Have you ever wondered how global brands appeal to their customers? Trying to reach a specific audience can be difficult. From cultural differences to language barriers, marketers face many challenges when trying to communicate with potential customers. Understanding your target audience and their characteristics is essential to develop and sell a product. So what are the benefits of audience analysis for your business? And how can you feel confident in who your audience is?
Audience Analysis: The Perfect Tool To Understand Your Market
An audience analysis tool is a software that processes data about a defined audience like your prospects or current customers. It provides you with the characteristics of this audience, from general demographics to specific interests.
How does it work? First, people are hyperconnected and constantly interacting online. During their visits to websites and online applications, they show interest in specific topics and products. This data can come from a like, interaction with an app, information provided when signing up, etc. This anonymous data is then leveraged by partners who specialize in consumer data. An audience analysis tool then compiles the data comprising demographics, behaviors, and interests and provides you with a profile for your target audience. These tools analyze many data points and translate them into useful and easy-to-read social media insights, giving you a complete view of your audience.
How Can Audience Analysis Help You?
Audience analysis can help organizations in many ways, depending on the type of business and business objectives. Here are a few benefits of audience analysis:
Targeting
Knowing your audience can help you target the right group of people. Once you broadly know what you want to offer, an audience analysis tool will help you determine who could be interested in your products. That will allow you to refine your social listening strategy for that specific target audience. You will then have all the ingredients to attract the right consumers to your brand.
Promote Your Product
It is well-known that advertising can be very expensive. For this reason, marketers can’t afford to launch a campaign that might be unsuccessful. With audience analysis, you have access to the interests of your potential customers. You can then promote your product with content that resonates. To illustrate, let’s consider a consumer electronics company that specializes in music products, and they are promoting a speaker. To make a successful advertisement, they would need to incorporate what their target customers like so that the product will appeal to them, consciously or subconsciously. It could be using the audience’s favorite singer or band as a sponsor for the brand, or using their favorite music genre in a video ad.
Reach Out To Your Customers
With the growth of social media over the past decade, communication has drastically changed. Sending emails and using telemarketing is no longer enough to reach consumers. Nowadays, you need to be active on social networks and mainstream media to have an impact and raise your brand awareness. One of the benefits of audience analysis is its ability to understand the media consumed by your target audience. You can then learn what social network they use most, which magazines they like to read, which type of media they prefer, and more. By adapting to their preferences, you have a greater chance of engaging your target audience.
Attract New Customers
Audience analysis doesn’t have to be about your own audience. You can decide to gather insights about your competitor’s audience too. This will allow you to understand the difference between your customers and your competitor’s customers. You will then be able to adjust your offering, create content, and advertise to your competitor’s customers. In the end, this will help you develop and grow your business, and ultimately gain market share.
Benefits of Audience Analysis Over Traditional Market Research
Time Savings
Audience analysis tools are time-savers. Traditional market research can take months or even years to complete. After identifying your problem/opportunity, the process usually involves developing a research plan, collecting data, analyzing this data, and so on. Audience analysis tools eliminate these lengthy steps, giving you direct access to actionable insights. Forget about the long hours spent creating surveys or managing focus groups. With audience analysis software, you can get all information about your potential and existing customers within minutes.
Cost Efficient
In addition to being time-consuming, traditional market research can become very expensive in no time. Whether you’re interviewing people or running experiments, the budget will always be high if you want accurate results. However, the benefit of audience analysis is you obtain precise information at a lower cost. Since the technology is fully-automated, there is no wait time or effort to collect data, therefore the costs are lower than traditional methods.
Complete Data
Audience analysis empowers you with quality data that you can’t get from other sources. The traditional market research methods will only gather information when a person is asked for that specific information (for example, through a survey). The probability that the information will be biased or not entirely correct is very high. Additionally, people might not be willing to share as much as they do on social media sites. On the flip side, audience analysis empowers you with large amounts of quality data and real-time data. Take Facebook for example. Facebook collects various information about their 1.7 billion users around the world, and this data is leveraged through audience analysis. Facebook has insight into interactions with the platform, location information, activity on partner sites, and more. This 360-degree view of your target audience is critical.
Confident Decision Making with Audience Analysis
The benefits of audience analysis are numerous. Audience analysis provides you with crucial data that will power confident decision making for your business. It is one of the fastest and most accurate methods for conducting market research. And when done right, it will greatly enhance your planning and overall strategy.
