Who is your audience? Not just "middle-aged women" or "college students in the South", but who are they on a deep-dive level?
When it comes to all of the possibilities Facebook allows for, it's not enough to build simple and/or hypothetical audience profiles. With all the data that's available, "middle-aged women" can easily be refined down to "females aged 44-64 who are middle-class, married, have a high school education, like The Notebook, and support Habitat for Humanity." Now you're starting to get somewhere.
Once you open up Facebook's ad tools, you'll start to realize how incredibly complex the options available to you are - and that's a good thing, as you no longer have to take a shot in the dark at guessing who your audience is. Instead, Facebook will tell you.
Now, of course, there's still a lot of testing that can be done to refine the data Facebook provides, but you can start from a more advanced level than your competitors if you know how to use the tools properly.
All that to say, today I'd like to share with you some key findings in a new report from Think With Google.
In "The Best Tools for Consumer Insights: Lessons from Google BrandLab," Google shared insights into three extremely valuable - and free - tools that many marketers and brand managers may not be aware of.
1. YouTube Analytics
Video view counts are nice, but they don't even come close to telling the entire story. With YouTube's analytics tools, however, you can look at "Audience Retention," among other things.
The Audience Retention feature allows you to view both "absolute" and "relative" audience retention percentages as graphs while you watch your video play in real-time. Using this tool, you can discover connections between what happens in the video and when your audience stops watching. This is an amazingly under-valued resource for video content creators.
2. Google Trends
With Google Trends, you can confirm or deny hypotheses about what your audience is interested in. Compare how two or more search terms are entered into Google over time. This can help give you an idea of what content you should be creating, as well as the SEO strategies that should be built into it.
3. Google Correlate
Third - and perhaps least well known - is Google Correlate, which can help you find searches that are similar to the trends you already know are popular with your audience. If you know, for example, that your audience likes recipes for meals that are easy to cook, you might enter the search term "easy recipes." Google Correlate would tell you that "garden recipes" has a 75% correlation, suggesting that people who are interested in "easy recipes" are also likely to be interested in "garden recipes," as well. There's a new blog or video idea for your website.
The post Hone In On Your Audience With These 3 Free Tools appeared first on BuzzPlant. Main image via Unsplah/Pixabay