What is Audience Management? | SME South Africa

As a business, it is crucial to know your audience and understand their pain points, how to address them, and how to communicate them effectively to your audience. Without making the effort to thoroughly understand your audience, your marketing efforts will be fruitless, as you’ll be shooting out messages with no one to receive them.

Audience management is the process a business goes through in finding, analysing and using audience data for campaigns across various channels. Through audience management, you can ensure that your campaigns are beneficial, not just for your business, but for your audience as well.

How Does Audience Management Work?

The process of audience management works by, firstly, having an audience management strategy. This will allow you to find insights from your customer data to help create better campaigns and increased ROI.

Audience management allows you to analyse your audience’s behaviour, and to use that information to create campaigns that are relevant to them. Through marketing tools like theMarketer, you can conduct an RFM analysis that lets you segment your customers based on Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM), allowing you to identify who your most valuable customers are.

Why is Audience Management Important?

As a business, knowing your audience and finding ways to communicate with them directly, instead of having a generic approach, gives your marketing efforts a better chance of succeeding.

Let’s say you’re running an e-mail marketing campaign, using a Customer Relationship Management software like MailChimp will help you sift through your database to place your customers into different groups.

If you’re launching a new product and want to ensure the best value from your campaign, you can segment your customer base by various factors such as demographics (age and gender) or behaviours (e-mail open rate, recent website visits, and purchase frequency).

This targeted approach gives you a better chance of reaching the right customers and achieving your goals, as opposed to launching a generic campaign and hoping for success.

What is Audience Management Maturity?

Audience management maturity as the name suggests is how mature or advanced the effectiveness of the audience management processes in a business. The concept and framework of audience management help businesses evaluate customer relationship management, and address the areas that require improvement.

There are various factors which influence the audience management maturity of a business. Some of these factors include:

• The use of CRM and marketing automation tools.
• Target audience research and target audience analysis.
• A clear and continuously refined strategy.

How to Get Started With Audience Management?

If you want to intentionally make efforts to communicate effectively with your audience, you need to start by knowing how to clearly define your target audience. If you already have a clear target audience, you need to develop a clear strategy.

Your audience management strategy might need to be tweaked now and again based on the campaign, goals, and marketing channel.

Regardless, here is an idea on how to create an audience management strategy:

1. Have a clear definition of your goals: You need to set out what you want to achieve with your campaigns and audience management. Whether you want to drive sales, increase brand awareness, increase website traffic, or whatever your goal is
2. Set KPIs: After setting goals, set key performance indicators to measure the success of your marketing efforts.
3. Research and understand your audience: Go through the necessary steps to understand your audience and their behaviours. Conduct market research to understand where your audience is from, who they are, and what they like.
4. Group your audience: Segment your audience by demographics, behaviour, value, characteristics, or any other category that may make it easier for you to group them. This helps you send out campaigns that are tailored for the right audience.
5. Choose the appropriate marketing channels: With marketing and audience management, you can not have a one-size-fits-all approach. Cross-channel marketing can be useful, but it’s important to know how to present your brand according to your audience’s behaviour on each channel.
6. Make use of technological tools: Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are great to help you analyse your audience’s behaviour.
7. Create tailored content: CRM tools will make it easier for you to understand your audience. That will allow you to create tailored content, not only based on demographics but on how they interact with your brand.