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Social intelligence specialist Brandwatch launched Audiences, an influence and audience analytics product that helps marketers gain insight for planning highly targeted campaigns.
The platform also helps marketers discover real-time opportunities specific to their target customer segments, allowing them to build custom audiences from scratch, discover the influencers within them and study the content they are sharing.
“Today, marketers are seeking to do more than just publicize their brands. They understand that to succeed in the age of ad-blocking they must build authentic relationships by understanding the psyche, preferences and trends of their customers and prospective audiences,” Nick Taylor, product marketing manager at Brandwatch, told eWEEK. “The voice of the customer is a mammoth priority for marketers currently, and audience analytics are a powerful technology to create more targeted and personalized marketing and ad campaigns, and to smartly leverage real-time marketing opportunities.”
With Brandwatch Audiences, users can define highly specific audiences they want to reach and discover the niche or up-and-coming influencers they should be collaborating with, as well as the trends unique to that group.
“We’re also seeing a lot of our users in customer and consumer insights roles blending Audiences data with other sources of data like CRM, web analytics, in-store survey, sales and more for a holistic approach to understanding and engaging with customers,” Taylor noted.
Audiences can be based on followers of any account, people who mentioned specific keywords and demographic and biographical information. The ability to create live dashboards gives users the ability to see what any group is currently discussing and the exact hashtags, images and stories they are sharing.
The platform uses the PeerIndex Influence Graph, a live author database of more than 200 million active Twitter users.
The Influence Graph maps each individual’s interactions with other users, assigning an influence score based on the frequency of their engagement and, in turn, the influence of those they are engaging.
“Marketing analytics have become absolutely essential, and the latest technologies are evolving faster than many marketers can keep up with today,” Taylor said. “Social data and analytics is a huge factor in that, as it holds an ocean of unsolicited, unfiltered information from consumers on their unadulterated and authentic opinions. It’s a consumer insights professional’s best tool in the journey to truly understand the VOC [voice of the customer].”
At the end of the day, he said, text analytics remains king, as it holds the most robust data.
“In the future I’m hoping to see further advancements in categorization and audience analytics because that is where the real intelligence exists for marketers,” he said.