This content from: Small Business Marketing Blog - Strategies That Increase Sales

As business owners and salespeople, we’re always interested in learning more about our current and potential customers. Customer Insights help us craft more effective messaging, design products and services, and close more sales.

Twitter recently released Audience Insights, a new tool to help us learn more about our followers and those who interact with us on Twitter. In this post I’ll give you a quick overview of this new tool along with some ideas for using the data in Audience Insights to grow your business.

Getting Started with Audience Insights

Audience insights is available to all Twitter advertisers and analytics users. Start by logging to ads.twitter.com. From there, select ‘Audience Insights’ from the ‘Followers’ drop down.

You can also login to analytics.twitter.com and choose ‘Followers.’

Quick Note – You don’t have to be spending money on advertising to access audience insight, you just need an account. If you don’t have one already, you can sign up for a Twitter Ads account here.

The Audience Insights Dashboard

Once you’ve followed the steps above, you will see the Audience Insights Dashboard. The dashboard consists of 5 main sections or tabs:

• Overview
• Demographics
• Lifestyle
• Consumer Behavior
• Mobile Footprint

Each tab has a collection of aggregate data about your Twitter audience. You can also view data for the Twitter universe as a whole. For example, on the Demographics tab you can find:

• Gender breakdown
• Marital status
• Highest level of education completed
• Household income categories
• Home type
• Net worth
• Home value
• Countries and languages

I encourage you to look through all the tabs to find the data that is most relevant to your business.

Comparing Twitter Audiences

Have you ever wondered how your audience compares to Twitter users as a whole? You can easily flip back and forth between audiences using the dropdown at the top left of the page.

To view audience data side-by-side, click on the “+ Add comparison audience” link that is right below the dropdown.

How Sales Can Use Audience Insights

All this data is great, but how do we turn it into leads and sales? How you use the data will depend upon your business (and your imagination), but here are some ideas to get your started.

Advertising on Twitter

Naturally, Twitter wants you to use this data to invest your advertising budget with them. If Twitter advertising makes sense for your business, use your audience insights data to get the most bang for your buck. One way to do this is to create highly targeted ads. Rather than creating one ad campaign for all your target segments, consider creating several smaller campaigns. Customize each campaign for a particular target segment. Use the data from your audience insights to help you craft headlines and offers that speak to the needs of each segment.

By creating highly targeted ads, you should increase your conversion rates along with the ROI of your campaigns.

Test Your Messaging

Have you ever agonized over which headline to use in an ad? Or wondered which ad copy will be more effective? No, maybe that’s just a marketing thing <g>.

Twitter ads and Google Adwords can be a great way to test headlines and ads. They allow you to throw enough traffic at an ad in a relatively short amount of time, so you don’t have to wait forever for results. By using your audience insights, you can run your test for a particular audience. You may find that the message you use for your technology audience is effective for that audience, but falls flat with your business owner audience. Testing your messaging by audience is a great way to make sure you are connecting in a way that is meaningful to them.

This can also be a great technique for testing your 30 second commercial, tagline, or pain points.

Evaluating Your Audience Building Efforts

Reviewing your audience insights can also provide feedback on how well you are building your desired audience. For example, let’s say you want to target the technology industry. Upon reviewing your audience insights, you may learn that only 1% of your audience is interested in technology (Lifestyle | Interests). Now that you know that, you can begin to take steps to grow that part of your audience.

Review your audience insight data with your sales team, peer group, or master mind group. Using the example above, you may find that one of your team members does a great job of attracting people who are interested in technology. Learn from what they are doing. Find out who they follow, what types of things they posts, when they post, etc.

Finding the Right Channels

Your audience insights can also help you find the best places to find your prospects. If you advertise on TV, are you advertising during the types of shows your audience watches? Check out the interests section of your dashboard. Can you find magazines, websites, or other advertising channels that cater to the interest of your prospects?

Is your company considering developing a mobile app as part of their marketing plan? If so, make sure to review the data in the mobile footprint section of the dashboard before starting development.

Identifying Referral Partners and Co-Branding

Another powerful (and often overlooked) way to use data about your audiences interests to grow your business is to use that data to identify potential referral partners and co-branding opportunities. As an example, let’s say that in addition to the services you sell, your learn that your audience is also in outdoor sporting activities. You could then identify local businesses that provide products and service related to outdoor sports and approach them about joining your referral network.

Co-branding works in a similar way. You may distribute one another’s marketing materials, put both of your brands on a piece of marketing material, or you co-sponsor an event.

Wrapping Up

I hope this gives you some ideas on how you can use Twitter’s Audience Insights to grow your business. If you have any tips you’d like to share, please leave a comment below.

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