Introduction: The Growing Importance of Audience Data Science
Marketing success today requires data-driven audience insight. But with buyers more informed and empowered than ever before, surface-level analytics can no longer cut it. Marketing teams need to tap into audience intelligence – using big data, machine learning and psychology – to intimately understand motivations, behaviors and preferences hidden within the noise.
The potential? 75% higher conversion rates, 60% bigger average order values and 3x higher ROI as per Forrester research.
Little wonder that 52% of brands report having an audience intelligence initiative underway – even if in early stages. The 10% of brands achieving full-scale intelligence adoption see game-changing performance improvement. This guide will get you on the fast track.
Overview: Core Benefits of Audience Intelligence
Before diving into leading solutions, let‘s ground ourselves in the capabilities propelling the latest audience research renaissance:
Lookalike Modeling – Historically best customers can be dropped into intelligent platforms to automatically uncover new qualified prospects that match.
Psychographic Tagging – Analyze beyond demographics to what truly fulfills and motivates your audience via psychology-based modeling.
Predictive Segmentation – Platforms combine dozens of signals from past behaviors, interests, attitudes and context to predict future buyer actions.
Channel Consolidation – Collect and connect data from paid ads, site analytics, email metrics, support cases and beyond to stitch together comprehensive buyer journey analysis, no matter where it plays out.
When leveraged in tandem, these intelligence layers help you continuously optimize CX, messaging, product positioning and creative execution based on – and even ahead of – your audience.
Let‘s now explore leading solutions enabling brands to tap into these opportunities.
Audience Intelligence Platform Profiles
Quantcast – Unparalleled Reach-Based Audience Segmentation
Boasting direct measurement of over 100 million web and mobile properties, Quantcast offers unmatched reach-based segmentation to extract and size target audiences.
I‘ve partnered closely with Quantcast over the past two years across client projects. Beyond the headline metrics, a few favorite features include:
Auto-Detected Segments – Quantcast instantly surfaces the largest behavioral groups already visiting your properties – then allows filtering and export to activate through ads. This instantly surfaces natural customer clusterings without any guesswork or complicated rules-building.
Lookalike Expansion – Initial segments based on your 1st party data or other seeds can be expanded using similarity models to uncover net new audiences matching their profiles.
Outlier Detection – Machine learning automatically flags unexpected audience clusters showing atypical conversion/engagement behavior so you can quantify opportunities.
And with audience data fueling ad targeting, Quantcast also facilitates seamless retargeting and similar audience activation across programmatic buy channels.
Brad, one independent retailer I consulted saw 12x ROI within 6 months of getting Quantcast insights flowing across his org. It‘s an analytics mammoth – especially for publishers or commerce brands.
Ideal Users: Media buyers, performance marketers, publishers
Pricing: Custom quotes
Sparktoro – Specialized Influencer Intelligence
Sparktoro focuses exclusively on influencer identification and creative analytics – indexing over 550 million social media profiles and entities in support.
As social commerce and community-driven messaging explodes, Sparktoro has proven a gamechanger for activating partnerships. Consider that the average order value of referred customers is 16% higher than non-referred.
Sparktoro handles the hard work of connecting you to resonating creators through features like:
Influencer Competitive Benchmarking – Quickly size up competitors‘ ambassador rosters including engagement rates, traffic metrics and compensation levels – so you can spend smarter.
Fake Account Detection – ML evaluating posting patterns, connections and more can flag likely fraudulent or inorganic accounts. This safety check avoids PR crisis (and wasted spend!)
Psychographic Profiling – Beyond vanity metrics, tap into interests, beliefs and personality traits of creators AND their audiences for ideal partnership matching. This drives referral conversion lift by 2-3x in my experience.
While pricier than some standalone analytics tools, the wealth of influencer insights pays dividends fast if you‘re investing in partnerships.
Ideal Users: B2C brands focused on influencer & UGC strategy
Pricing: $250/month starter plan – custom enterprise quotes
Affinio – Interest Graphs Reveal Deep Psychographic Connections
If you struggle connecting the dots between disjointed audience data, Affinio was built to help. Harnessing proprietary graph database technology, Affinio automatically maps the connections between interests, habits, preferences and more to help you segment and understand customers unlike ever before.
We‘re talking targeting capabilities on par with Facebook powered by AI-uncovered insights like:
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Micro-clustering vehicle enthusiasts by exact car model niche communities
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Segmenting fitness gear buyers based on preferred specialty workouts and diets
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Grouping first-time moms by exact baby care products researched
The interest graphs almost serve as "psychographic infrastructure" in how they spotlight patterns across data signals as varied as:
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Website clicks and scroll depth
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Social media follows and engagement
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Past purchase categories
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Video watch time by genre
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Email clickthrough topics
From this foundation, Affinio empowers users to easily build audiences, analyze them and compare segment performance to continually optimize funnel strategy. With creative personalization unlocked, it‘s no surprise 72% of brands see a revenue lift within 6 months of onboarding.
The biggest tradeoff is slightly steeper learning curve relative to push-buttonReporting suites – but for marketers willing to dive deeper, Affinio is a goldmine.
Ideal Users: Media Publishers, eCommerce brands
Pricing: Custom quotes; ~$1500/month starter plans
Audiense – The All-In-One Audience Intelligence Toolkit
If looking to minimize integrations by consolidating core analytics within one interface, I consistently recommend Audiense to mid-market and enterprise brands.
Backed by partnerships with industry titans like Microsoft, SAP, Hootsuite and more – Audiense combines robust social data aggregation, segmentation tools, predictive modeling and activation channels for end-to-end audience intelligence.
A few favorite highlights:
Content Personalization AI – NLP evaluates language patterns to classify content into interest verticals automatically. This allows matching visitors to articles based on reader persona models.
Purchase Predictor – Combining past transaction data, website behavior and social signals, Audiense can score leads on purchase propensity. Focus sales outreach on high-intent segments for 2-3x conversion lift.
Psychographic Analysis – Categorize audiences across spectrums like liberal vs. conservative political beliefs, environmentalist vs. industrialist and more based on content consumption and social posts. Refine messaging accordingly.
While the 360-degree feature set demands some ramp up time, for complex organizations, Audiense drives alignment through a unified audience toolkit usable by marketing, product, CX and more teams. And with managed analytics packages available, less mature brands benefit from expert guidance getting intelligence campaigns off the ground.
Ideal Users: Mid-market and enterprise brands
Pricing: ~$2500/month starter plans; custom enterprise quotes
Evaluating Audience Intelligence Solutions
With so many capabilities and offerings at hand, identifying the best fit can certainly feel overwhelming. To guide your buying process, let‘s compare solutions across five crucial factors:
| Platform | Data Scope | Segmentation Power | Ease of Use | Activation Channels | Ideal Buyer Profile |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quantcast | 5/5 – Directly measures 100M+ sites/apps | 4/5 – Automated grouping with strong builder | 4/5 – Clean UI though moderately complex | 5/5 – Direct ad activation; self-service or managed service options | Media buyers, performance marketers, publishers |
| Sparktoro | 4/5 – 550M social media profiles indexed | 3/5 – Strong influencer & persona analysis; less segmentation | 5/5 – Very intuitive workflow | 4/5 – Reporting and analytics focused over activation | B2C brands valuing influencer partnerships |
| Affinio | 4/5 – 100M+ social media profiles analyzed | 5/5 – Leading interest graph platform for segmentation | 3/5 – Novel UI and approach has learning curve | 4/5 – Robust integrations and audience sharing tools | Media publishers, eCommerce brands |
| Audiense | 5/5 – Analyzes social web, web analytics, CRM data | 5/5 – Strong predictive modeling and segmentation power | 4/5 – High capability platform still complex | 5/5 – End-to-end segmentation, activation and measurement | Mid-market and enterprise brands |
Depending on your use cases, this benchmarking showcases which solutions may be a fit – or if a broader analytics provider like Audiense removes need for multiple niche vendors. Beyond features though, proper planning and governance ensures your investment pays dividends.
Getting Started With Audience Intelligence
To transition audience intelligence from a nice-to-have into proven business accelerant, concentrate resources around three crucial pillars:
Governance – Centralize campaign data, provide broad tool access and clearly define success metrics to rally your org around audience goals. Marketing ops can facilitate but insights are everybody‘s business long-term.
Enablement – Don‘t expect managers unfamiliar with data science to instantly run intricate segmentation routines and analysis. Create tip sheets, host lunch-and-learns, record tool walkthroughs and pay for vendor training to skill up staff.
Cultural Adoption – Workshops co-developing targeted use cases, friendly challenges incentivizing tool usage and celebrating early wins develops grassroots momentum across sales, product marketing, CX and more over time.
Lean on technology certainly – but never lose sight that audience intelligence lives or dies based on human adoption propelling data into action.
For hands-on guidance unlocking your analytics stack‘s potential, I‘d be happy to schedule a quick consultation. Just shoot me an email.
Now, let‘s explore emerging trends hinting at what‘s on the frontier…
What‘s Next for Audience Intelligence
We‘ve only scratched the surface of marketing analytics‘ potential sitting on the horizon. Here are three macro-level shifts I predict significantly evolving solutions by 2025:
Predicting Response to Unreleased Content – Can historical data modeling soon tell us the exact messaging, offers and creatives a customer will convert on before we even test them? With AI advancements, I‘d bet on it.
CRM+ Marrying First and Third Party Signals – Rather than fragmented analysis across internal data, media analytics, web data etc. we‘ll see unified customer views combining everything we know about them. Privacy precautions provided.
Booking Marketing Spend Against Value Creation – Sophisticated attribution will soon allow us to definitively tie campaign costs to downstream value production whether pipeline generated, revenue influenced or lifetime customer equity uplifted. This will transform budgeting.
While consumer niches proliferate, their digital footprints merging with psychology and predictive intelligence promise ever more relevant, delightful experiences while optimizing your stack‘s ROI. It‘s an exciting frontier – and hopefully an accessible one with the solutions above democratizing such innovations.
Breathe New Life Into Your Audience Strategy
Audience intelligence comes loaded with intimidating jargon: psychographic segmentation, predictive modeling, persona analysis, interest graphing and more.
But by collaborating with the right technology partners, committing leadership support, and taking an iterative test-and-learn approach, any marketer – from boutique startup to Fortune 500 giant – can tap into an analytics foundation delivering remarkable returns across the business.
So don‘t leave the opportunity on the table. Get started with the guide above and shoot me a note if any other advice would help accelerate your roadmap.
Now get out there, unlock remarkable audience insights, and drive stronger customer connections than ever before!
