Audience-centric digital strategy is a form of marketing personalization that aims to achieve a high level of customer satisfaction through relevant, engaging and contextual personalized experiences that delight consumers.
Behavioral analytics should be at the core of your audience-centric digital strategy, and it needs advanced technology to analyze the vast amounts of data available. At Semetrical, we believe that one of the best tools for audience intelligence is Audiense, as it allows you to quickly identify social and insight-rich consumer segments (called “audience segments”) that can drive your strategy.
You should integrate this data with other data sources including:
- Google Ads Keyword Planner search data for keyword intelligence.
- Pulsar, social listening tool, to generate your Audiense audience intelligence reports from keywords around topics and interests.
The goal is to connect the insights gathered from your keyword intelligence research and audience intelligence to establish an integrated digital strategy that all teams can follow. This is not based on the search patterns of relevant audiences, but is continuously fed by real-time social insights, obtained through audience intelligence reports, to continuously optimize search marketing campaigns.
As a digital marketer, you need to work proactively with your targeting refinement at all stages of the funnel by optimizing based on search, behavior, and interest data for multiple audience segments. You should run this full funnel experience across all of your channels to create personalized journeys powered by multi-segment audience intelligence.
A logical way to manage the insights gathered from your keyword intelligence and audience intelligence research is to organize it into an action plan that is achievable:
- Strategic management of digital marketing
- Team coordination and SMART goal alignment
- Optimization of multichannel campaigns.
So how do you formulate an audience-centric digital strategy to establish a complete and personalized funnel experience?
Identify the segments and buyer personas of your target audience to define the profile of the ideal client
As part of your process to identify your target audience segments, you should start by defining the characteristics of your ideal customer profile. This will allow you to set the criteria that must be met to qualify the lead.
The best place to start is by reviewing your company’s CRM database.
This will vary depending on whether you’re into B2C or B2B marketing, but you should try to audit your customer segments and cross-reference them with revenue generated, conversion rate, or significant engagements to determine your Ideal Customer Profile.
Keyword intelligence research to understand the search patterns of target audiences (keyword research and SEO gap analysis)
To establish an effective SEO strategy, you must first take care of keyword intelligence to identify the search patterns of your target audience.
Keyword intelligence is obtained by following a process of identifying high-value, relevant keywords to be used when developing keyword strategies to increase SEO visibility through the sales funnel, and as a result you can prioritize your SEO strategy. to increase the organic visibility of your brand.
To do this, you need to complete keyword research and SEO “gap” analysis to identify all possible keywords your target audience is searching for to find your products or services, while analyzing user intent and SEO competitors to Validate your keywords for targeting.
As illustrated in the diagram above, this process will allow your brand to create a keyword targeting strategy, whereby you can group your priority keyword segments into a keyword targeting planner and align them with your relevant audiences, It helps coordinate teams to focus on specific goals.
An example might include improving the organic ranking position of keywords at the purchase intent decision stage for a specific keyword segment through a combination of tactics including: web page optimization, SEO topical modeling and a digital PR campaign informed by an audience intelligence report.
Audience intelligence research through social audience analysis and segmentation
Audience intelligence involves analyzing and defining audience segments (social consumers) that are derived from a larger subset of the market outside of your brand’s customer base.
Audience segments are generated from social platform data including profiles, social connections, likes, shares, favorites, and unstructured post data, as well as other third-party data sources. They are defined based on behaviors and interests (eg Eco-Conscious Vegetarians) rather than solely demographics (eg Men in their 30s).
This provides a consistent and relevant foundation for defining your audiences and should act as a valuable foundation for building your audience-centric digital strategy and tailoring campaigns accordingly.
There is also an opportunity for brands to collect information on unknown audiences, outside of their customer base, which offer growth opportunities in new segments of social consumers. By conducting research on an unknown social consumer segment, your brand can tailor a campaign strategy to their interests, thereby increasing the likelihood of hitting your KPIs.
One of the main benefits of audience intelligence research using social consumer segments is the speed with which reports are generated, as it can be generated in a matter of days or hours. This allows your teams to operate with greater agility to maximize real-time opportunities to make your brand more relevant to the interests, conversations or demands of a changing audience.
There are two main processes for creating audience intelligence reports on social consumer segments:
- Interconnected audiences: You can analyze the social profiles of the main competitors, media and influencers in your industry to generate multiple targeted audience segments. This can inform the targeting of your target audience for your advertising activities, expand your target audience by targeting similar audiences, identify influencers or topics of interest within that community.
- Interest-Based Audience: Focuses less on who is connected with whom on social networks, and instead focuses on characteristics or interests expressed in the feed or bio of social profiles. Audience intelligence in this case focuses on groups of users who have expressed similar interest. You can use social listening platforms and topic-grouped keyword searches to gather the group of users and their related posts, and then run an audience intelligence report to identify social consumer segments relevant to that topic.
PRO TIP – Use ‘SEO competitors’ or ‘SEO seed keywords’ to inform your audience intelligence research and develop ‘search marketing personas’.
For the ‘SEO competitors’ approach: use your keyword intelligence (SEO gap analysis) to identify your ‘SEO competitors’ by priority keyword segment and analyze relevant social profiles on an audience intelligence platform, such as Audiense, to establish your ‘search marketing personas’.
This data enrichment process can help you coordinate and optimize your audience-centric strategy based on the integration of platform data sources.
For the ‘SEO seed keywords’ approach, add your SEO seed keywords, which are relevant to your SEO hub pages, into a social listening audience intelligence platform to collect historical social post data on a topic that is keyword (previously identified during your keyword intelligence research).
You can then run an audience intelligence report on that dataset to identify your ‘search marketing personas’ based on their expressed (or inferred) interest in the grouped keyword topic.
Competitive analysis of social communities, SEO keywords and content funnels
Performing competitor analysis is essential as part of your keyword intelligence, audience intelligence, and content audit.
Before starting these research projects, you must define your direct competitors, since you will use them to help you formulate your strategy in the following ways:
- Use competitor websites as an indicator that a keyword segment is relevant to services, products or topics related to your business as part of the SEO gap analysis process.
- Upload your competitors’ social profiles to an audience intelligence platform to identify social media audience segments you can target with your brand.
- Use a content analytics platform to analyze your competitor’s websites to collect data and trends on the content themes and formats that drive social media engagement and backlinks.
PRO TIP – A note on “SEO competitors”
It is important to remember that you will have “SEO competitors” who are left out from your direct competitors.
“SEO competitors” may be indirect competition, or perhaps media outlets, publishers, or blogs; but you must consider them direct competitors to gain visibility in search results.
You’ll discover these “SEO competitors” during the SEO gap analysis process, and they can be useful for additional insights during your audience intelligence research and help define complete “search marketing personas.”
PRO TIP – Audience intelligence reports for relevant media or similar brands.
As part of your audience intelligence research process, you should add a list of relevant media brands or similar brands that you think are of interest to your target audience. You can do this by analyzing their social profiles on an audience intelligence platform.
This can vary by product or service, but it can be a powerful tool for developing a more holistic understanding of your target audience and their ecosystem of influencers.
