Personalizing the customer experience gives you an edge over your competitors. In fact, 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase when brands offer personalized experiences.

Audience data is the key to connecting you with your target audience on a much deeper level.

In this article, we will explore how to leverage this data to understand your customer base and improve the overall operational efficiency of your business. This will allow you to stay on target when pursuing departmental and company goals while minimizing misses and missed opportunities from operating in the dark.

If you want to get started on your own, we encourage you to follow along in our “How to Build a Custom Audience with PDL” tutorial!

What is Audience Data?

Audience data is detailed information about your target audience. This can include enriched data from people already in your network or completely new data about people you have not discovered yet. 

Some of the most common types of audience data:

• Demographics

• Lifestyle data

• Social engagement data

• Website visitation data

• Purchase data

• Third-party behavioral data

• Geographical data

• Conversion data

How to Use Audience Data

The more you know about your customer, the more personalized their experience is, and the more likely they are to engage.

Here are some high-level ways you can use audience data:

1. Personalized Marketing Campaigns

This is where the rubber meets the road when using audience data for your marketing campaigns. 90% of consumers find personalized marketing content effectively appealing.

Target prospects with personalized marketing efforts, including custom-tailored product recommendations, website pop-ups with the user’s name, consultative/conversational support like Drift, and targeted location-based campaigns.

2. Audience Segmentation

No single outreach resonates with your entire audience. 

Segment your data using rules and create separate campaigns based on your custom segments. For example, if you are in the insurance industry, you might want to segment your audience to target people 40+ years old in New York.

Proper audience data enables you to perform TAM analysis to form a holistic picture of your addressable market, customer tiering to ensure your customers are organized and supported efficiently, and differentiation that resonates with your targets.

3. Audience Behavior Analysis

Audience behavior analysis reveals how your audience interacts with your company as well as within an industry altogether. It’s much easier to address your prospects’ challenges when you understand their behavior. 

What content are they consuming? What tools do they use? What is their journey through your website?

When building a data-based approach, overreliance on buyer personas to find your "perfect" customer is a huge mistake. Relying on “SaaS Sally” doesn’t make as much sense when you know exactly who your customers are thanks to your audience analysis.

Combining audience behavior with an audience enrichment tool makes it possible to skyrocket the ROI of marketing campaigns. 

What Is Audience Enrichment?

Audience enrichment is the practice of supplementing first-party information you've collected with additional information provided by third-party sources, be it another website, a public database, or a data vendor.

The average amount of audience data businesses collect internally is not enough to form a full picture. Many businesses find themselves stuck in a position where they have a lot of data about people in their network that is mostly incomplete. Also, data about people is highly subject to constant change. 

For that reason, companies leverage data providers like People Data Labs to fill in the gaps. Enriching your data also foregoes all of the manual work that would be required in updating each record. This frees up time and effort that ought to be spent engaging prospects.

Reach out to us to discuss any challenges you face with your audience data. We are eager to help.

Audience enrichment allows you to fully understand your audience. Take that understanding and combine it with data-driven marketing strategies, and you have a strategy to catalyze ROI. 

Most obviously, sales and marketing efforts greatly benefit from audience enrichment, but less time spent maintaining data improves the overall operational efficiency of your business.

Benefits of Enriched Audience Data

With this superior, enriched data, you're able to make more informed decisions on campaigns, create effective and creative advertising engagements, operate with confidence and efficiency, and reap a wide range of other unique benefits:

1. Shorter Lead Capture Cycle

A shorter lead capture cycle is a win-win for your audience and marketers. All you need is a shorter lead capture form that asks for something simple like the name and email of your users, then leave the data enrichment to a partner like People Data Labs to fill in the rest.

2. Automated Lead Scoring

Audience enrichment automatically categorizes your leads on a real-time basis. In the past, when someone would enter only their name and email address, you might have missed great opportunities due to the lack of information to work with.

With audience enrichment, that's all you need to source more information to accurately score your leads.

3. Better Segmentation

Marketers are always looking for ways to improve segmentation. By allowing you to understand your customers better, data enrichment makes it possible for you to fully leverage the power of audience segmentation. The added information that comes with a unified audience data set allows for new segments. Better segmentation means a competitive advantage.

4. Improving Customer Experience

Enriching your data brings more insight into your customer database for you to know more about your customers’ behaviors, likes, dislikes, and more. You're then able to use that information to bring more value to your customers and improve their experience. 

For example, if you are aware many of your customers favor Google as a tool, implementing solutions like Auth0 on forms could greatly increase the number of signups and improve customer satisfaction. Or, if you are aware many of your customers use a platform like Reddit, a witty ad on the front page that resonates with and addresses a need of your target is much more valuable than a cold email.

5. Identifying Untapped Revenue Opportunities With Existing Customers

Audience enrichment raises the quantity and quality of your data significantly.

When you have high-quality audience data at your disposal, it is easier to understand upselling opportunities and untapped ways to increase revenue among your existing customers.

6. Quickly discovering new opportunities 

It’s much easier to quickly search for and engage new customers via a person search tool once you have a firm understanding of your audience. Once you’ve implemented a method to enrich your audience data, you can search for similar prospects to target. Start to rinse and repeat, and you’ve got an effective machine to engage your audience and strategize internally.

Catalyze Your Audience Data with a Superior Source

Personalization has become the industry standard in marketing, and empowering your business with a data expert will give you that competitive edge without the chore of maintaining a massive database.

With over 3 billion unique professional and people profiles from across the globe, People Data Labs grants you data that is incredibly deep and complex yet simple to use to uncover unique insights around your audience via cutting-edge enrichment and search capabilities. Also, this data is production-ready, compliant, and secure. 

Speak to a PDL consultant today to catalyze your business’ performance with audience data.