Improving Audience Analysis for Competitive Advantage

What exactly is audience analysis? It is important to discuss what audience analysis is, before discussing how AI improves the process. Customer (or audience) analysis is an essential part of market research. It is the process of identifying target customers, understanding the needs of the customer and improving the product and service to meet their needs.

Creating customer profiles is a crucial part of audience analysis. Businesses use customer profiles to better understand current and future customers and, in turn, increase sales while expanding their business. These profiles are created by conducting psychoanalysis of the buying criteria - i.e. the factors that persuade customers to make a purchase. For instance, for B2C customers, it is price, quality and reliability. While for B2B customers, buying criteria will be payment terms and delivery schedule.

Understanding customers through an audience analysis enables businesses to tailor their value proposition, identify new potential customers, invest in a more targeted marketing plan and develop a competitive advantage.

How Applying Artificial Intelligence Can Improve the Process?

An artificial intelligence tool improves the customer analysis process by expanding the depth of what marketers can find out. An excellent example is the customer profile - conventional customer analysis tools can paint customers into fairly broad personas. However, artificial intelligence can discover and create more nuanced personas that open up new niches for marketers, not seen before.

For example, an outdoor apparel retailer can use conventional customer analysis tools to divide customers into broad personas like ‘campers’ and ‘hikers’. But with AI, the outdoor apparel retailer can further divide the broad personas into ‘Glampers’ - customers who like luxurious goods for camping - and ‘Trail Techies’ - campers who love to use technology. The information allows the outdoor apparel retailer to develop new products and create targeted marketing campaigns that appeal to these new customers.

However, AI can do more than identify niche audiences - it can also predict how audiences will respond to marketing tactics. Marketers need to know how and if their target audience will respond to their message, and which medium is best suited to achieving their goals.

An artificial intelligence tool can give marketers even better insight into how customers respond to a certain marketing tactic. This additional insight allows marketers to develop more effective, targeted marketing campaigns, which guarantee better ROI.

The Benefits of Using AI in Customer Analysis

There are several advantages to be gained from AI in customer analysis, the first benefit is expense reduction. Whether it is a marketing firm or branch within a larger firm, operating expenses will fall. Therefore, firms will earn a competitive advantage over their peers because they can invest in marketing operations that generate value at a lower cost than ever before.

Investing in AI for customer analysis also leads to new products and services. This happens because marketers have an easier time discovering new niches within their target audience.

Furthermore, marketers can also track changing audience preferences over time, so organisations can tweak their products and services to better reflect what the consumer is going through.

This better understanding is crucial because making a change to an image of a well-established brand is risky and can lead to serious blowback if an organisation misjudges its audience. By contrast, better understanding the customer can generate more interest in a brand to keep audiences interested.

However, it is not just the discovery of new products and services, it is also about making a customer's life more convenient. An excellent example is Volvo’s use of an AI detection program that informs customers when they need to take their car in for servicing. The artificial intelligence tool could predict which part of the car needs servicing and alert owners before there is any permanent damage.

Artificial Intelligence Tool - An Asset in Marketing

An artificial intelligence tool is a tremendous asset in marketing. The practice of promoting goods and services, as well as building a brand can be done more efficiently with AI because the technology can perform the work of several people. The market for AI is growing rapidly, with a value of $38 billion in 2025.

At the end of the day, this immense growth is due to the fact that AI can be used in different areas connected to marketing like data analysis, automated assistance and conversion intelligence.