How your digital campaigns can benefit from audience marketing in 2018
Potential customers can be targeted progressively with the help of audience marketing, focusing on the more personal aspects and not just looking at an overall demographic. It considers mindsets, behaviours and preferences of people in all demographics, before filtering that information to identify individuals at a more granular level.
How is audience marketing in 2018 different to older methods?
A good example would be marketers working for a new quality burger brand. Rather than targeting a wide social group of millennials who say they’re keen on burgers, they can utilise audience intelligence to find that hipster group of 20-year olds who enjoy heading out at the weekend for something a little more gourmet. By fully understanding the perceptions and mindsets of these audiences, marketers can be more confident that the audience their speaking to really is their dedicated audience.
The audience in question is more likely to be interested in what the gourmet burger brand has to offer compared to fast food options for instance - and are more likely to act on their messages. It’s a delicate and precise model that incorporates studying social data and getting a clear understanding of who you’re speaking to and when to reach out to them.
Audience marketing has these three pillars:
Perceptions: Social media is a haven of personal opinion and it’s the one place you’re guaranteed to get honest opinions from audiences about their thoughts and beliefs. Gathering audience perception information on new products is a great way to understand how your audience feels.
Analysing networks provides you with tips on emotion surrounding the product or the topic in question, and the areas you want to focus on. With this information you can gauge the reaction to new products and adjust your marketing approach throughout the campaign. You can also see look at the reaction to your new product or service once it’s launched.
Moments: People are experiencing different moments in their lives all the time – whether that’s as simple as commuting to and from work or having a child. These moments impact the way people behave and respond to marketing campaigns on social media.
If you identify the audience who are most active at certain points, you can increase campaign success as you’ll know who is more likely to react and when. If you’re looking at when consumers use or talk about topics or products, you can pinpoint opportunities where your product could have the most impact on that person’s life and when it’s more likely to be engaged with.
If you build a campaign around these moments, you can create a product campaign that resonates and aligns with the lives of your dedicated audience.
Behaviours: There are many different behavioural indicators demonstrated on social media – and your audience is no different. You can interpret things like their favoured shopping options, the places they are most keen to or enjoy visiting and what events encourage them to make decisions.
With this information you can get a better understanding of their lifestyle, buying behaviours and the brands or places they prefer. By tailoring products to align with these lifestyle preferences, you can appeal to your audience when they’re most likely to engage and witness better success from your marketing campaigns.
What makes this information useful to marketers?
Social data is the key to unlocking the audience insights that are immensely beneficial to marketing campaigns, as well as finding the people who care the most and want to engage with your product. With knowledge of their mindsets in hand and knowing the social discussions taking place within your audience group, you can look to create aligned marketing campaigns. This saves plenty on campaign budgets – and ensures you don’t fail to engage your true audience and achieve your objectives.
What industries can benefit from audience marketing in 2018?
Almost any industry can benefit from a wide range of audience marketing techniques: from a TV spot with a huge budget, to smaller campaigns that rely on a few online or offline adverts. If you manage to pinpoint your audience to begin with, you are no longer missing the target. The same goes for the content produced for the campaign itself, which you can also adjust to meet the needs of your audience based on the data you collect.
With your specific audience in mind, you can approach campaigns with more confidence, safe in the knowledge that the campaign is backed by insightful audience intelligence. Social data is unmatched when it comes to datasets that offer insights into consumer behaviour. It’s a brilliant resource if you’re looking to acquire perceptions, moments and behaviours shared by your dedicated audience.
If you spend some time mulling over the three pillars mentioned earlier, you can discover your audience identity and how they feel about your brand you’re your competitors – as well as gain insights for potential new campaigns. This is all part of the campaign and product marketing process, yet this is all backed by a superior knowledge of your audience and a complete understanding of what they want to see.
Digital marketing is constantly changing – you have to change too
Whether it’s AI or voice activation, new technology is constantly having an impact on the digital marketing. Audience marketing is a new approach to targeting, substituting general demographic targets and focusing on specific audience groups that you can tailor your content to.
While demographic targeting is seen as granular enough in itself, there are huge numbers of people who are missed out through general demographic targeting – and this is why new audience marketing techniques provide so much more for the success and reach of new campaigns.
The dataset available online is monumental, from social media to reviews and blog sites. You can forget about relying solely on time-consuming surveys and focus groups to discover what people are thinking and talking about.
In order to achieve the most from your data, you also need to master the creativity that’s required for content campaigns to flourish. The map can only show you the way – the final objective is reaching your goal, which in this case means using the creative skillsets you have available to you.
Even then, social data offers key insights into what your audience wants to see – which means you’ll know exactly what to bring to the creative table.