Reach Your Target Customers with Audience Insights Research

Reaching your target customers effectively is a big part of marketing success. With Audience Insights, a new report in the SEMrush Traffic Analytics tool, you can pinpoint the most relevant media and connect with new users that none of your competitors has won over yet.

• Do You Know Your Audience Well Enough?
• Research Beyond the Audience Overlap
• 1. Choose the Platforms for Advertising and Media Placements
• 2. Identify Relevant Co-Marketing Partnerships
• 3. Research Your Competitors’ Audiences to Pursue Them and Get Ahead
• 4. Calculate Your Market Potential
• 5. Predict the Next Leader of Your Competition
• 6. Steal the Show with Well-Informed Remarketing

Do You Know Your Audience Well Enough?

It’s not the first advertising campaign of your career; it’s not your first partnership or guest blog either. However, you may find yourself wondering if it is the right placement and the right message that you deliver.

Because if it isn’t, it’s your campaign that won’t deliver.

Research Beyond the Audience Overlap

To fuel your performance, SEMrush Traffic Analytics introduced its Audience Overlap feature some time ago. Initially, it showed you the percentage and the absolute number of users that visited both of the entered websites.

Now the tool can provide you with more.

The new Audience Insights report has replaced the Audience Overlap tab and now starts with a refined chart that shows you the volumes of shared and unique audience for the websites of your choice.

If you’ve used Audience Overlap before, then you already know that it’s one of those rare cases when you can enter your own website into SEMrush Traffic Analytics and gain smart insights.

The Audience Insights report applies to researching your own website’s visitors as well as those of any other site. Now you can:

• See a list of websites with a similar audience in your chosen category;
• Turn on the Safe Mode to filter out all the adult sites;
• Compare shared and unique audiences;
• Analyze your competitive segment and multiple intersections between rivals in a comprehensible chart.

Here are six different ways you can use this new report to get actionable insights:

1. Choose the Platforms for Advertising and Media Placements

Enter your own website and those of your potential publishers to reveal which social media, blogs, and online publications your potential customers consume.

Depending on your goals, you can:

• Opt for placement in the media with the biggest share of the unique audience — this way, you get a chance to broaden your reach
• Choose the media that you share most of the audience with — to create an additional touchpoint with your potential customers.

Filter Audiences by Categories

Here, we are applying the Audience Insights filters to find some media that are in the same category as Marketing Land and SmartInsights and share most of the audience. And voilà, we have several more options to consider for media placement.

2. Identify Relevant Co-Marketing Partnerships

In a similar way, you can find a partner that will help you acquire a completely new audience or one to support your middle-of-the-funnel activity.

3. Research Your Competitors’ Audiences to Pursue Them and Get Ahead

So, there is this competitor against whom you fight for the same target customers. Does the audience really consider you both, or did you manage to differentiate, and the actual overlap is not that significant? You may want to:

• Monitor how the audience overlap changes to be aware of the user flow that starts to consider your competitors;
• Research audience insights in a scoping study before launching a product or entering a market.

Such immediate data on the current state of the competition can also help you to:

4. Calculate Your Market Potential

Take an example of project management software services. The chart reveals how huge Trello’s audience is, and that it’s mostly different from the rest of the competitors: the overlap doesn’t exceed 1.8% with Asana.

However, in absolute numbers, the shared audience counts in 368K users. This means that if Asana were interested in poaching potential customers from Trello, there would be a huge user base to pursue.

Alternatively, you can look at the volume of Trello’s unique audience — 14M users  — and set this number as a benchmark of the target market you could potentially reach.

5. Predict the Next Leader of Your Competition

It would be nice to see your company at the head of the competition, but for that, you need to stay aware of where the real threat may come from.

In the segment of home decor e-commerces, the fiercest rivalry appears to evolve between Joss & Main and World Market. Their websites share an unbeatable 13% of the audience, and some of these users can be expected to become customers of just one of the online stores.

The ultimate decision may depend on which of the websites set their remarketing intelligently.

6. Steal the Show with Well-Informed Remarketing

Get a list of websites that your competitors’ audiences also visit and follow them on those media with your ads or promo assets.

Audience Insights can help you better understand potential customers’ interests and values and hone the message that will resonate with them.

Connect with Your Potential Customers Effectively
Capitalize on Knowledge of Audience Insights