How to use audience profiling for a more effective marketing strategy?

What is audience profiling?

Audience profiling, or audience profiling, consists of qualifying a target population with socio-demographic data, centers of interest, affinities, or consumer behavior. Audience profiling is based on a set of techniques that make it possible to get to know an audience better.

Audience profiling is particularly useful in marketing, since knowing your target is what allows you to better know your customers or consumers, and thus adapt offers and communication strategy.

Profiling can take the form of an overall analysis of the audience, the definition of segments (“personae” types), or even a more in-depth knowledge of its customers on an individual basis.

The different types of audience profiling for marketing

If the principle of audience profiling is clear – getting to know a target of customers or consumers better – different tools can be used to perform profiling. The techniques vary, and the possibilities they offer in terms of marketing use cases can be very different.

Social listening

Social listening consists of capturing data from conversations on social platforms (social networks, forums) by focusing on specific communities, themes or brand campaigns. This makes it possible to trace associations between subjects, to evaluate the tone of conversations around these subjects, and thus to better understand the centers of interest of a target.

Social listening thus allows another form of profiling, consisting in better understanding the centers of interest and the content on which an audience expresses itself.

Examples of use cases in marketing are:

• the definition of an editorial communication plan, with the content to be produced, the events to be favored in the editorial calendar
• the choice of subjects or territories of expression for a brand
• the choice of partners with which a brand can associate within the framework of co-branding operations
• identification of the most powerful media or influencers to reach the brand target

Profiling using Facebook data

Facebook has one of the largest databases in the world with over 2.9 billion monthly active users (Q3 2021 data). Already, in 2015, researchers from Cambridge and Stanford had built an algorithm to better understand the personality of an Internet user than his family or friends, simply from the “likes” of his profile on the social network.

Thus, Facebook offers one of the most powerful profiling tools. It is possible to use it to make an in-depth analysis of your audience or a segment of your audience.

Then, two axes of analysis are combined in order to generate insights on the profile of the target: by looking in absolute terms at the criteria for which the interest of the target is very marked, and by comparing the audience analyzed with a reference audience (e.g. “national” Facebook audience).

Socio-demographic profiling of first party data, thanks to open data

If the profiling solution based on Facebook data is very powerful, it has the disadvantage of not allowing the enrichment of first party data: it allows you to create an average profile on an audience or a segment of the audience, but not a granularity to the individual. This is a powerful solution to better understand your target, but it does not allow you to know each individual better, for example to personalize a campaign.

A solution allows you to do this: Family Square. Starting from a postal address, this solution from the Dékuple group uses the richness of INSEE data, linked to an ultra-precise geographical breakdown (up to the square of 200m by 200m, which includes 40 households, on average). The variety of data provided by INSEE is very important, and makes it possible to classify individuals into “geotypes” according to their address. These geotypes provide information on income level, household size, housing type and area, etc.

Better understand its customers to adapt its communication and marketing strategy

Audience profiling enabled by social listening tools or profiling using Facebook data provides better overall knowledge of a population.

• In the case of social listening, it is an approach by conversation topics, allowing, by “capillarity”, to identify topics related to the target, and to define the tone of the conversations.
• In the case of analysis based on Facebook data, this involves defining the main profiles (personae) within an audience.

In both cases, profiling should help inform the brand about the marketing and communication strategies to adopt.

Here are some examples of marketing uses:

• Refine a brand territory according to the roughness of the audiences and the positioning of competitors
  Segment and know your prospects by proposing and defining personas
• Adapt media planning, targeting and broadcast formats using factual and tangible data
• Identify the most aspirational subjects of your targets and the best media outlets
• Define an editorial schedule to build a customer relationship through relevant content

Enrich its first party data to optimize the relevance of its PRM and CRM communication

The audience profiling enabled by the Family Square solution is different, since it allows you to go further by enriching a company’s contact database (prospects or customers). The level of granularity of this profiling is on the individual, and not on a global audience. In other words, Family Square profiling makes it possible to enrich a brand’s first party data.

By also using the DataMatch repository (more than 30 million contacts), it is also possible to start from an email address to carry out this profiling and this data enrichment.

The uses of such profiling are very numerous for marketing departments:

Segment your prospect or customer base on other socio-demographic axes
Broaden your targeting to look-alikes (so-called “look alike” profiles) of your customers, or some of your customers (VIP, etc.)
Target the geographical areas where the lookalikes of your best customers are located.
Control your marketing expenses by using the best channels, those that perform best according to geotypes.