8 Audience Intelligence Platforms for Marketers (& Use Cases)

17 min readNov 30, 2022

Today, businesses keep their marketing efforts focused on social media analytics and audience intelligence to increase their online presence’s ROI.

Finding and understanding your target audience is essential when you’re working on your next big social media content strategy.

A quick assumption of how the Facebook algorithm works and a visually pleasing Instagram post are important starting points. However, these simple methodologies don’t guarantee your social marketing platform’s success.

Dataset providers have been producing a significantly big number of audience intelligence tools to help companies improve their overall performance.

In this article, we’re going to cover all the critical aspects of audience data insights. Consequently, we’re going to talk about how social analytics tools can help with the management of these specific metrics.

Let’s get started then!

What is Audience Intelligence?

Audience intelligence is the marketing best practice of finding your target audience and gaining valuable insights into audience demographics, behaviors, and other key characteristics.

When planning their marketing strategies, brands care about the following questions:

What are your specific audience targets?
What are their opinions and lifestyles?
How do they behave online?
What topics do they mostly talk about?

This kind of information is being acquired by artificial intelligence technology and machine learning. Afterward, companies use these actionable insights and audience data to base their next business decisions, such as their targeted marketing campaigns.

Audience intelligence is relevant to multiple marketing practices, like consumer research, social media monitoring, and the technique of PR clipping. However, they’re not entirely the same.

In addition, some people claim audience intelligence and audience demographics to be the evolution of social listening. In fact, they do share similar indexes and sources, like social media analytics.

While this may be true, you shouldn’t forget their key difference. Basically, social listening is about monitoring the audience’s social media interests, while audience intelligence dives deeper into who they are.

Furthermore, audience intelligence tools include social data from multiple data sources, such as social media platforms, websites, and third-party data.

In order to fully understand its true potential, you have to comprehend the marketing power that audience profiles hold.

Why is Audience Intelligence Important?

Undoubtedly, the perks of studying and analyzing audience behaviors are plenty. In general, when it comes to businesses, they’re able to conclude into actionable insights about their custom audiences.

More specifically, companies want to know exactly what their possible customers care about. Eventually, they’ll be able to use machine learning and social intelligence to make beneficial business decisions for their content strategy.

With the right data sources and professional handling of analytics, indexes, and metrics, any business can deploy audience intelligence for:

More efficient marketing campaigns
A stronger connection between brands and customers
Future consumer behavior prediction
Effective influencer identification

A point often overlooked is that digital marketing has become a highly complicated and competitive field today. In a digital world where anything goes and everything is moving rapidly, the best approach for most companies is obvious.

Several brands use audience intelligence platforms to help them connect or even reconnect with their audience targets. That is to say a clever way of knowing how to introduce or rebrand themselves. In truth, they gather data insights and plan their marketing efforts according to what these people find important or interesting.

In order for their marketing campaigns to succeed, brands need to decide early on to whom they’re addressing their message. The depth and range of most social media platforms are endless.

As a result, the saturation of social media often steals your clout or drives you off the trends in a heartbeat. Valuable insights will lead you to the correct audience demographics. In time, you’ll know exactly whom you’re targeting and how to win them over.

When you know who you’re working for, you can start creating stronger connections with the person that consumes your content. Stronger relationships with consumer personas lead to an increase in your CLV (Customer Lifetime Value).

This important metric is the total worth to a business of a customer over the whole period of their relationship. The importance lies in the fact that it’s much more expensive to go after a new audience than work to keep your current one.

The process of creating, studying, analyzing, and deploying audience profiles has evolved past the world of advertising. Actually, nowadays, it’s mostly used for companies to predict the future behavior of their audience based on their social data.

Influencer identification is the last addition to the perks of audience intelligence. Sooner or later companies end up using analytics tools to help them find the right influencers for their brand.

Based on the characteristics and online friends of each customer, the AI-powered systems of analytics platforms create a list. This list shows each company what influencers are most likely to catch the eye of their target audience.

What are the Use Cases of Audience Intelligence?

Audience intelligence is a vital practice for many industries.

In fact, it doesn’t matter what industry a company belongs to. It’s safe to say that audience intelligence is currently a necessity for their social marketing game.

With this in mind, let’s see what are the use cases of audience intelligence:

Audience segmentation
Audience identification
Influencer identification
Social demographic segmentation
Social media targeting

If you’re wondering why and how these use cases are affected by audience intelligence, then you’re lucky. We’re about to dive into each one of them.

Use Case #1: Audience segmentation

It’s not always beneficial for a brand to create content according to the popular voice of the time. Especially for small and medium businesses, this approach doesn’t help individual brands to stand out or find loyal customers.

In order to avoid centering their marketing efforts toward a wider and less targeted audience, companies turn to audience segmentation. To put it differently, breaking down your audience into small and distinct segments helps you acquire personalized insights for them.

Clustering audiences into groups of ages, genders, regions, and job titles, helps you easily extract niche insights about them. In fact, if you’d take a look at each segment’s behavioral and psychographic details, you’d understand who these people are.

What do they like to talk about? Who are they following? How do they tend to navigate online?

Cracking the code and answering these questions will get you to understand preferences, motivations, and communication tendencies.

Thereafter, your marketing strategy should include reading case studies written by audience intelligence experts. Not only theoretically reading about them, but also studying specific brands and how they cater to each audience segment.

Successfully breaking down your audience into sub-communities lets you create audience passion networks. This helps you separate potential customers based on personal interests like fashion, films, sports, etc. Subsequently, this information will be helpful when you’re choosing influencers, brand advertising, or product-creating ideas.

Use Case #2: Audience identification

The analysis of sub-communities and audience passion networks allows you to discover the people that are behind the buyer personas.

What language do they speak when talking about your brand? What geographical area are they logging in from? Are they morning or night online surfers?

Based on online affinities, social demographics, and digital behaviors, audience intelligence helps companies identify the members of their audience targets.

Once you’re done creating detailed audience profiles, you’ll be able to reach them and keep them interested. Whether it’ll be with a personalized ad or a targeted campaign on a specific marketing platform, your audience will listen.

With society being as divided and socially active as today, it’s a good marketer’s job to listen to their customers. Do they follow certain activists? Do they support specific causes?

Successful social marketing flourishes in this type of media consumption. For example, your potential audience cares about marriage equality. Are you working for a company that supports this cause? If so, pitch a relevant content strategy for your next campaign.

Moreover, when the specific audience still consists of many consumers, artificial intelligence helps with social media marketing. In fact, social media monitoring tools offer businesses quick results about reporting accounts that are mentioning them online.

By comparing characteristics and acquaintances, your marketing team will be able to find the right leads for the brand.

By all means, the increase in more relevant and loyal customers offers higher conversion rates and impressive ROI results.

Use Case #3: Influencer identification

It’s important to realize that there are certain individuals who have a greater impact on shaping people’s ideas and habits. In today’s digital landscape, those people are called influencers.

In general, influencers are defined as social media accounts with over 10,000 followers. These followers tend to care about popular accounts’ opinions and shopping tendencies much more than other people’s thoughts.

Hence, influencer suggestions are a widespread marketing technique that’s been used over the past few years.

Influencers can be already established celebrities, such as actors and musicians. However, over the past decade, there are several social media accounts that are rising to fame with their online content. For example, a Youtuber can be as valuable of a marketing asset as any actor today.

Furthermore, lately, you can spot micro-influencer accounts over Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, etc. These online personas haven’t built a worldwide name for themselves, but they tend to curate meticulous feeds. Surprisingly, a micro-influencer with a niche and passionate following is the ideal solution for promoting a smaller brand to consumers.

You need to ask yourself:

Who are the right influencers for your brand?
How do they tend to interact with your target audience?
What’s the impact of their social posts?

Audience intelligence will help you understand your audiences and find the right accounts to influence them positively over your products.

In any case, social media tracker tools can help you with influencer identification.

For example, Mentionlytics offers users a specific Influencer Report option that finds accounts that talk about your marketing interests online. Subsequently, the system can rank these accounts by popularity, so you can find the best option for your brand.

Use Case #4: Social demographic segmentation

Having a crystal clear image of their audience is priceless for brands. What kind of people and what type of consumers does their target audience consist of?

When you’re done with audience segmentation and identification, audience intelligence platforms proceed to social demographic segmentation.

What does that mean exactly?

It means that by analyzing their audience profiles, you get to learn details about your potential consumers:

Age
Gender
Location
Education status
Income

The demographic dataset that falls into your hands is an effective way to go big on your buyer persona analysis. Hence, you can create a deeper understanding of what makes your specific audience unique.

What makes them different from other audience segments? Also, is there something that your possible customers have in common? Maybe you can use this information for your next inclusive marketing campaign or a bonding user experience.

Undoubtedly, building a culturally relevant awareness of your brand audience is going to set you apart from other marketers. By doing that you can let consumer segmentation leave the marketing realm and move further into your company’s strategy.

Use Case #5: Social media targeting

So you’ve settled on your target audience.

Who are they? How do they behave online? Where do they spend most of their time? What do they talk about?

By knowing exactly who your target users are brands can perform more targeted social media marketing campaigns.

Moreover, audience insights will help you create more accurate and focused social marketing strategies for every specific audience segment. You may need to use different methodologies for each segment and social channel to create more buzz for your brand.

Consumer insights help companies create buyer personas not only for their established and undiscovered audience but also for competitors. Eventually, knowing what type of content to share and what issues to remove helps brands improve the general user experience.

Given these points, it’s no wonder that audience intelligence is weaponized by marketing and research industry managers. Audience analysis provides clients with fast, accurate, and cheap consumer insights and advice.

If you’re wondering which platforms offer audience intelligence solutions, read below, where we’re suggesting 8 analytics tools to help you.

Tool #1: Mentionlytics

First up on the best audience intelligence tools list is Mentionlytics.

Mentionlytics is an all-in-one mention tracking tool that provides users with social media analytics and insights for their marketing strategy.

This digital marketing platform is a universally acclaimed AI-empowered web and social media monitoring tool. Operating with a fast social media monitoring software, Mentionlytics tracks your brand mentions. In fact, it offers a wide variety of social media platforms for its social listening services. Find out what’s being said about you on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, TikTok, Google Reviews, Reddit, and more.

How can Mentionlytics help with audience intelligence?

Mentionlytics promises quality and quantity of mentions and insights about your target audience, top mentioners, engagement, and other important metrics.

Its Social Intelligence Advisor’s (SIA) algorithms analyze social media mentions and transform this vast amount of data into valuable insights. In this case, SIA helps you find the right hashtags and channels to promote your brand to the right audience.

Mentionlytics offers multiple social media reports, one of them being the Influencer / Top Mentioners Report. In short, the Influencer Report scans the web to find every account talking about your brand or other relevant keywords. Then, you can rank the results by followers or by engagement to find influential accounts for your next campaigns.

Brand Example: Electra Hotels

A success story example of a client using Mentionlytics to up their audience game is the Electra Hotels case study. They started using Mentionlytics to improve their social presence and maintain their untarnished status in the hospitality field.

Their next big Valentine’s Day campaign resulted in a positive sentiment analysis increase of 46,3%. It was clear that their target audience liked the campaign and engaged with the brand quite well.

Subsequently, Mentionlytics helped Electra Hotels with engagement tips and social advice from SIA, Influencer reports, and compatible consumer leads monitoring. In detail, Mentionlytics tracked relevant keyword online conversations and identified accounts looking for recommendations and guidance in the hospitality sector.

Finally, total engagement increased by 22,4% and total brand mentions increased by 57,9% for the period studied.

Mentionlytics features

Ideal for audience segmentation, as well as influencer identification, Mentionlytics has a great number of promising features. Some of the most prevalent features are:

Social Intelligence Advisor (SIA), a feature that offers personalized tips to help you improve your audience targeting
Advanced Boolean search for result filtering via keywords and hashtag combinations with operators such as AND, NOT, and OR
Free social media report builder for customizable reports that consist of all the metrics and indexes you need
Simplified team collaboration, with real-time alerts, tags, labels, and task assignments
Review & competition monitoring and social media analytics
Intelligent sentiment analysis in 24 languages

Mentionlytics pricing

Mentionlytics has created 6 different pricing solutions to help you find your best match. The subscription plans are the following:

Basic ($49/month)
Essential ($99/month)
Advanced ($199/month)
Pro ($299/month)
Agency ($450+/month)
Enterprise ($950+/month)

You have the option to pay monthly or annually. The second option saves you 2 months from your total subscription.

Tool #2: Audiense

One of the most suitable options for the job is Audiense.

One of the best audience intelligence platforms, Audiense provides brands with actionable insights to help them plan successful targeting strategies. Audiense’s social media analytics platform offers users detailed audience segmentation tools.

Significantly, the tool analyzes the interconnectedness and potential of consumer segments to find the perfect target audience for your brand.

Audiense features

Audiense’s many intelligent features include:

Audience segmentation and identification
IBM Watson-powered personality insights
Audience targeting optimization for ads and campaigns improvement
Consumer insights revelation, like social demographics, online habits, buyer personas, and media consumption preferences
Communication improvement through personalized messaging based on each audience segment’s profiles
Twitter community insights and tailored audiences

Audiense pricing

Audiense has one of the few free audience intelligence providers, with a limited version of Twitter Marketing and Audience Insights. However, the tool’s social audience functionalities reach their full potential in one of their two offered subscription plans:

Twitter Marketing ($49/month)
Audience Insights ($1499/month)

Annual billing offers a 20% discount for the Twitter Marketing plan and a 50% discount for the Audience Insights plan.

Tool #3: Affinio

Affinio is an advanced digital marketing analytics platform that helps brands make the right data-driven business decisions.

Affinio is one of the most popular social audience intelligence platforms that use AI-powered technology to offer valuable data insights. In detail, customer data helps users identify the affinities, characteristics, and behavioral styles of a brand’s target audience.

Furthermore, automatically clustering your audience into relevant communities helps you find new undiscovered audiences. For instance, Affinio finds connections between consumers who follow the same accounts, share their location, use the same hashtags, etc.

Moreover, Affinio has been praised for its intuitive UI and dataset tracking speed. In a word, it’s one of the easiest audience data tools.

Affinio features

Affinio is a pioneer in audience intelligence and identification. Some of its main features include:

Audience segmentation
Social Intelligence
Report customizability and exporting
Competitor and follower analysis
Audience scalability and expansion
Customer profiling and persona development for audience targeting

Affinio pricing

Unfortunately, Affinio doesn’t provide pricing details for public viewing.

However, if you’re interested in the platform, you can contact the Affinio team to get details on their subscription models.

Tool #4: SparkToro

The next item on the list is SparkToro’s high-quality audience research capability.

SparkToro is a software company that wants to democratize market and audience research. Certainly, their affordable pricing and basic audience intelligence functionalities make SparkToro a great solution for beginners and inexperienced data analysts.

SparkToro is known for its ease of use and effortless report running. Basically, users can plug in their query filters and get detailed audience insights in a heartbeat. The platform aims to respond to important questions about your audience, like what:

Topics they frequently talk about
Words they use in their profile
Social accounts they follow
Websites they frequently visit
Hashtags they frequently use

SparkToro features

SparkToro’s exciting audience intelligence features include:

Audience research
Market research
Behavioral insights
Intuitive user interface
Direct access to contact information for quick outreach
Ability to export your customer data into .CSV files

SparkToro pricing

Although there’s a free option available, mostly for testing the platform’s functionalities, SparkToro offers its tools via subscription. The pricing plans are as follows:

Basic ($38/month)
Standard ($112/month)
Agency ($225/month)

Annual billing saves you 3 months of subscription.

Tool #5: Brandwatch

Our next pick is a universally acclaimed tool. In fact, Brandwatch identifies as the world’s pioneering digital consumer intelligence platform.

To clarify, this AI-powered social listening tool helps marketers understand their target audience and market better. As a globally growing customer data software company, Brandwatch has expanded its platform with six different products:

Consumer Research (for brand & market intelligence)
Audiences (for audience intelligence)
BuzzSumo (for marketing intelligence)
Vizia (for intelligent reporting)
Reviews (for product intelligence)
Falcon.io (for social media management)

In detail, Brandwatch’s audience intelligence platform lets users build accurate audiences by using filters, like demographics, location, affinities, and connections.

Brandwatch features

Some of the main audience intelligent features of Brandwatch include:

Brand and crisis management
Market research
Consumer research
Audience analysis
Trend analysis
Competitor monitoring

Brandwatch pricing

At the present time, Brandwatch has not provided its web visitors with pricing information for the services it offers.

However, according to TrustRadius, Brandwatch has 2 pricing editions, from $800 to $3,000. Moreover, a free trial of Brandwatch is also available.

In order to learn more about the subscription plans and additional costs of the tool, you have to contact the Brandwatch team.

Tool #6: Pulsar

The next option, Pulsar’s audience intelligence platform offers upgraded social data insights.

Above all, Pulsar goes deep in artificial intelligence analysis. To clarify, the social listening platform does perform basic functionalities, like keyword and social media monitoring and text mining. Nevertheless, its main focus lies in target audience building and monitoring content distribution.

Pulsar’s premium data sources help brands improve their social audience game by analyzing behavioral patterns and finding undiscovered marketing opportunities.

Pulsar features

Since Pulsar focuses most of its functionalities on audience intelligence, the tool comes with some cool features, like:

Social listening and audience insights
Network analysis
Social panels building by audience segmentation
Advanced profile filtering
Top audience community identification
Influencer identification

Pulsar pricing

Surprisingly, Pulsar doesn’t provide its audience with pricing information for its services

However, according to TrustRadius, Pulsar’s starter package costs $1,200.

In order to learn more about the subscription plans of the platform, you have to contact the Pulsar team.

Tool #7: Zoomph

Another impressive audience intelligence tool for our list is going to be Zoomph.

Zoomph’s platform aims to measure the value of the online world while improving the digital marketing strategy of its clients.

In fact, the tool provides solutions for two platforms. On one hand, they deal with media valuation. On the other hand, they focus on consumer insights.

The premium dataset they use promises successful business decisions that derive from image logo and brand name detection. At this point, the previous process of PR clipping has become automated audience behavior and social media monitoring.

Zoomph features

While half of Zoomph’s functionalities focus on media consumption and value, there are many consumer research features, like:

Consumer insights
350M+ social profiles for audience understanding
Unique audience building
Audience segment benchmark
Customizable industry reports
Sponsorship value measuring

Zoomph pricing

Unfortunately, Zoomph doesn’t provide visitors with pricing information for its services.

If you want more details about the tool’s initial and additional costs, you can contact the Zoomph team.

Tool #8: BuzzSumo

Lastly, our final suggestion is BuzzSumo, one of the largest indexes of social data.

BuzzSumo is an all-in-one content strategy marketing tool that measures your content performance and offers valuable insights for presence improvement. Not to mention that the results are coming fast and effortlessly.

Furthermore, BuzzSumo is a content research tool as well. To clarify, it’s not known for deeply analyzing and understanding each audience segment. However, it’s more than sufficient if you want to build custom audiences fast, based on shared content across the web.

For example, you can perform a query for the term “media consumption”. Firstly, you’d be able to view articles that mention it. Secondly, you’d find people who shared those articles on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Thus, a new custom audience would be built.

BuzzSumo features

While the platform offers some fun functionalities, like specific keyword discovery for audience targeting, BuzzSumo’s main features include:

Influencer identification
Advanced brand monitoring
Competitor intelligence
Blogger search engine
Content discovery
API extension

BuzzSumo pricing

Although BuzzSumo offers a free limited option, most cool features are included in one of its 3 subscription plans:

Pro ($99/month)
Plus ($179/month)
Large ($299/month)

Annual billing will save you 20%.

Now Over to You

All in all, these are audience intelligence’s most prominent features and use cases. If you’re looking for consumer insights for your company, there are many suggested analytics platforms you can check out.

Have more questions? Book a live demo with Mentionlytics to let our specialists explain how our audience intelligence software works for your brand.

Originally posted on Mentionlytics: www.mentionlytics.com/blog/audience-intelligence/