We all hear about companies that always seem to go viral or get a ton of word-of-mouth marketing because of their campaigns or products. But do you ever wonder how they do it? To start, most companies spend anywhere from 5% to 20% of their annual revenue on research and development.
One of the many things they research is what their audience wants, how they want it when they want it, and who they want it from. They use audience insights tools and software to get this information. Surveys and customer feedback forms further supplement this information.
But knowing your audience isn't enough. You also have to optimize your marketing strategies to the insights you've gathered. Below, we discuss the top audience insights tools and tips to optimize your campaigns based on the information they give you.
Top Audience Insights Tool for 2024
Notable clients: Unilever, GSK, Nestle, Carlsberg, Toyota, Tui Pricing: Upon request Brandwatch serves as a comprehensive resource for managing all your social media needs. Its audience insights tool, Consumer Intelligence, provides you with a real-time glimpse into how your target audience feels about your brand. With this tool, you can monitor conversations that mention your brand by collecting millions of conversations, posts, and comments in the same place. You can further segment these conversations by feedback, opinions, complaints, and other factors. This information helps you identify areas of improvement and optimize your campaigns to address these concerns. Brandwatch’s AI functionality further lets you spot insights from this data. You can also use the AI copilot to ask questions and get recommendations on how to improve your strategies. Even better, Brandwatch lets you share these insights with other departments in your organization through live reports and alerts. Part of what makes Brandwatch such an excellent solution for audience insights is that it tracks historical data all the way back to 2010. Plus, over 500 million new conversations are added to the tool daily to expand its database. Brandwatch collects conversations across 100 million sources and websites. It also has official firehose access to Reddit, Tumblr, and X, which means no data is lost due to API restrictions. According to Brandwatch, they have spent over 17 years developing an AI solution that can combine proprietary tech and large language models. Their AI solution offers the following features: If you have collected data yourself through surveys or feedback analyses, you can also upload that to spot sentiment, historical trends, key topics, and other patterns. For continuous monitoring, you can set automated AI-powered email alerts to authorized personnel in the organization. The reports are also exportable via Excel, PPT, and PDF. Brandwatch has been the consumer insight software of choice for many businesses, one of them being the TSL Media Group. Huawei, the renowned tech corporation, came to TSL to advertise their new Huawei P40 Pro. TSL used Brandwatch to get audience insights for the campaign. Based on Brandwatch’s data, they found that Gen Z and millennials were the best audience for the campaign since they spend most of their time on their phones. Plus, these groups do not spend much time with their grandparents as they grow older. TSL used these insights to create an ad for Huawei in which a millennial and her grandmother (who isn’t a native mobile phone user) explore the features of the Huawei P40 Pro together to show how easy the phone is to navigate for every demographic. Here’s why using Brandwatch was a success for TSL and their client, Huawei: Notable clients: Apple, Manchester United, Warner Music Group, TikTok Pricing: Audience Insights (£1,199 per month); custom pricing available Audiense is a sophisticated Audience Intelligence platform designed to help marketers and consumer researchers gain a deeper understanding of their target audiences. It provides comprehensive data, from demographics and affinities to occupations and hobbies, empowering you to make well-informed communication strategy decisions. The tool’s Audiense Insights tool provides you with an in-depth view of your audience’s interests, content spending habits, lifestyle choices, beliefs, and influencer relationships. You can use this information to segment audiences by interests, create data-driven personas, understand niche audiences, and select the right influencers for your campaigns. What makes Audiense unique is that it uses affinity (people following similar accounts) to determine audience segments rather than just demographics. This allows for a more accurate understanding of an audience’s interests and behaviors, which can lead to more effective targeting and messaging. Audiense has also integrated a MAP dashboard that shows you geographical regions where your niche target audience is over-represented, providing you with a must-target area for your campaigns. SOPRISM has a database of millions of predefined consumer segments that you can use to analyze your particular audience. Audiense is used by many agencies, including Convosphere. When a client in the edutainment space approached Convosphere to expand their services into France, Japan, and Germany, Convosphere turned to Audiense to learn more about the region’s audiences. Using on-ground research, Convosphere aimed to find out the following: After collecting this information, they fed it into Audiense to gather insights. Here’s how Convosphere used Audiense to learn more about the client’s target audience: Audiense insights Key Features: Search/Discovery, Audience Analysis, Social Listening, Competitor Research, Channels: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok Notable clients: Dell, Delta, Applebee’s, T-Mobile, Taco Bell, PayPal, Capital One, Bayer, Rakuten Pricing: Available upon request Dstillery offers exceptional audience solutions, enabling businesses and agencies to reach their target consumers for successful programmatic advertising campaigns. With 21 patents under its belt, Dstillery’s AI technology ensures precise and scalable audiences, mostly due to its top-notch Data Science. It is also one of the Top 25 Artificial Intelligence Companies in 2024 by The Software Report. Plus, the tool won the AI Excellence Awards from the Business Intelligence Group. This profile is utilized to create a Custom AI Model that assesses and ranks potential audience members every day based on current market signals, ensuring your audience remains up-to-date and targets only relevant customers. These insights are refreshed and scaled every 24 hours to ensure maximum relevance. Additionally, Dstillery’s Audience Studio is a self-service tool that allows you to explore, create, and activate audiences on your preferred DSP. This tool recommends which audiences to engage with, enabling you to focus more on achieving your goals and less on navigating complex technologies. It also emphasizes audience overlap and ranks to enhance data transparency and provide valuable insights. Custom Built Audiences, meanwhile, are unique combinations of Dstillery’s Pre-built Audiences that help you connect with your target persona without relying on first-party data. By employing Boolean logic (and, or, not), customers can create any distinctive combination from Dstillery’s ever-growing library of Pre-built Audiences that suits their targeting needs. These audiences outperform industry benchmarks for even the most regulated industries like healthcare. Dstillery’s patented ID-free® technology protects consumer privacy and ensures your data is secure throughout the process. More importantly, its AI learns the browsing patterns of the devices used by your audience to always find the most relevant people for your campaigns. Lastly, Search for Audiences enables you to explore over 10,000 and growing audiences in Dstillery’s database. Smart Search uses a proprietary search algorithm to find matches. Dstillery has been a market player long enough to be seen as a trusted tool by marketers and agencies. In fact, the company sponsored DMEXCO 2024, the leading tech and digital marketing event in Europe. So, when a reputable automotive brand, Sokal, came to Dstillery to collect audience insights without third-party cookie reliance, the tool proved to be the golden solution for their ad campaigns. The client wanted to reach its target audience through video, display, and dynamic display ads. Here’s how Sokal used Dstillery to get results: Sokal case study Dstillery’s audience insights helped the client get a 61% better cost per mille (CPM) than traditional display, 75% better CPM for dynamic display, and 59% better CPM for video. Notable clients: Google, BuzzFeed, Spotify, LinkedIn, Snapchat, The Guardian, Omnicom Group Pricing: Free, Pro (upon request) GWI (formerly known as GlobalWebIndex) is a company that provides audience insights to publishers, media agencies, and advertisers across the globe. The firm has been in business since 2009 and uses a panel of 18 million connected consumers to profile consumers in 46 countries. GWI platform is subscription-based and allows you to gain deeper insights into your target audience quickly. You can access on-demand insights that will help you make informed decisions about important marketing issues. With over 250K profiling points, you can build and discover unique audiences. By using GWI data, you can create a global plan that covers 52 markets or focus on a particular region. You can compare countries easily and use the insights to make smart, data-driven choices. GWI has partnered with Dynata to launch GWI Audience Activation, which lets you segment audiences and activate digital campaigns from the same platform. What is quite interesting about GWI is that it has specific segments in which you can conduct audience research. For example, the Core audience gives you a comprehensive view of the connected consumer and includes demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal data. You can also specifically search for US audiences with the tool’s database of 250 million customers across 50 states. If you specifically need insights for your young audience, GWI also has a Kids category that includes information about people aged 8 to 16 across 18 markets. You can also simply create a custom audience to find a specific group of consumers that match your desired criteria. Passion Digital, a London marketing agency, used GWI to help its client, The Thinking Traveler (a luxury villa company), get the attention of high-income audiences. The client wanted to learn everything about the ultra-high earner group in their target markets so that they could create marketing material that was more in tune with these segments. After using GWI, Passion Digital found that its client’s target audience: They also found the target audience to be younger than they had assumed. Based on all this information, Passion Digital created a content marketing plan for The Thinking Traveler’s website and blog. Since GWI had also shown Facebook to be the main social platform for their target audience, Passion Digital created an exclusive Facebook group for its client’s customers. People who joined were given perks and discounts. Social engagement cycle Here’s why using GWI was a success for this campaign: Notable clients: McDonald’s, Walmart, Cisco, Samsung, PBS, Nintendo Pricing: upon request People Pattern is a platform that specializes in audience analytics. It uses data science approaches to extract valuable marketing insights from social media users’ views and data. Unlike other social marketing tools that analyze brand-related interactions, People Pattern focuses on understanding the individuals behind the conversation using rigorous data science. People Pattern’s data science team uses trustworthy and widely used machine learning algorithms to extract insights from unstructured social data. They are continuously retraining and fine-tuning their prediction models to achieve the optimal balance of recall and accuracy. By using a combination of machine learning methods and topic modeling algorithms, People Pattern creates clusters of individuals that fit into a particular niche. This allows you to gain insights into audiences and industry professionals without having to select them first. People Pattern also facilitates competitor analysis by showing you who your competitor’s audience is. You can also see how your audience under or over-indexes with respect to your competition. With this data, you can gauge your brand’s performance and identify areas of improvement to better target your audience. People Pattern audience insights Further, you can develop lookalike audiences from more than 500 million social media users. These audiences possess characteristics similar to those of your existing audience, making it easy for you to target your customer personas. People Pattern also lets you develop a personalized media and content strategy based on customer affinities and demographic data. Additionally, People Pattern enables you to identify topic-specific influencers to disseminate your brand’s message and discover industry trends by studying what a panel of experts is discussing and posting. With People Pattern’s enhanced audience groupings, you can move beyond vanity metrics and use more advanced methods of evaluating, targeting, and engaging high-impact audience groups. As we’ve mentioned earlier, big names like McDonalds have used People Patter’s user behavior analytics and lookalike audiences to optimize their campaigns. A rather niche brand that used the tool is Liebeskind, a European luxury brand that wanted to target a young and creative audience. They already had a decent presence in Europe, but when it came to expanding into North America, they were unsure of who to target and how. People Pattern came in handy. Liebeskind wanted to identify North American lookalike audiences to capture a demographic similar to that of their European audience. With People Pattern’s advanced algorithms and massive data pool, they were able to do so successfully. People Pattern case study Here’s how the client used People Pattern to see success: According to Nathalie Spears, the company’s CEO, “Using People Pattern’s audience analysis, we closed a multi-million dollar order in our first meeting with a major retailer.“ The tool also helped the client identify 34k new audience personas. Notable clients: Lexus, Epic Games, Lacoste, LVMH, Publicis Groupe Pricing: Undisclosed Meltwater is a media intelligence and social media monitoring platform that equips organizations with the necessary tools to track, assess, and gauge their online presence. The platform scrutinizes millions of digital sources, including news sites, blogs, and social media, employing AI and machine learning algorithms to deliver real-time insights about a company’s performance. Its consumer insights platform fuses top-notch social data with AI and human expertise to uncover actionable insights, empowering organizations to make well-informed decisions throughout their brand’s lifecycle. Meltwater’s adeptness at AI is such that it hosts industry events, where its team members share their insights with industry professionals. Their suite stands superior to other audience insights tools with its distinct features like shareable dashboards, AI contextualized explanations, global social data, expert data structuring, and audience segmentation. It also analyzes images and videos to provide insights that text-only insight tools might have missed. Meltwater consists of data scientists, market researchers, and consumer insights experts with vast experience in audience insights and consumer research across various industries. The feature enables them to intelligently organize the data, paying close attention to the context and the specific attributes of their client’s markets. This allows them to move beyond basic social listening and help clients discover valuable consumer insights. You can also set social listening reports on autopilot to get automatic reports every day, week, or month, depending on your needs. Bring your PR or customer experience teams on board to make this feature even more efficient. The tool also allows you to onboard marketing or PR agencies to collaborate on key projects and campaigns. Recently, Meltwater introduced their AI assistant called Platform Assistant, which lets you access insights through conversational commands. You can use it to get brand monitoring data, media analyses, competitive intelligence data, or audience insights in mere seconds. Although Meltwater has clients from all around the globe, we were really impressed by their work for The Economist since a publication of that scale would have incredibly diverse social data from different regions. Meltwater helped The Economist grow their readership with new subscriptions. But for that, the publication had to connect with the right people and that too all over the world. Another challenge was to put all this data together in a presentation that could give the stakeholders a deeper dive into what drove the subscription. And Meltwater was able to deliver just that with its social listening and data analysis abilities. The Economist case study Here’s how Meltwater drove subscriptions for The Economist: Even now, Meltwater provides The Economist with brand impact metrics, real-time updates, and location-based analytics to help them cater to their audience of a million readers. 1. Brandwatch Consumer Intelligence
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2. Audiense
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Top Features to Look for in Audience Insights Tools
When you're narrowing down options for an audience insights tool, here are the top features to keep in mind.
Demographics and Behavioral Data
This is possibly the most basic and essential feature of any audience insights tool. Look for a tool that provides data on demographics such as age, gender, interests, online behavior, and location. In behavioral data, the tool should be able to track and analyze user actions such as clicks, purchases, and website visits.
Based on this data, you will be able to understand who your target audience is and how they behave when making a purchase. You can then provide them with personalized shopping experiences to maximize satisfaction and the chances of retention.
Audience Segmentation
As you must have noticed in the reviews about, most tools have AI customer segmentation. This is necessary because it categorizes your audience into smaller groups based on shared characteristics.
For example, segmentation can help identify which age group and gender are most interested in your product or service. You can then write personalized content for them or approach them on platforms they most commonly use.
Some tools even offer advanced segmentation features, such as only segmenting audiences in certain age groups or from a particular region. For example, GWI has Kids and US options to analyze data specifically related to children and/or customers in the United States.
Cross-Platform Insights
You don't want a uni-dimensional understanding of your audience. People might behave differently on different platforms. That's why it's important to pick an audience insights tool that shows your audience's behavior across multiple channels like websites and social media.
Let's take younger audiences as an example. They may use Instagram just to scroll and check out products, but on TikTok, they may be more interested in buying items from TikTok Shop. The tool should be able to show you these nuanced behaviors so that you can tailor your marketing strategies to best suit each platform.
Ultimately, the goal is to make informed decisions about your audience based on data and insights. With accurate audience insights, you can craft targeted and effective marketing campaigns that really get your audience's attention.
Customer Engagement Metrics
It also helps if an audience insights tool tells you how your target customers engage with content on each platform, such as through likes, shares, comments, or reposts.
Also, how much time do they spend on each platform on average? These metrics can help you see which channels your customers may be most active on. You can then use social media posting and scheduling tools to post content on these platforms.
Engagement metrics also give you an idea of what level of interaction you can expect your content to get. For example, if you find that your target audience doesn't interact much with LinkedIn posts, you shouldn't waste your time and resources creating and promoting content on that platform. Instead, you can focus on the channels where your audience is more engaged.
Advanced Analytics
Most importantly, the audience insights tool should provide advanced analytics features, such as predictive analytics, sentiment analysis, trend forecasting, conversion tracking, and customer journey mapping.
For example, Dstillery offers AI predictive analysis that you can use to tweak your marketing and advertising campaigns. A notable use case is businesses using AI predictions to adjust their bidding strategies.
Similarly, a tool with advanced Instagram analytics, such as Audiense, can help you identify brand advocates and influencers who can promote your products or services to their large following. It also helps you track sentiment analysis to see how customers feel about your brand.
How to Leverage Audience Insights Tools for Strategic Decision-Making?
The primary use case of audience insights tools is to get information about your target customers. But that's not it. You can also use this information to further make strategic decisions. The platforms we've reviewed above go beyond basic demographics and offer predictive, behavioral, and interest-based insights.
Here are some of the use cases where you can use audience insights for strategic decision-making.
Hyper-Segmentation for Precise Targeting
Hyper-segmentation means breaking down your target audience into specific groups based on granular behavioral, transactional, psychographic, and demographic data. For basic targeting, you can use this approach to find your target audience on social media.
But you can also go a step further with AI-powered audience clustering. Audience insight tools can further analyze patterns and behaviors across multiple data points, forming micro-segments that reveal hidden customer needs, motivations, or pain points. You can then create hyper-personalized campaigns to target more niche and lucrative audience segments with unique product variations, offers, and messaging.
For example, Passion Digital wanted to target high earners for their clients. So, they used GWI to hyper-target their audience, particularly on Facebook. It was due to Passion Digital's segmentation that Passion Digital was able to understand that the client's target audience valued authenticity and was most active on Facebook, where the agency ended up making an exclusive group to increase engagement.
When needed, you can also combine audience insights with predictive analytics to anticipate future behaviors. It will help you adjust marketing efforts based on projected changes in customer preferences or lifestyle shifts.
Optimize Multi-Channel Advertising Spend
When advertising to customers across multiple channels, you want to minimize ad waste while expanding your reach as much as possible. Audience insights tools let you analyze audience behavior across different channels to help you determine which channels are most effective for reaching your target audience.
An excellent example of this comes from Sokal's use of Dstilley. When the automotive company used Dstillery to get audience insights for their ad campaigns, they were able to get a better CPM for all channels, including video, dynamic display, and display.
You can also use advanced attribution models to allocate advertising budget to all channels that contribute to conversions and not just the last click. Again, AI can come into play to automatically redistribute ad spending in real time based on performance.
They can continuously optimize your budget, shifting spend to high-performing channels, ad sets, or creatives while pulling back from underperforming ones, ensuring that your overall spending is efficiently managed.
You can also combine historical performance data with audience insights to forecast future advertising campaign spending. For example, if you know that your target audience is most active on social media during certain times of the year, you can increase ad spend during those periods to maximize reach and engagement.
Leveraging Predictive Analytics
Most audience insights tools also feature predictive analytics capabilities, allowing you to anticipate future trends and behaviors. For example, if the data suggests that a certain audience segment is likely to convert after viewing a specific type of ad, you can tailor your future campaigns to target that segment with those types of ads.
You can also use predictive analytics to estimate your customers' lifetime value. Look at their purchasing patterns, demographic data, and engagement levels to determine how much value they are likely to bring to your business. Then, focus your retention campaigns on high-value customers for ROI maximization.
For example, when Tombrass, an advertising agency, needed alternative solutions to cookies, they used Dstillery's ID-free targeting technology for their client projects. Not only that, they used the tool's AI predictive capabilities to implement predictive bidding strategies for their clients. AI predicted the value of every impression to determine the cost a client should pay for it. Their campaign had a 60% better CPA and 88% better CPM, with 7.6x more impressions.
Tombras success story
Improve Cross-Channel Retargeting
We've already established that reaching your audience through one platform isn't enough. With audience insights tools, you can learn which platforms to target your customers on and which devices they prefer.
Based on this data, you can show sequential messaging to your customers across platforms. For example, instead of showing them the same ad over and over, you can retarget them with different ads on different platforms, creating a cohesive and personalized messaging experience.
Let's say a prospect clicks on your product ad on Google search. On YouTube, you can show them a product demo, followed by a discount offer on Facebook, and finally, an email with related products. This strategy builds engagement in stages, creating a more persuasive, non-repetitive experience.
For example, in the Audiense case study above, Convosphere used the tool to identify different audience segments in the new markets the client wanted to expand to. Then, they conducted self-research to find where these segments were active and what they were interested in. This information helped Convosphere spread the client's message across different channels.
You can also use behavioral signals from audience insights tools, such as scroll depth, browsing time, and engagement rate, to inform which type of content and ad format to use on each platform. Predictive retargeting can also be helpful, as AI can tell you when your customers are most likely to convert based on their past behavior and purchase patterns.
Monitor Audience Evolution Over Time
Part of the reason you can't use audience insights tools once and call it a day is that your audience is constantly evolving. People change, their interests shift, and new trends emerge. So, there's a dire need for you to keep a constant eye on your audience so that you can always reach them in the most effective way possible.
The good news is that audience insights tools refresh regularly to give you updated data on your audience. For example, Dstilley refreshes every 24 hours. Similarly, you can set daily, weekly, or monthly automated audience reports on Meltwater to get the most up-to-date audience insights. Brandwatch adds 500 million conversations to its database every day. So, whatever social media insights you get are extremely recent.
With this data, you can determine if your audience has shifted to a new platform or if their interests have changed. You can also track the performance of your content and see if it no longer speaks to your audience the way it used to.
Take The Economist for example. They are regular users of Meltwater, which they use to keep track of their audience base of a million people. Meltwater not only shows them real-time audience updates but also provides brand performance metrics so that they can keep track of their impact on their audience.
How to Choose the Right Audience Insights Tool for Your Business?
Here are a few tips to help you find the best audience insights tool for your business.
Key Features
Which core features do you want the tool to have? Some common ones are:
- Social media monitoring
- Brand reputation management
- Audience engagement
- Campaign tracking
- AI predictions
- Customer segmentation
- Content optimization
- Competitor analysis
- Market trends analysis
Look for features that will help you in your daily business activities. For example, Brandwatch is an excellent option for social media monitoring, but if you want to conduct market research, Meltwater will be a better option.
Platform Integration
A lot of teams in your organization would need audience insights, including customer experience, marketing, PR, advertising, and product development. So, you'll need an audience insights tool that can integrate with your existing marketing automation software, CRM, or eCommerce platform.
This way, you won't have to log into multiple platforms to access data and insights. Also, all teams will be able to collaborate on important decisions.
Budget
As you have seen above, most audience insights tools do not disclose their pricing. You have to tell them your needs, and they'll provide a quote accordingly.
It's important to have a budget in mind before selecting a tool. Some tools offer packages for small businesses, while others cater to large enterprises. Ideally, you want a tool that you can get maximum ROI out of.
For example, Liebeskind reported that they were able to score a multi-million dollar deal after using People Pattern. So, paying a few thousand dollars for the tool was totally worth it.
Scalability
Not all audience insight tools are made for all businesses. Some are more suited for small businesses, while others have extensive offerings for enterprises. You should select the tool based on your scalability needs.
For example, if you're a small business, the amount of data you'll be collecting and analyzing will be significantly less than an enterprise-level company. A basic tool may suffice for your needs, while an enterprise-level company would require a more robust and customizable tool.
However, you should anticipate your growth trajectory, as your data requirements and team size may increase over time. Your marketing efforts will likely become more complex as you target different segments or expand into new channels, requiring advanced analytics, integration, and reporting features.
Some audience insight tools offer tiered pricing plans, where higher tiers come with additional capabilities, allowing you to unlock new features as needed. You should check beforehand whether these more expensive plans include the features you expect to need in the future or if upgrading will still leave you short-handed.
Also, consider the tool’s ability to handle larger data volumes. As your campaigns scale up, so will the amount of data you need to process. Tools designed for small businesses may impose limits on the number of data points you can analyze and the number of user profiles you can manage. If you plan to expand your campaigns in the future, opt for a tool that can support larger data volumes down the line.
In the same vein, the tool should also have extendable collaborative features. For example, if the basic plan allows you to have three team members, the advanced one should support more team members and even marketing agencies so that all relevant parties can access the same dashboards and insights.
Get In the Know With Audience Insights Tools
Whether you simply want to get Instagram post insights relevant to your audience's engagement rates or want a full-blown picture of your audience, an audience insights tool can be quite useful. These tools help you hyper-target your marketing and advertising campaigns while using predictive analysis to keep the momentum going for the future.
Unlike some social media marketing tools that only offer audience insights as one of their features, these tools are exclusively made for the job. Thus, their data is highly accurate, often coming directly from the source, such as Audiense's SOPRISM tool that shows Instagram and Facebook customer data from API.Meta.
With this priceless data at your disposal, you can cater to your existing audiences and even expand into new markets with enough information to capture your target audience.
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparing digital marketing tools
Besides audience insights tools, here are some other marketing tools you can use to enhance your campaigns.
- Best Digital Marketing Tools
- Top 21 Digital Marketing Software Tools
- Top 20 Digital Marketing Tools for Small Businesses
- Top Free Marketing Tools for Brands
- Top Influencer Marketing Tools
- Best Social Media Marketing Tools
- Top Real-Time Social Media Analytics Tools
- Top 30 Social Media Analytics Tools
Comparing marketing optimization agencies
If you don’t plan to conduct audience insights analysis and campaign activation in house, you can hand over these tasks to marketing agencies who will do everything from start to finish for you. At Influencer Marketing Hub, we have reviewed and analyzed the following:
- Best Marketing Agencies to Grow Your Business in 2024
- Top 24 Full-Service Agencies for 2024
- Top Digital Marketing Agencies in the United States 2024
- Top 47 Digital Marketing Agencies to Boost Your Growth in 2024
- Top Global Marketing Agencies for Global Success
- Top Social Media Marketing Agencies for 2024
- Top 10 Inbound Marketing Agencies for Enterprises
- Top 8 Integrated Marketing Agencies to Grow Your Business
What are the top audience insights tools?
We have reviewed the following audience insights tools and found them to be extremely helpful for solo marketers, brands, and project managers.
| Audience Insights Tool | Notable Clients | Best For | Notable Feature | Pricing |
| Brandwatch Consumer Intelligence | Unilever, GSK, Nestle, Carlsberg, Toyota, Tui | Small, medium, and large brands | Historical data back to 2010 | Upon request |
| Audiense | Apple, Manchester United, Warner Music Group, TikTok | Businesses of all sizes | SOPRISM for Meta platform insights | £1,999 per month; customer pricing available |
| Dstillery | Dell, Delta, Applebee’s, T-Mobile, Taco Bell, PayPal, Capital One, Bayer, Rakuten | Large businesses and enterprises | Custom AI audience-building | Upon request |
| GWI | Google, BuzzFeed, Spotify, LinkedIn, Snapchat, The Guardian, Omnicom Group | Large businesses and enterprises | 250k customer profiling points | Upon request |
| People Pattern | McDonald’s, Walmart, Cisco, Samsung, PBS, Nintendo | Medium, and large brands | Influencer discovery based on audience insights | Upon request |
| Meltwater | Lexus, Epic Games, Lacoste, LVMH, Publicis Groupe | Large businesses and enterprises | Platform Assistant | Upon request |
Which features do audience insights tools provide?
The table shows the features offered by the best audience insights tools in the market.
| Audience Insights Tool | Demographics and Behavioral Data | Cross-Platform Insights | Audience Segmentation | Social Listening | Influencer Identification |
| Brandwatch Consumer Intelligence | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Audiense | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | x | ✔ |
| Dstillery | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | x | x |
| GWI | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | x | x |
| People Pattern | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | x |
| Meltwater | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
What is an audience insights tool?
An audience insights tool is a software or platform that analyzes customer data from various sources, including social media, website analytics, and surveys, to provide valuable information about customer behavior, purchase patterns, preferences, and demographics. Marketers can use this data to tailor their campaigns closely to their target audiences.
What are the tools to identify target audiences?
Some of the most popular tools used to identify target audiences are Brandwatch, Audiense, Dstillery, People Pattern, and GWI. These tools also come with additional features, such as AI assistants, customer segmentation, influencer identification, and real-time monitoring, to further streamline marketing operations.
Who can use audience insights tools?
Audience insights tools can be used by marketers, content creators, brand managers, and sales teams. These tools can help these people tailor their content to target audiences, identify potential leads, and create or improve their existing products and services.
How can you optimize your marketing strategies with customer insights tools?
You can use these tools to personalize marketing campaigns, adjust your marketing efforts in real-time, refine your customer journey, and improve the overall customer experience to ensure higher conversions. They also come with predictive AI analytics to set your future campaigns for success.
What are some advanced tools for detailed audience segmentation?
While Google Analytics can be helpful in providing basic audience segmentation, there are more advanced tools that let you create audience segments and analyze them in a more detailed manner. These tools include Meltwater, GWI, Dstillery, and People Pattern. You can also use Brandwatch to analyze social media data and create audience segments based on their behaviors and interests.
How can I use AI tools for better audience targeting?
AI tools can really help refine your audience targeting by analyzing large amounts of data to find patterns in behavior, interests, attitudes, buying patterns, and demographics. Tools like predictive analytics can forecast which users are more likely to convert based on their past actions. AI can also help with segmenting your audience more accurately, creating personalized content, and optimizing ads for better results. Plus, tools like chatbots and recommendation engines use AI to engage with users in real time, providing relevant offers or content that increases the chances of conversion.
What should I do if my ads aren't reaching the intended audience?
If your ads aren't reaching the right audience, the first step is to review your targeting settings. Check if you've selected the appropriate options like demographics, preferences, location, buyer personas, and behaviors that align with your ideal customers. You should also adjust your keywords or exclude irrelevant ones to filter out unqualified traffic. Another thing to consider is testing different ad platforms or formats; sometimes, a platform like Facebook might work better than Google for your audience. Also, look at your ad creative and messaging to ensure it resonates with the group you're trying to reach. You can also use an audience insights tool to get to know your audience closely and then refine your targeting accordingly.
