enabling marketers to make data-driven marketing decisions.
By segmenting and clustering specific audiences into smaller groups, marketers can be more laser-focused when planning for marketing and communications programs, especially for B2B and technology brands.
How to Use Data-Informed Audience Personas
As mentioned, the buyer’s journey is complex, and building audience personas from intuition is a thing of the past.
While it may seem convenient to download a persona template from Hubspot, customize it to your brand identity, and fill in the blanks, personas that are not backed by data simply don’t work.
They may look good on a slide, but they won’t get you the results you expect.
On the other hand, data-informed audience analysis and persona creation give marketers actionable insights they need to create data-driven content marketing programs that deliver real business value and make an impact.
Here’s a quick summary of the types of data you can expect from an audience analysis:
- Brand Affinities: What brands they’re most connected to and reference more than others.
- Buyer’s Journey: What keywords (triggers) they’re using as they research and purchase products and services.
- Influencers: Who they’re influenced by as they weave in and out of the buying cycle.
- Media: What media publications they read and share by topic of interest.
The beauty of building data-informed audience personas is that they will benefit everyone in the organization, from PR and social media to channel sales and direct marketing.
Audience Architecture is Art, But Mostly Science
Together, human intuition and data-driven insights can identify unique audiences, where to find them, and how best to engage them.
There are three ways to build audiences:
Specialized Audiences: This type of audience architecture begins with bio search and is effective for more technical audiences like engineers, developers, IT decision-makers, and the C-suite, mainly because they aren’t shy about telling the world what they do for a living.
To find engineers or developers who are talking about #AIOps, #DevOps, or Robotics Process Automation (RPA) would require combinations of bio search and public social media conversations. Other specialized audiences like technology journalists, analysts, architects, real estate agents, physicians, nurses, and human resources professionals can be built with this methodology.
Affinity-based Audiences: This approach is good for finding like-minded audiences that have similar interests, affinities, and characteristics. It uses a combination of bio search, follower relationships, and social media conversations as its source. Using this architecture, we can build niche audiences, such as millennial sneakerheads who live in New York, prefer drinking craft beer, and listen to 90’s R&B and hip hop, for example.
Micro-audiences: These are smaller audiences (<500), consist of influencers, and are built for the purpose of real-time content marketing or organic influencer engagement. The audience size is large enough to extract directional insights to inform content yet small enough to use for the creation of highly targeted creative assets and organic engagement.
6 inputs to use for audience architecture
- Conversations: What are they talking about?
- URL Sharing: What media are they sharing?
- Bio Search: How do they describe themselves?
- Followers: Who do they follow?
- Demographics: Where do they live?
- Interests/Affinities: What are they passionate about?
Next, we’ll use your audience analysis to design creative storytelling and advertising that can break through the clutter and reach audiences with a memorable, impactful, and game-changing content strategy.
Michael Brito is a digital and analytics strategist, published author, TEDx speaker, adjunct professor. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Audiense has built an audience intelligence platform that combines rich social data sources with the world’s leading cognitive and machine learning. Follow Audiense on Twitter and LinkedIn for cutting-edge and actionable marketing insights.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
