No matter the size of your business or organization, understanding your audience and knowing your ideal client is important, especially if you want to continue to build your brand and thrive financially. The key to understanding your clients is through audience data.
Throughout this blog, we’ll cover the following:
- What Is Audience Data?
- Why You Need to Understand Audience Data
- Different Types of Audience Data
- Benefits of Audience Analysis
- Ways to Gather Target Audience Data
- Choosing the Best Data Gathering Approach for Your Business
What Is Audience Data?
Many of your advertising initiatives and product designs are just a shot in the dark without audience data. If you don’t know who’s looking at your ads, visiting your website, or buying your products, it’s extremely difficult to succeed as a company.
By understanding as much as possible about your audience, you can make more informed decisions in your marketing, branding, and more. The goal is to use this information to grow your business and increase sales. While gathering audience data and interpreting it isn’t an exact science, the more information you have, the better. Audience data informs many of your online marketing and product decisions.
Why You Need to Understand Audience Data
The Helpful Content Update is sitewide, so a website classified as “having unhelpful content” can negatively impact all of your pages unless there are other signals that identify helpful and relevant answers to a specific query. In that case, those pages can still rank well.
Since this update is weighted, sites with plenty of helpful content will be given more weight in the SERPs. The opposite is also true—sites with plenty of unhelpful content will likely notice a more negative impact on search performance.
But they are not doomed forever. The signal will simply reevaluate at a later date, and if the content has changed, the “unhelpful” classifier will be removed.
Different Types of Audience Data
There’s more than just one kind of audience data. Understanding the different types of target audience data will help you gather and use this knowledge effectively.
When it comes down to it, there are five core types of audience data:
Intent
Do you want to know how people use your website and what pages they visit? Want to understand how frequently customers tend to stay on a product page? The answers to these questions lie in the intent data.
Basically, intent data refers to tracking the behavior of your potential customers. You’ll get to see things like how your target audience is navigating your website, how often they visit pages, and how long they stay on each page.
Through this information, you can start to make more educated guesses on the intent of your target audience. Do they visit product pages often before they make a purchase? With answers to these kinds of questions, you can build better initiatives moving forward.
Interest
Interest data is similar to intent data but on a broader scale. With interest data at your disposal, you’re learning about your target audience and their overall interests online and with your brand. You can discover things like their purchase over time and how they engage with your brand.
Demographic
Of all the different kinds of audience data, demographic is probably the easiest to understand and the most straightforward to collect. It’s probably the data you’re most familiar with gathering as a company.
With demographic information, you learn many things, such as age, income, marital status, location, gender, and more.
Knowing the demographics of your potential audience is key, as you can use this data to build better marketing campaigns, social media posts, and much more.
Psychographic
Psychographic data relates to demographic data, but it’s less about numbers and more about behavior and patterns. While most people understand why you’d want to know the location and age of your target audience, it’s also valuable to get insights into your audience’s values and personality profiles. With this psychographic data, you can create generalized buyer personas that help you further understand and personalize your brand.
Firmographic
The final kind of audience data is firmographic data. While most other kinds of audience data have to do with business-to-consumer marketing, firmographic data is especially useful for business-to-business marketing and relations.
This type of demographic data looks at information from other businesses, such as where they are located, how many customers they serve, and much more. Even if you’re not specifically advertising to other companies, this info helps you better understand your competition, which is equally valuable.
Different businesses may focus more on certain kinds of audience data. Overall, however, it’s useful for all companies to know about these five types of audience data and how to aggregate these insights.
Benefits of Audience Analysis
With the knowledge of what audience data is and the five overall types of audience data, it’s now easier to understand and delve into how audience analysis benefits an organization. There are many pros to having this data.
Audience analysis provides significant benefits for marketing teams, such as it allows you to:
- Grow your sales pipeline
- Create accurate buyer personas for your target market
- Make further advancements in your sales development process
- Get a better understanding of how your market makes buying decisions
- Segment potential buyers based on their wants and needs
- Further personalize a prospect’s experience with your company
- Generate more leads
While this list isn’t comprehensive, it does give a good overview of the many benefits and advantages of audience analysis for your business. If you gather accurate data on your customers, you can cater your brand to them, build better websites, employ improved ads, and overall suit their needs.
Ways to Gather Target Audience Data
Understanding why audience data is important matters. Still, knowing about target audience data doesn’t matter much if you don’t know how to obtain this information in the first place.
There are two main ways to collect your audience data: 1st party audience data and 3rd party audience data. Both of these methods have their benefits, so when debating 1st party vs. 3rd party audience data, the answer is likely to use a combination of both.
Here’s what you need to know about first- and third-party target audience data.
First party: Simply put, this method involves using tools on your own (internally) to discover the audience data of your target market. This can be done through various marketing tools and technologies like Google Analytics and Clearbit. They can also be discovered through your company’s CRM and past campaign experiences.
Third party: Third party audience data is discovered by hiring an outsourced company to do all the grunt work for you, allowing companies to spend more time selling to prospects rather than gathering customer and prospect information. Using a third-party agency to collect audience data often makes it easier to keep current customers satisfied with your product and service offerings.
Choosing the Best Data Gathering Approach for Your Business
Generally, you can decide which method of gathering audience data better suits the needs of your organization. While most companies want to have access to basic audience information, not all organizations have the time or resources to gather and analyze all of this information on their own. If you’re a smaller company with only a few employees, outsourcing this work to a marketing agency can relieve a lot of stress.
So, depending on the needs of your business, you may focus more on first party data-gathering methods or third party data-gathering practices, although most companies use a combination of both.
After all, having more information about your clients is better than having less.
Key Takeaways
Learning the basics of audience data is vital to all businesses, large and small. If you want to expand your company or sell more products, you need to understand your target audience. Without this information, you can’t cater effectively to their needs and wants.
By collecting various kinds of audience data, such as demographic, psychographic, and firmographic, your organization can create better ads, build a stronger brand, and sell more products.
At Abstrakt Marketing Group, we outsource sales and marketing services to help your organization find your audience data. After gathering this information, we then help you present sales and marketing materials that pique the interests and needs of your audience.
Contact the lead generation experts at Abstrakt today to learn more about our audience data approach and how we can help your business.
