Decoding demographics: Best audience insights tools for maximum reach 

Are you tired of guessing your audience’s preferences and the keys to a successful marketing campaign? Imagine having a crystal ball that reveals exactly what makes your audience tick. That’s precisely what audience insight tools do. 

These tools enable you to uncover trends and audience interests, allowing you to run well-targeted campaigns that propel your business forward. With audience insights tools, you gain a competitive advantage, ensuring you hit the bull’s eye with every piece of content you produce. 

Dive into this comprehensive guide to learn everything you need to know about audience insights tools. 

What is an audience insights tool? 

An audience insights tool helps businesses understand finer details about their target audience. These tools can provide insights into the target audience’s unique characteristics, interests, customer journey, specific behaviors, overall demographics, and psychology. 

Popular audience insights tools like Birdeye, Meta Insights, Google Insights, Semrush, and BuzzSumo enable you to analyze specific user groups.

The best audience insights for your business depend on your marketing campaign needs, business objectives, budget, and more. 

Why are audience insights tools essential for businesses in 2024? 

Audience insights tools help businesses go beyond the basic demographics and explore aspects like customer buying behavior, interests, brand loyalty, content preferences, and values, to name a few. 

How well you know your audience determines the success of your marketing campaigns. Unfortunately, most marketers don’t go beyond the basics, such as age, gender, employment status, etc. 

With audience insights tools, businesses can:

1. Develop accurate buyer personas
2. Segment the target audience base 
3. Create tailored and impactful content 
4. Gauge customer sentiment 
5. Develop an effective advertising strategy 

Let’s explore these benefits of audience insights tools in detail. 

Develop accurate buyer personas

With audience insights tools, you can uncover detailed information about your customers. While most marketers rely on basic demographic data like age, gender, or employment status for their campaigns, understanding deeper aspects can enhance effectiveness. 

Knowing which brands your target audience prefers, how they discover products, and what drives their purchasing decisions allows businesses to craft more targeted and compelling marketing strategies. 

Additionally, audience insights tools can provide information on customers’ beliefs, values, lifestyle preferences, cultural insights, etc., enhancing the depth of your marketing approach. 

Segment the target audience base 

How you sell the same product to someone in Texas vs. someone in New York will differ considerably. Segmenting the customer base by interests, buying habits, and customer journey can improve branding, ad targeting, and content strategy. 

Audience insights tools make segmentation easier by helping businesses gather in-depth information about potential customers. 

Create tailored and impactful content 

In addition to applying the segmentation and buyer personas to your content marketing strategy, audience insights tools can help businesses: 

1. Choose the right social media platform for each campaign 
2. Identify the influencers you can work with based on affinities and loyalties uncovered in the insights 
3. Discover niche audiences and the content they prefer to see from businesses 
4. Identify best-performing content across various marketing channels to replicate the results 

Gauge customer sentiment 

Audience insights tools not only reveal detailed nuances but also enhance your business strategy with big-picture data. For instance, sentiment analysis helps you gauge how a specific customer base feels about your business. 

Audience insights tools allow you to analyze customer reviews, social media mentions, surveys, and other feedback channels to gauge the prevailing sentiment. 

Develop an effective advertising strategy

Social media managers often start by optimizing the target audience for the campaign to run impactful ads without overspending. Most rely on existing, well-performing campaigns to guide them or experiment.

However, with audience insights tools, you can accurately identify the target base that will likely engage with your campaigns across all social media platforms. 

Knowing who your audience is and what they like considerably improves targeting and reduces the cost per click for social media advertising campaigns. 

Types of audience insights tools 

Broadly, there are two types of audience insight tools that businesses can employ to understand their target audience better: 

• Primary audience insights tools that help you gather information directly from customers via reviews, interviews, and surveys. 
• Secondary audience insights tools that help you understand your audience via third-party tools by analyzing user behavior on Google, social media platforms, and other channels. 

Understanding these tools’ role in audience analysis can help you choose the right one for your business. Let’s explore these tools in detail. 

Primary audience insights tools 

With heightened data privacy regulations, it is becoming increasingly difficult for businesses to track user behavior across social media and other websites. That is why investing in first-party audience insights tools is the way to go. 

Collect and analyze customer feedback using review management tools, survey builders, feedback management systems, and social listening tools. These tools can help you gather sentiment, customer needs, and overall purchase behavior. 

Secondary audience insights tools 

You can collect detailed information about your audience from social media platforms without violating data privacy regulations. Social media audience insights tools can tell you a lot about your target audience based on:

• What they post online publicly
• How they interact with branded content 
• The pages and influencers they follow 
• The communities they are a part of 

Top 7 audience insights tools for businesses in 2024 

To thrive in a competitive market, your business needs every advantage it can get. Using audience insights tools allows you to understand your audience intimately and deliver personalized campaigns that effectively engage them. 

The top seven audience insights tools to explore are:

1. Birdeye 
2. Facebook audience insights
3. Instagram audience insights 
4. Google insights 
5. Semrush audience insights 
6. LinkedIn insights
7. Pinterest insights 

Let’s get into the details. 

Birdeye 

Taking the lead in first-party audience insights, Birdeye helps businesses understand their target audience better by:

• Analyzing customer reviews across Google, Facebook, G2, and other niche-specific review sites 
• Allowing you to gauge customer sentiment with AI-generated review summaries 
• Gathering customer feedback with custom-built surveys that measure NPS, CSAT, and provide AI-generated survey summaries 
• Tracking feedback trends across custom metrics 
• Monitoring custom social media feeds to track customer comments, mentions, and tags on your business accounts. 
• Measuring social media metrics for each account across post likes, followers, best-performing posts, etc. 

Birdeye is one of the premier audience insights tools for gathering first-party data. It helps you understand what your existing customers feel about your brand, the purchase experience, and the overall product. 

With this information, you can devise marketing strategies, improve customer experience, and streamline processes in your customer service. 

First-party data from Birdeye can also help you predict trends, modify brand positioning, and accurately target potential customers.

Learn how Orange Fish Consulting deployed the audience insights from Birdeye to understand market conditions, analyze trends, gauge customer sentiment, and understand buying behavior.

View the case study now!

Facebook insights

Birdeye’s survey on social media usage for multi-location businesses shows that almost 90% of businesses consider Facebook one of the most important social media platforms for their mission. 

Facebook provides access to a broader demographic base, has diverse ad targeting options, and remains a top-rated social media channel for news, entertainment, and more. 

With the Facebook audience insights tool, businesses can gather information about their: 

• Saved audience (audience base grouped by shared interest, beliefs, and demographics)
• Lookalike audiences (audience base similar to the organic audience)
• Custom audience (audience base created from ad campaign results, social media activity, email addresses, or website visitors)

Meta discontinued the standalone Facebook audience insights tool and subsumed it with the overarching Meta audience insights tool. However, the tool’s role remains unchanged. 

How to use Facebook audience insights as an audience insights tool? 

Looking to understand more about your overall target audience or lead base from Facebook analytics for your campaign? Follow these steps: 

1. Go to your Meta business suite dashboard. 
2. Access the “Insights” tab. 
3. Click on “Audience” in the left column.
4. Now, choose the “Potential audience” option from the menu. Make sure you choose Facebook as the Meta dashboard displays both Instagram and Facebook audiences. 
5. Customize the audience based on age, gender, location, and interests. Narrow down as much as you can to improve ad targeting. 
6. Save the final list to use this audience for your advertising campaigns. 

This process helps businesses understand the demographics, interests (page interactions), location, and more. 

Instagram insights 

For businesses with a strong presence on Instagram, Instagram Insights is invaluable for understanding their social media audience. Similar to Facebook Insights, this tool is accessible through the Meta Business dashboard or your Instagram professional dashboard.

Some of the metrics that you can view and track with the Instagram audience Insights tool are:

Accounts reached

Accounts reached refers to the unique accounts that you reached with your content. In this section, you can see: 

• The age, gender, and location of these accounts
• Information on the accounts you reached via ads and promotional content
• Reach of top-performing content across different formats such as Posts, Reels, and Stories
• The distribution of followers vs non-followers in your reach 
• Impressions of all posts for a particular period
• What users did after visiting your profile, including website taps, business address interaction, call button taps, or email taps 

Engaged audience 

This section shows the unique accounts that interacted with your account and their associated demographic information, such as age, gender, and location. You can also see a breakdown of the following:

• Total followers gained in a period 
• Content shared by your account in the period 
• The distribution of followers vs. non-followers in your engaged audience 
• Most active times of your engaged audience 
• Individual engagement metrics of each post across images, videos, and Stories 

Best performing content 

Instagram enables businesses to identify their top-performing content from the Insights dashboard quickly. You can filter the posts by engagement to see what your audience explicitly interacts with. 

Analyzing this content can give you insights into Instagram audience behavior, their favorite content formats, most active times, the best time to post, and so on. 

How do you get Instagram audience insights? 

You can check audience insights for your business account from the Instagram mobile app with the following steps: 

1. Go to your Instagram profile 
2. Tap the hamburger icon
3. Next, tap the “Insights” tab 
4. Choose between the “Overview” section or individual posts for a detailed breakdown 

Google analytics 

If you use Google Analytics or Google Ads, the Google Insights tool is invaluable for gathering audience insights. Google uses its vast data from billions of internet user interactions to help you better understand your audience. 

You can use Google Analytics as an audience insights tool with these steps: 

• Log in to the Google Analytics dashboard 
• Click on the “Audience” tab and “Overview” to learn more about your website visitors 
• Choose the metric you wish to explore from: “Demographics,” “Device usage,” “Interests,” “Bounce rate,” “New vs. returning users,” “average session duration,” “page per session,” and so on 
• You can also build and analyze a custom audience from the “Audience definitions” tab in the Admin tab 

The AI-powered Insights finder tool can also help you learn more about the target audience that interacts with your Google Ads. This tool can help businesses uncover trends, understand the audience in detail, and discover new marketing strategies. 

With this tool, businesses can:

• Understand the top-performing audience base for their advertising campaigns with AI-powered insights 
• Deep dive into audience segments with a detailed buyer personas table 
• Identify the top-performing advertising assets for performance max, demand gen, search, and video ads 
• Determine how well a particular audience segment connects to your campaign/asset compared to the overall user base 
• Discover suggestions for assets from your library that may perform better with your target audience

Note: Insights Finder is only available in select countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Mexico, Spain, Netherlands, and Turkey. 

Contact your Google representative to see if you’re eligible for the program.

Semrush audience insights 

Semrush is a popular SEO analytics tool. However, the tool can do much more. It can help you understand how your audiences interact with competitors, other businesses in allied industries, publications, and social media platforms. 

Here are the steps to use Semrush as an effective audience insights tool:

• Login to your Semrush account and choose the “Traffic Analytics” tab from the left-hand side menu 
• Enter your business website into the first tab as “Root domain 1”
• Semrush allows you to enter three more root domains to analyze audience behavior, demographics, interests, etc. 
• Choose competitor or partner domains to compare your audience with 
• You can also enter social media platform URLs to see which channel your audience favors the most 

Semrush traffic analytics can help you gauge audience behavior by interpreting web traffic statistics. This tool is valuable for businesses that want to dive deeper into their website audience. 

LinkedIn insights 

B2B companies with an active LinkedIn base must utilize LinkedIn analytics as an effective audience insights tool. 

LinkedIn analytics help businesses understand the location, job function, designation, industry, age, gender, and other similar attributes of their audience. 

These pieces of information can help businesses deliver targeted, well-designed, and impactful campaigns across other channels. 

Access audience insights from LinkedIn with the following steps: 

• Login to your LinkedIn account 
• Navigate to the Company page
• Next, click on “Manage Page”
• Now, click “Analytics” from the top navigation bar 
• Choose “Followers” to access insights from LinkedIn 

You can also get audience insights from the LinkedIn Ads Manager by creating custom audiences within the platform dashboard. To do this:

• Go to the Campaign Manager dashboard
• Next, create a new audience group by clicking the “Create” button 
• Choose from “Matched audience” (created from company contacts and member accounts that have interacted with your content) or “Saved audience” (custom audience from preset attributes) 
• Next, go to Plan—> Audiences to get insights. This will show content recommendations and audience details for your business account 

Pinterest insights 

Pinterest is a powerful social media platform for businesses targeting Gen Z and millennial customers, especially in the B2C sector. This channel is particularly popular for providing keen insights to its customers, especially with its Pinterest trends tool. 

However, you can also use the Pinterest analytics tool to learn more about your Pinterest audience. Businesses can measure metrics such as audience size, language, gender, age, location, interests, shared boards, and brands. 

Access follower insights with the following steps:

• Go to Pinterest analytics 
• Select “People you reach” and go to “All audiences”
• Next, choose “Your followers” to access insights for your business 
• To know more about the overall Pinterest audience, switch to the “All Pinterest users” tab 

You can export the audience insights into a CSV file or use them to create a Pinterest advertising campaign. 

Related read: How to grow followers on Pinterest: 25 proven strategies for 2024 

Five ways to make the most of audience insight tools 

Understanding audience insights tools is crucial, but it’s equally important to know how to maximize their effectiveness. 

Here are five powerful ways to utilize these tools to enhance your business operations: 

1. Know what your audience wants: Take the guesswork out of your campaign research and transform the information from audience insights into actionable buyer personas. Develop specific and accurate buyer personas that go beyond the demographics. Level up by understanding customer purchase behavior, social media usage, and brand affinities. 

2. Streamline content marketing: Know the best social media platforms, content formats, and posting times for your business to develop effective content marketing strategies. 

3. Improve advertising efficiency: Improve ad targeting, optimize ROI, and increase conversion rates by creating specific audiences for each social media platform. 

4. Boost online reputation: Pick out top-performing keywords and most-mentioned topics for your business, streamlining reputation management. 

5. Analyze competitors: Monitor your competitors across social media platforms to develop impactful campaigns and improve brand positioning. 

Know your audience to take your brand to the next level 

Are you looking to enhance the impact of your campaigns and increase engagement on your organic content? It’s time to understand the target audience on a deeper level. 

Rather than taking shots in the dark, let audience insights tools guide your content, design, and strategy decisions. This will ensure that your audience finds your content more easily and gets the answers to the most pressing questions. 

Frequently asked questions about audience insight tools 

Unlock powerful audience insights for your business with Birdeye 

Growing a multi-location business is hard, especially when you have to cater to wider target audiences. That’s why it’s important to invest in a holistic, omnichannel audience insights tool like Birdeye. 

With Birdeye, you can collect customer feedback from surveys, reviews, social media inboxes, and webchat under one dashboard. This way, you can access summaries and insights without constantly switching tools. 

Manage reputation, customer experience, and social media marketing with Birdeye and level up your marketing campaigns today! 

Watch the free demo to know more!