The amount of digital content available to audiences is growing far more rapidly than both the audiences themselves and the time they have to engage with it. For example, there are approximately 60 billion Facebook and WhatsApp messages processed every day. For brands, this means that the available share of audience attention is shrinking – and fast.
This ongoing battle for audience share is made even more challenging for brands by the fact that too many are focusing on the same broad audience groups such as ‘Millennials’ or ‘Affluent Males’. The upshot of this is less visibility, higher media costs to buy access to audiences and a growing audience indifference to overly familiar content themes and messages.
Taking a precise approach
If brands are to see success in their marketing efforts in the future then what is required is a more precise approach, which focuses on defined audience groups for each brand and how to drive value from them.
The only way to combat this ever-diminishing share of audience attention is by adopting precision in marketing practices. This can only be achieved by identifying the audience groups and digital tribes that offer the most value to brands and learning the best means to engage and inspire them.
Whilst the majority of brands the world over have long since embraced social media as a means to engage and drive value from their audiences, it seems that only digitally enabled global brands have so far fully leveraged the data and insights that social platforms can offer them. The majority of brands are yet to fully comprehend how this vital intelligence can be used to optimise their marketing efforts.
Harnessing the power of audience intelligence
Audience intelligence offers brands the opportunity to build a defined picture of their customers and potential customers in order to understand their preferences, behaviours and motivations.
This insight can be applied across their business, from product research through to the development of the narrative and themes needed for impactful marketing content, choosing personalities to face campaigns and on to informing the precise media targeting now available to modern marketers.
Brands that utilise this data and intelligence are able to speak directly to their audiences, claiming a slice of the ever-decreasing attention share that is available for themselves. They can then use this opportunity to drive value. Brands that do not and instead focus on addressing only broader audience groups and demographics with outdated methods will eventually find that over time they become less and less visible within the ever-increasing digital noise.
Embracing the possibilities
It is increasingly vital for organisations to fully understand the possibilities and benefits of a better-understood audience in order to build successful strategies and activations.
The application of audience intelligence does not stop at marketing either, as a good comprehension of an audience’s motivations can also be used to develop more relevant and appealing products and solutions. In the case of the luxury watch industry, for example, brands have instant access to a community of highly informed horology hobbyists and adoring customers they can work with to co-create products, which audiences will feel naturally invested in.
The opportunities for brands using audience intelligence are manifold, and we’re looking forward to a future where they can better speak to their customers with a voice that truly cuts through the digital noise.
By Edward Bass, co-founder and director at EntSight
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