5 audience insight techniques that actually lead to action
Let me start by saying, I hate audience profiles. You’ve probably seen it before - a million times over:
Meet Judy from Bristol. She’s 32 years old and works as a nurse. She’s married, has a kid and bought her flat through shared ownership. She went to university, reads the Guardian and gives to international causes, when she can. She’s ambitious. Oh, and she likes dogs.
And you’ve probably been left thinking: great, but… now what?
A persona is only useful if it changes what you do.
If an audience profile cannot shape targeting, messaging, creative, channel planning or journey design, it is probably just a nicely written description — not a strategic tool.
The thing is, personas paint a picture, but seldom tell you things that turn into action. CRM data and targetable criteria can rarely be layered onto them, meaning they stay static. And if by some miracle they make it to campaign as a prospecting ad set, you know you’re going to switch them off when lookalikes start to perform better.
I once worked with an organisation that wanted to target “middle England” parents who were “small C” conservatives, to align with their persona profile. It was only when I outlined what was feasible with audience targeting that we realised it basically meant targeting parents in conservative constituencies by postcode. And that was the end of that persona.
But the good news is, there are plenty of other ways you can get to know your audiences and weave them through your campaign planning cycle.
Five techniques that are probably more useful for getting to know your target audiences than another predictable audience profile
Model audiences by behaviour
Use network and affinity tools to cluster people by what they follow, discuss and over-index on — not just by who they are on paper.
Append useful data
Where compliant and appropriate, enrich CRM records to understand supporter value, lifestyle, channel potential and differences between key cohorts.
Listen beyond the brand
Track what important audiences talk about in the wider world, so campaigns can respond to what people actually care about over time.
Ask better questions
Use surveys, panels and creative tests to answer specific strategic questions instead of relying on assumptions about what audiences think.
Use the internal hive mind
Bring stakeholder experience into the process, but treat it as one source of insight to test and triangulate — not the final answer.
I’d rather get under the hood of barriers and motivations than work to limited audience portraits that barely graze the surface. There are 67 million people living in the UK, and each of us is different — to reduce cohorts to static summaries is rudimentary at best, and risks dangerous profiling at worst. As society shifts, so too must our understanding of our changing audiences evolve — and to do that, ongoing, cyclic insight streams are crucial.
1. Use networking tools to model your audiences, on a regular basis, based on their affinities or online behaviours.
There are plenty of tools out there, like Audiense and Quid, that cluster likeminded cohorts based on things you can act on, such as the accounts they follow or the niche topics they over-index on. The results can often be surprising, and enlightening.
In a recent study I conducted on the green steel industry, I stumbled upon a small but mighty group of people living in Andhra Pradesh. At first, I was confused. But when I dug deeper, I learned Andhra Pradesh was “the new industrial hub of India”, and the group was set to develop more influence in the years ahead. They quickly became a segment of note, for medium to longer term consideration.
Audience intelligence
Affinity data turns “who” into “where next”.
The value of network modelling is that it can reveal communities, interests, influencers and emerging audience pockets that can actually inform targeting, partnerships, messaging and longer-term campaign planning.
2. Append data (in a GDPR compliant way), to fill in the gaps and build out the information in your CRM.
A tactic that’s used more by US organisations than UK counterparts, due to GDPR compliance, is data appending. It can be a hugely powerful way to better understand your CRM database, and build upon existing audience development work — leveraging new data points on them, regardless of your initial data capture. Organisations like TargetSmart offer a ‘pay per line’ model, with vast appending options. From just an email address, it’s possible to learn their affluence, lifestyle — even their SMS number and social handle. Organisations with records in the hundreds of thousands often take a statistically significant sample to compare different cohorts - eg. monthly versus cash donors or the 20% most valuable versus the wider database.
More data does not automatically mean better insight.
Appended data can be powerful, but only when it is compliant, proportionate and tied to a real decision. The question is not “what else can we know?” It is “what would this help us do differently?”
3. Listen to how your audiences are engaging with the world — beyond your brand — to learn how to deepen audience engagement.
Organisations often know how their audiences engage with them, but often, know next to nothing about how they view the world more widely. This hugely limits their ability to lean into impactful relevancy. Social listening tools like Brandwatch, Netbase and Meltwater can be a great way to understand what core groups of people engage with over time and how their perceptions are shifting. For a previous client, I developed panels of users based on key affinities then “listened” to what they were talking about week on week, enabling stakeholders get into the minds of their audiences on an ongoing basis. By understanding how the topics our audiences talk about change, we can pivot at pace and stay relevant.
The brand bubble
Measures what people say to you, about you or in response to your campaigns — useful, but too narrow to understand audience worldview.
The wider world
Looks at the topics, frustrations, values and communities your audiences engage with when they are not talking directly about your organisation.
4. Survey your list or pay for responses, to answer burning questions or test creative.
Whether you want to know something specific or test your way into a new creative identity, email surveys can be a quick way to get insight in a cost-effective manner. If you’ve got a strong database, an email to a sample of them could give you the information you need — but if your list is small, fear not; the likes of SurveyMonkey offer 24 hour turnarounds that can be as little as a couple of quid per response. Or if you go through Prolific, it’s even cheaper and you can retarget them with follow up questionnaires, to see how their responses change over time.
5. Ask your stakeholders for their honest thoughts. And actually listen to the variety of feedback.
It’s likely that you’re a great target audience for the brand you work for, and know the barriers your audiences may encounter, so why not view yourselves as a zero-cost focus group? With data being so key to every decision these days, there’s a tendency to overlook the obvious: tapping into the internal hive mind and going one step further by taking the feedback on board. Chance has it, between you and your team, you’ve raked in a collective hundred plus years of subject matter experience you can put to good use.
Our approach should be as human and evolutionary as our audiences
We shouldn’t look for a simple summary for something as complex and evolving as the human mind. Instead, we should keep our fingers on the pulse, and ask questions, on an ongoing basis — even if we think we know the answer already. Because people change, and so in turn do the answers.
Whatever your approach, it’s important to diversify data sources and be mindful of the limitations and biases each research touchpoint has. Social listening is likely to use Twitter data primarily and Twitter as a platform lends itself to very shouty people — while people being paid to complete targeted surveys are likely earning a bit of cash on the side so may not reflect your wealthier audiences.
It’s important to triangulate any audience insight, to minimise bias; using multiple touchpoints and referring back holistically. If two of the three stand up, it probably makes sense to build on the insight more — or take an insight-driven output through to live testing.
Gather from different sources
Combine behavioural data, social listening, CRM insight, surveys, stakeholder knowledge and live campaign results where possible.
Check the bias
Every source has limitations. Twitter/X can overrepresent loud voices, surveys can overrepresent people willing to answer them, and CRM data can overrepresent existing supporters.
Look for repeated signals
If the same barrier, motivation or audience behaviour appears across more than one source, it is more likely to be worth building on.
Take it into testing
The best audience insight should eventually become a message test, journey change, targeting decision, creative route or strategic priority.
Whatever your path may be in understanding your audiences, from powerhouse tools to humble focus groups, it’s an exciting time for data-driven strategists. Brands have woken up to audience insight and are slowly realising it means more than user journeys — the next challenge is getting organisations to truly put audience thinking at the start of the process, instead of retrofitting insight into established campaigns as a vanity metric. But that’s a whole other blog post…
What audience insight should help you do
- Move beyond static personas that are hard to activate.
- Understand audiences by behaviours, barriers, motivations and affinities.
- Use multiple data sources instead of relying on one research touchpoint.
- Watch how audiences change over time, not just what they said once.
- Turn insight into targeting, messaging, creative, journeys and live tests.
If you’d like to chat about how to get to know your audiences better, get in touch.
