Gaining Consumer Insight from Audience Segmenting
Successful brands understand how to continue to reach their customers while generating interest among new audience segments. To maintain brand loyalty, it is crucial to maintain a nuanced understanding of why a brand’s customers are loyal. Equipped with this level of consumer insight, brands can create actionable strategies to establish the same appeal when reaching out to new audiences.
What Are Consumer Insights?
Consumer insights arise from a deeper level of analysis than merely tracking consumer behavior. Rather than simply assessing who is buying what and when, consumer insights often involve identifying how a consumer feels and thinks about a brand, product, or service.
These insights into what a consumer actually prefers are then translated into marketing strategies that can better reach the consumer. Consumer insights bridge the gap between R&D and marketing. The goal is to improve the consumer experience based on a deeper understanding of the motivations and attitudes underlying consumer behavior.
What is Audience Segmenting?
Audience segmenting involves applying AI and social media analytics to group consumers based on their demographic characteristics or brand-relevant attitudes and interests.
Segmenting could involve assessing attitudes towards a brand expressed by different age groups, such as Gen Z, Millennials, or Gen X. Or segmenting could involve assessing groups based on shared interests, such as sports fans, DIY crafters, or fans of a certain genre of music.
How Audience Segmenting Generates Consumer Insights
Audience segmenting generates actionable consumer insights because it allows brands to understand the attitudes, interests, and demographic characteristics that its existing customers share. It also allows brands to recognize groups of consumers whose attitudes, interests, and demographic characteristics overlap with existing consumers. These are ideal consumers to target when building a brand.
Using audience segmenting, a fashion brand might discover that a large segment of its younger customers also support environmental causes. If the brand is trying to reach more consumers in this younger demographic, then this sort of consumer insight should lead to an emphasis on sustainability in future product development and marketing strategy.
To generate these consumer insights, brands apply powerful AI tools to gather and analyze large sets of data from social media posts and other online content. Sentiment analysis, an AI-based tool that can determine the emotional content of text and image-based content, enables brands to gauge attitudes towards its brand and brand-relevant topics even when their brand is not tagged in a post.
For example, NetBase Quid AI, a leading social listening tool, uses sentiment analysis to create audience segments and apply a Net Sentiment rating to these groups. The ratings range from -100 to 100, so they provide a more fine-grained level of consumer insight that tells a company not just that a certain segment likes or dislikes its brand, but how much these groups like or dislike the brand.
Maintaining Brand Loyalty and Building an Audience
The goal of using audience segmenting to gain consumer insights is to simultaneously understand a brand’s strong points and recognize market gaps.
By analyzing the segments that feel positively about its brand, a company can glean its strengths and lean into those strengths as it targets new customers. And by understanding the segments that feel more negatively about its brand, a company can gain an understanding of weak points that it can address to improve its reach.
As AI and data analytics continue to drive next-level consumer insights, brands that understand how and why to implement audience segmenting strategies will be well-positioned to succeed. These strategies help brands continue to meet consumer needs by better understanding how consumers feel and what they want from their products.
