Today’s digital landscape has enabled businesses to connect with their consumers through a variety of channels. But it’s also created a huge headache for marketers trying to reach their audience in a sea of endless competition.

HubSpot polled marketing leaders to understand the top challenges they were facing in 2023. Among the top 5 pain points were adopting a data-driven marketing strategy, increased competition, and generating traffic and leads.

Marketers are spread thin. They’re scrambling to try and figure out who their audience is, and how to best connect with them. They also are in search of answers to questions like:

• What channels will be most effective for me to engage my audience?
• Is this influencer the best choice?
• Who are my competitors’ customers?
• What are my audience’s interests and affinities?

There is a way to find out the answers to the above, plus everything you need to know to create winning marketing campaigns that convert.

But you need access to the right audience intelligence tool—and unfortunately, there’s a lot of wrong tools out there.

What are audience intelligence platforms?

Audience intelligence platforms provide rich consumer insights, based on a variety of different data sources, allowing marketers to better understand their target audiences and reach them effectively.

Why many audience intelligence platforms are not what they appear to be

Here’s the deal—not all audience intelligence platforms are created equal. And if you choose the wrong one, you could be leaving valuable insights on the table.

Many audience intelligence platforms only have access to data on one, maybe two social media platforms (typically Twitter), or employ AI, modeled data or social listening.

This is problematic for 4 reasons:

1. Social media is an ever evolving landscape with Twitter’s future unknown and new platforms emerging.
   
2. Only having audience insights from 1 or 2 social channels is not enough to understand who your audience is, and what drives their purchase behavior. Consider how consumers engage differently across platforms (e.g. Instagram vs. LinkedIn)
   
3. While AI and modeled data is better than no insights at all, the data is probabilistic and an aggregate view of consumer behavior, not the self-declared data we need for more informed decision making.
   
4. Social listening can provide a lot of great information into what is trending and the conversations being had on social media, but it doesn’t provide insight into who the audiences are behind all the buzz.

It’s important to do your due diligence before choosing an audience intelligence platform. Do some research, and during the selection process be sure to ask these 2 questions (in addition to your own):

1. How many different social channels do you pull audience insights from?
   
2. Do you rely on AI, modeled data or social listening for your data insights?

The best audience intelligence platform on the market: Silhouette™

Silhouette is the industry’s only social audience insights platform that delivers a complete picture of any audience based on self-declared data and their behavior across major social channels, giving you a comprehensive understanding of any brand, influencer or social audience’s:

• Interests and passions
• Brand affinities
• Favorite influencers
• Preferred media channels
• Career profiles
• And demographics

When you leverage an audience intelligence platform like Silhouette, you gain a holistic view of who your audience is, what matters to them most, and the ability to take action on any audience in a number of ways. Once you have self-declared data at your fingertips, the sky’s the limit on what you can do with it:

• Do a deep dive of brand, influencer, social or competitor audience
• Conduct consumer-based research
• Measure brand lift & track brand health through targeted studies
• Deploy custom social panels for ongoing monitoring
• Identify influencers and determine campaign impact
• Run highly targeted paid media campaigns

Ready to take the guesswork out of audience intelligence? Check out this 2-minute video to see the Silhouette difference.