Audience Curation Vs. Audience Resolution: Understanding the Differences
In the competitive and modern business world, being digitally savvy with marketing tactics is more important than ever. In marketing, it’s important to understand how to effectively target specific audiences, and with that comes a lot of terminology that can be confusing at times. Don’t fret, however, because we’re here to shed some knowledge on two terms that can often be used interchangeably, when in fact, they’re quite different.
Let’s take a deep dive into two concepts: audience curation and audience resolution. These are both tools and processes used to enhance customer satisfaction and enhance ad personalization, leading to increased customer satisfaction and engagement. They are two different concepts that are worth exploring.
What is audience curation?
Audience curation, which is also referred to as consumer audience curation or customer audience curation, pertains to the technique of using specific characteristics to organize an audience or target group. Curating an audience requires first-party audience data partners to analyze and understand certain details about your company’s ideal customers, including their behaviors, demographics, interests, preferences, etc. By doing so, your business can create personalized experiences that are carefully tailored toward your ideal audience or target group.
Audience curation is an important process used by many different types of companies in various industries. From marketing to entertainment, it is an essential step to make sure that your business or organization’s marketing strategies and content creation are going to effectively target and interact with your ideal customers. Curating consumer audiences will lead to better brand awareness, customer loyalty, and a better return on investment.
6 Steps to Curating a Consumer Audience
1. Do Your Research
The first order of business is conducting your research. In this step, you need to research the market you are targeting, and lean into a first-party data partner to gather data so you can understand your ideal audience’s demographics, interests, preferences, etc.
2. Segment Your Audiences
Once you have your audience data, the next step is segmentation. This is where you divide the larger audience into smaller, more specific segments. You break these audiences down using their shared behaviors and characteristics. This will enable you to gear your marketing campaigns to resonate in a way that’s aligned with each segment’s commonalities.
3. Execute Your Creative
Content creation is a critical step in this process. Once you’ve segmented your audiences, it’s time to create content that resonates best with each (like email campaigns, display ads, videos, etc.). Be sure that the messaging around the products and services you offer is aligned with the motivations, wants, and needs of each customer segment. This is also where you choose which channels are best for each segment (E.g., social, email, video, etc.)
4. A/B Test
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a marketing technique used to compare two different versions of a webpage, advertisement, email, or any other marketing element to determine which one performs better. It is a controlled experiment where two variants, A and B, are presented to different segments of an audience, and their responses are measured to identify which variant produces the desired outcome. Be sure to A/B test your creative content to determine what messages and initiatives work best with your audience segments.
5. Monitor Feedback
Be sure to engage with your audiences through various channels. This could be through customer support, social media, or surveys. This is the best way to gain feedback on what resonated best with your audience profiles. Doing this will help you build upon your learnings to improve future marketing efforts in the future.
6. Update and Improve Your Marketing Campaigns
The last step is ongoing when it comes to curating consumer audiences. After you’ve completed the five steps above, it’s essential that you continue to measure, review, update, and improve your audience segments and your creative content for each. Pay attention to new data that you are gathering and the market trends relevant to your curated audiences, as well as their behaviors. This will ensure that you’re adapting your messaging and approach to streamline your future efforts in targeting each audience segment.
Overall, organizations curate audiences to better understand and target their ideal customers. It leads to greater levels of engagement, more meaningful reactions, and better results. Now let’s discover more about audience resolution and how it differs from audience curation.
What is audience resolution?
Audience resolution, also referred to as customer audience resolution or consumer audience resolution, differs from audience curation. This is because audience resolution brings more detailed information to the process. It’s a technology that allows website owners to identify their visitors even when these visitors don’t interact with the web content or complete any forms on a site.
This technology helps break down who the audience is, where they are visiting from, what their actions and behaviors are, and when they’re visiting the website. From there, you'll have all the tools needed to understand how to drive your business forward.
VisitIQ offers an innovative technology called ResolveID™, which uses a website ID tag to allow website owners to better understand the who, where, what, and when of their audiences, giving businesses and organizations an opportunity to remarket products and services to those who have already shown interest.
Let’s look further into the information that audience resolution technologies, like ResolveID™, offer to help businesses and organizations successfully engage with customers and reach next-level results.
Audience Resolution: “The Who”
Of course, a building block of audience resolution is helping you to define “the who” — but it's more than just the basics. With audience resolution, you can go many steps further in identifying your website visitors by also knowing in-depth information, such as demographic and psychographic information. In all, businesses have at their fingertips up to 500+ specific identifiers when it comes to their audiences, including email addresses, street addresses, and mobile ad IDs. Businesses will then be able to deliver custom messages wherever a customer is, on whatever device they’re using.
Audience Resolution: “The What”
There’s more to knowing that a customer has visited your website, where they’re located, and what device they’re using. Now it’s time to propel your marketing tactics forward by knowing what content they engaged with most at your website. Knowing "the what” of website visitors’ actions and behaviors will also better position you to have successful marketing campaigns. Audience resolution allows for better understanding of the exact pages on the site that were visited, as well as the products and services in which your website visitors showed the most interest. Knowing these details allows for more successful marketing efforts.
Audience Resolution: “The Where”
Using data provided by VisitIQ, you can identify the hot spots and cold zones around your customers. This enables you to figure out which geographic locations are best to target for your campaign and avoid wasting resources.
Audience Resolution: “The When”
Smart audience resolution allows businesses and organizations to fully understand the frequency and timing of visitor interactions. It shows exactly when potential customers visited the website, as well as how often. It also allows for insight into trends or patterns related to these visits. By knowing when customers are the most interested, businesses can market their campaigns to align with the perfect timing to reach their ideal customers.
Audience Resolution: “The How”
“The How” of audience resolution happens when you understand the following:
- In-depth demographic information of your audience, with up to 500+ identifiers.
- The exact pages on your website that were visited, as well as the products and services in which your website visitors showed the most interest.
- Which geographic locations are best to target for your campaign and avoid wasting resources.
- When potential customers visited the website, as well as how often.
Don’t be afraid to take the plunge and work with VisitIQ. We’ll help you use smart audience resolution tactics to peel back the covers on your website — and potential customers in the process.
Wrapping Up
To summarize the differences between the two concepts we outlined, audience curation allows you to select, organize, and understand customer segments based on their similarities. Audience resolution gives companies and organizations a more comprehensive understanding of who is visiting their website, their behavior and preferences, and when it happened — even when that website visitor hasn’t filled out a form.
While both concepts work to help marketers reach their ideal customer profiles, they do differ in their scope and capabilities. Knowing your ideal customer is more important than ever, and audience resolution takes targeting audiences to a whole new level of success.
