Advertising and marketing campaigns are only as effective as they are relevant to the audience they’re targeting. Audience insights provide a data-driven view of each market segment, enabling you to create tailored strategies, messaging, and content that will resonate with the people you aim to attract.
While native audience insight platforms share basic demographics, adding sociographic and behavioral data presents a more robust picture. The better you know your audience segments, the more confidence you have that your campaigns will deliver optimal ROI. In this article, we look at what audience insights can do for campaigns, sources of audience data you can tap, and how you can use data clean rooms to power audience insights.
Benefits of Comprehensive Audience Insights
Comprehensive audience insights are a type of business insight. They ultimately help you get better results from your marketing campaigns. Here’s what you can do with audience insights.
1. Identify specific segments and target better
With audience insights data, you can segment audiences further based on personality traits, online habits, relationships, influencers, and other factors. For example, you may be in the process of developing a strategic partnership with a brand that has audience overlap. Using audience insights, you can identify overlap points, such as shared characteristics, social media likes, and social media followers. Once you know what groups are most likely to be strongly interested, you can develop a social listening strategy to gather further data.
2. Craft tailored content, build new formats, and make relevant recommendations
When you understand the interests of each market segment, you can create content and new ad formats specifically tailored to those interests. You can also make relevant content and promotional recommendations based on interests.
3. Refine messaging and curate engagements for each segment
Crafting your messaging—as well as formats, ad types and channels, and content— to address each segment individually is much easier with audience insights. You can speak the language of each group and address specific pain points.
Comprehensive audience insights can give you a 360-degree view of who you’re trying to attract, and using them is faster and more cost-efficient than using traditional market research.
Sources of Audience Data
Audience data can be found in a plethora of locations. Here are four sources that you can mine for a wealth of audience-related business insights.
Brand mentions online: Look at who’s talking about your company or products on forums, reviews sites, and social media, and see what they’re saying.
Your social media accounts: Gather information about the people engaging with your brand on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other social media pages.
Your SaaS tools: Marketing platforms, CRM systems, customer service platforms, and chat tools all hold valuable audience insights data.
Your website: Your website is an excellent source of audience insights. Track behavioral patterns and content consumption patterns, and identify paths to purchase.
Third-party data: You’re not limited to using only data that you own to glean audience insights. Open and commercial data sets, such as those in Snowflake Marketplace, are available.
Data Clean Rooms Power Audience Insights
Identifying sources of audience insights and gathering data sets are fairly simple tasks. But to get data sets ready to query so you can unlock new insights is more challenging—especially when multiple departments and ecosystem partners need to collaborate on analysis. Data clean rooms are an ideal solution.
What are data clean rooms?
Data clean rooms give teams a secure place to bring data together for joint analysis based on defined guidelines and restrictions, which is necessary due to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Even if your audience insights data is anonymized, data privacy practices are a must. It’s possible to tie anonymized data to the person it relates to.
Data clean rooms control what data comes in, how the data is joined to other data sets in the clean room, what types of analytics each party can perform, and what data can be exported.
How to use data clean rooms for audience insights
Let’s look at an example to see how an organization might use a data clean room for audience insights. Consider a consumer packaged goods brand that has its own first-party data with customer attributes and associated SKUs. The brand wants to run an ad campaign targeting prospective customers who have the same attributes and then create relevant upsell opportunities based on additional attributes. The brand must first create the target segments and upload appropriate data sets into a clean room, while complying with privacy requirements. The brand’s BI team and marketing team can work with the ad partner to join first-party data with third-party data in the clean room.
Case Study: NBCUniversal’s ONE21
A real-world example is Snowflake client NBCUniversal’s Audience Insights Hub, which is built on a cross-cloud data clean room environment powered by the Snowflake platform. The hub unlocks data interoperability between NBCUniversal and its advertising ecosystem partners. It lets the participants design the level of protection and transparency appropriate for building audiences, activating campaigns, and measurement.
The NBCU Audience Insights Hub facilitates the following:
- Digital audience exploration: Partners can explore how audiences and customers overlap, providing valuable aggregate insights without any underlying data being exposed from either party.
- Cross-platform planning: NBCUniversal is combining the new clean room environment with its proprietary Linear TV APIs. This gives partners self-service access to NBCUniversal’s aggregate linear and digital data for cross-platform media planning.
- Reach and frequency measurement: The hub incorporates certified reach measurement models, enabling partners to use ad exposure data and conduct their own analyses, providing the ability to deduplicate campaign reach and frequency for more-efficient media planning and measurement.
- Cross-platform attribution: NBCUniversal’s interoperable measurement capabilities enable partners to conduct their own self-service multi platform attribution.
Comprehensive Audience Insights Power Marketing
Team members and partners can use audience insights to craft more-effective marketing campaigns. The key to a high ROI campaign is the ability to craft a data-driven strategy and design targeted campaign assets based on collaboration in a secure environment.
Learn More About Data Clean Rooms in this eBook.
Snowflake for Media, Advertising, and Entertainment
Snowflake’s Data Cloud establishes a single source of truth across products, channels, advertising, and engagement to improve personalization and experiences and drive better content decisions. By ensuring strict data privacy and security, Snowflake also helps maintain data governance over consumer data.