In this video, I talk about why audience insights are critical for brand storytelling, marketing programs and campaigns. Hope you enjoy the video below and subscribe to my Youtube channel to be the notified when new videos are added.

If you’ve watched any of my videos or read any of my content, you know how passionate I am about audience intelligence. I can talk about it for days. But I wanted to give a little more context on this actually means. I have had a few comments asking me to clarify so let’s spend a few minutes defining it because it really can mean anything and all of them can be true based on the context of the conversation.

Ok, so let’s talk about all the different ways you can get audience insights.

• Are unique visitors to a website an audience? Yes.
• Are email subscribers an audience? Yes.
• Is a panel of millennials responding to primary research an audience? Yes.
• Are a brand’s followers on social media an audience? Yes.
• Are tailored and custom audiences in paid social an audience? Yes.
• Is everyone using a specific hashtag an audience. Yes.

The point is that these are all important data points and some are more helpful depending on what you are planning to use the data and audience insights for.

Now when I refer to audiences, I am usually referring to people, most of us are, but I am talking about self-identified individuals that meet set of criteria.

Let’s take a look at the cloud security audience as an example.

Typically with most B2B audiences, they will self-identify in their bio as being an engineer, programmer, or developer and if they don’t explicitly say “security” or infosec or “insert keyword” here … you can combine that with conversational data and build your audience that way.

But even then, there are some discrepancies with the audience insights.