Back to Basics: Audience Data 101

80% of customers would rather engage with brands that deliver targeted marketing messages. Audience data is a critical data set to deliver these experiences. 

But first, what exactly is audience data?

Audience data is a group of consumers you can target for specific campaigns, based on criteria set by advertisers. It aggregates your target audiences' online and offline behaviours to arrive at a set of custom audience segments that would best suit your campaigns. Fact is, the more you know about your customers, the more relevant and tailored your messaging can be for them. Audience data provides the basic foundation for campaign targeting. 

Traditionally, audience data considered data points such as demographics, interests, and intents. Over at Lifesight, you can subscribe to over 4000+ pre-defined audience segments based on your campaign needs. Categories include:

• Demographics: Audiences made up of socio-demographic traits such as gender, age group, income, and household attributes
• Interests and intent: Audiences made up of online interests and intent from browsing and app usage, product categories, search intent among others.
• Geo-behaviour: Audiences made up of physical world movement behaviour and place visits. This includes place category visits, retail brand visits, and geo-behavioural personas.
• Personas: Audiences made up of consumer personas across several traits such as affluence, lifestyle, generation and life stage, family type, and device profiles
• Financial: Audiences made up of consumer financial interests and traits such as credit card users, credit level, investor status, investor level, and mortgage size.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Audience data can help brands choose target customers across parameters, and hyper-target their campaign strategies.

Privacy still wins

We live in a privacy-first era. So, it is critical that your audience data partner respects privacy laws. Only then processing this audience data and using it in campaigns will be in compliance with laws.

How to leverage audience data in advertising 

Audience data is a critical asset to strengthen the entire marketing lifecycle. Let us see how:

1. Define your campaign goals and find suitable audience segments using audience insights

The target audience is first defined as part of campaign goals. With the right audience data at hand, advertisers have an opportunity to define realistic yet ambitious goals for their campaigns in order to meet marketing objectives.

2. Leverage an audience partner with a cross device identity graph and audience taxonomy

Your audience is using multiple devices today, and it is important that their footprint across their devices are taken into account when developing audience data.

3. Build custom audience segments to target specific groups with similar traits

As a brand, you could have different campaigns running at the same time. But the same size of audience may not fit all different campaigns. With audience data, brands have an opportunity to define unique custom segments for different campaigns, with unique audiences as the target group.

4. Extend your reach using AI-based lookalike audiences

When you find an audience segment that bears results, you can use the defining characteristics through audience data to find similar customers. Scaling the reach of your advertising campaigns has never been easier.

Before you go

What marketers now need are data providers that focus on quality and privacy - in order to deliver accurate and effective campaigns.

Talk to Lifesight for a renewed, omnichannel approach to targeting and segmentation with high quality, privacy-compliant audience data available on the cloud. Are you ready to reach your customers in truly relevant, impactful ways? We're here to help.