Turbocharge Your Marketing with an Audience Management Platform
The success of a marketing strategy in the digital age is highly dependent on a brand’s ability to deeply understand their customers. This can be achieved through a data-driven marketing approach that is fueled by audience intelligence.
For businesses and organizations that are looking to implement more focused, data-driven marketing efforts, the task can seem arduous at first. That is why today we are diving into utilizing an audience management platform (AMP), which goes beyond the standard customer data platform (CDP) many are accustomed to.
Let’s uncover what an audience management platform is, how it utilizes a process of audience intelligence, and how using one can turbocharge your business operations to new heights.
Standard CDPs have a lot of benefits for businesses and professionals. For instance, they collect and unify diverse streams of customer information and data from various touchpoints. From there, businesses can use this information to create authentic connections and communications with their audience through targeting and personalization. Audience management platforms have this functionality, but their technology takes your marketing strategies to another level through the process of audience intelligence. So, before we jump into understanding more about the capabilities of an audience management platform, let's start with the definition of audience intelligence.
What is audience intelligence?
Audience intelligence is the act of obtaining insights into your brand’s target audience. Brands gather, analyze, and understand information about their target audience, such as behaviors, demographics, preferences, interests, and needs. They then use this information to inform their content creation, customer communication, and marketing efforts. When a brand is focused on the process of audience intelligence, they can segment groups of customers based on the information they have gathered about them. They effectively use this information to tailor messaging, products, and services that best resonate with target customers.
The main goal of audience intelligence is to drive deeper, authentic engagement with customers through content and campaigns that are strategically targeting an intended audience. It ensures a brand’s content, campaigns, and products are both valuable and relevant to the audience that is being targeted. Different tools and methods can be used in this approach, from social media analytics to market research. The most modern marketers will also gather insights from first party data that they gather from their own platforms like websites, apps, email campaigns, and more.
Having an in-depth and clear understanding of your audience’s behaviors, motivations, preferences, and pain points will lead to more personalization and targeting for marketing strategies, which drives better outcomes on your campaigns, whether they have a specific call to action or have been created for branding purposes.
Beyond the Basics: The Audience Management Platform
An audience management platform is a technology solution that combines data from various sources to create a unified and comprehensive profile of a company's existing audiences, while giving them access to prospective customers outside of their current network.
An AMP is an emerging technology that goes beyond a traditional CDP, because it helps marketers and brands identify and engage with new audiences in their market. It also allows them to ingest existing customer data to market to their audiences in a more effective way.
At DrivenIQ, our clients have access to an Audience Management Platform (AMP) called VisitIQ™. In this innovative and easy-to-use platform, brands and marketers can utilize up to 14 billion deterministic records to create new audiences in their market. A persistent identifier then helps brands identify and unify future audiences with their existing audiences. From there, users of the platform can connect and activate first party data audiences across digital pathways and media channels. This leads to more effective marketing campaigns and higher returns-on-marketing-investments.
With platforms like VisitIQ™, marketers are able to organize insights into customer behavior, preferences, interactions, and other relevant data.
Benefits of an Audience Management Platform
An audience management platform is unique in its ability to empower enterprises to create contextually engaging audiences while remaining privacy-compliant, every step of the way.
Modern marketers know that depending on household level information in terms of customer data is no longer the most effective use of your marketing efforts. Instead, using an AMP like VisitIQ™ allows marketers to further identify their ideal customer profile (ICP) with over 500 different demographic and psychographic characteristics. This allows for the vastest personalized audience experience available to marketers today.
Leading businesses are realizing the sheer power of using audience management platforms. For VisitIQ™ in particular, the data involved in the platform is the most accurate, comprehensive, and updated on the market today. It is also in compliance with privacy regulations. Brands can curate first party audiences, conduct data audience mapping and audience data marketing, and create audience lookalikes in seconds. They can do so without having to worry about privacy compliance or third-party cookies. Here are some other benefits of utilizing an AMP like VisitIQ™:
Data Integration and Analysis
Audience management platforms gather data from various sources, which may include implementing APIs and data connectors. From there it uses machine learning techniques and data analysis to expose trends and patterns from within the data. This allows marketers to better understand their customer preferences and behaviors.
Let’s go over a quick example of how trends and patterns can be determined in an audience management platform and how they can be utilized. Let's imagine there is a marketer for a children’s clothing brand who is looking into the purchase history patterns of their audience. The marketer notices a trend in a group of customers who start making large purchases of kid’s clothing in mid-August. So, to ensure prospective customers are shopping at this marketer’s online store in mid-August, they may choose to start targeting that segment of customers with back-to-school shopping ads in late July through August, keeping their brand, products, and deals at the top of mind and relevant through their customer segment’s most likely period of time to shop for kid’s clothing.
Segmentation and Personalized Marketing
Marketers can segment customers from within their database and target potential customers outside their current network into various groups. Within each segment, or group, customers have at least one behavior, characteristic, or preference in common with one another. This allows marketers to seamlessly create campaigns geared toward each segment, which leads to higher chances of delivering content and offers that resonate with individual customers. This results in higher engagement and conversion rates.
An example of segmentation would be for a e-commerce website that sells hats. The marketer of this online hat store could choose to segment a portion of individuals who have previously shown interest in baseball caps, using purchase behavior from consumers both in their network, as well as prospective clients that have not been exposed to their brand previously. Then, they can build tailored ads using content and messaging geared specifically towards selling baseball caps to all these customers.
Consistent Multi-Channel Marketing
Does marketing across various channels sound like a challenging task? It doesn’t have to be. That is because an audience management platform can support a slew of marketing channels, including mobile apps, email, social media, websites, and more. This enables marketing professionals to deliver personalized, consistent campaigns across various channels on the numerous platforms that are most relevant to their consumers.
Let’s continue with the example above to demonstrate how this could work. For the marketer who has identified a segment of customers who are interested in baseball caps, they can create display ads, social ads, SMS messages, and/or email campaigns, all geared toward the consumer where they are most likely to show interest. For example, if one customer tends to make purchases directly from social media websites like Instagram or Facebook Marketplace, then a social media campaign is going to be best for those customers. On the other hand, if a marketer wants to target the customer on every platform to help create more significant brand recognition to drive a purchase, they may choose to market via dedicated emails, web display ads, and on social media.
Optimization and Measurement
One of the often overlooked, but extremely important, processes in any marketing campaign is optimization and measurement. With an audience management platform, the tools needed to properly track and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns are already built in. These metrics provide insights into what is working and what is not, allowing marketers to quickly pivot and refine their marketing strategies over time.
For example, let’s imagine the marketer at the e-commerce store for hats has noticed that their social media campaigns are going strong, but the email marketing campaigns are falling short. There are tons of ways they can proceed to better optimize their marketing spend, from trying new creative in their email marketing, to finding a more refined target audience. The possibilities are endless.
Customer Retention and Loyalty
The benefits of an AMP don’t stop at the end of a marketing campaign. Instead, their use has been shown to lead to higher customer retention and brand loyalty. This is because when a brand understands customer behaviors and preferences, they are better suited to anticipate customer needs and proactively address issues. This ability leads to an improved customer satisfaction and loyalty, which can be measured through repeat business, satisfied customers, better reviews, and overall, a stronger brand persona. By understanding customer preferences and pain points, businesses can tailor their products, services, and interactions to meet customers’ needs effectively. This leads to a more satisfying and seamless customer experience.
Let’s look at one final example. Imagine you own a mobile dog grooming business, and you have decided to start offering a coupon deal to new and returning customers. An audience management platform will allow you to target your data of both existing customers that are already in your database, while also pulling relevant data to potential customers who have not interacted with your content yet. Once you have identified these customers, you can automatically send out marketing campaigns to remind them of your grooming deals on a schedule that matches their specific grooming cadence. By reminding them in advance that they typically get their dog groomed at a certain time, your customers will be grateful for your thoughtful and consistent, targeted communication.
Final Thoughts on an Audience Management Platform
In summary, an audience intelligence platform empowers businesses with the insights needed to build stronger customer relationships, enhance engagement, and optimize marketing strategies. It enables businesses to move beyond one-size-fits-all marketing and deliver personalized experiences that resonate with their audience, leading to improved business outcomes.
If you would like to learn how DrivenIQ’s AMP, VisitIQ™, is taking the future of audience intelligence to new heights, request a demo with our team of experts today.
