How to win and keep new clients using audience insights [key strategies and tactics]

Getting new clients and keeping the ones you have is super important for any agency — Obviously!

Securing new clients ensures a steady stream of revenue and growth opportunities, while retaining existing clients fosters long-term relationships and recurring income. Balancing these two is key to building a successful agency.

However, even experienced agency teams face challenges such as standing out in a crowded market, staying relevant to clients' changing needs, and clearly demonstrating their unique value. Additionally, with a diverse client base, they require unique strategies for each client.

Audience intelligence tools are proving to be invaluable for agencies in this context. By providing deep insights into client behaviors, preferences, and trends, these tools enable agencies to craft data-driven strategies, win pitches, and overcome challenges.

In this article, we will show you how to use audience intelligence tools to target more accurately, personalize your approach, and build stronger, longer-lasting client relationships.

Let's explore these strategies in detail.

4 key strategies to boost customer acquisition for agencies

As an agency aiming to boost customer acquisition, focusing on four key action areas is crucial. Below are some actionable questions for each area to help fine-tune your strategy. Audience intelligence tools can effectively tackle many of these questions.

1. Your value proposition 🪐 

Questions to consider:

• What specific problems do you solve, and for whom? 

• What are your unique strengths and differentiators compared to your agency competitors? 

• Is your value proposition simple, clear, and prominently displayed on your website and marketing materials? 
• How effectively do you communicate why potential clients should choose us over other agencies?

Leveraging Audience Intelligence:

Use audience intelligence to analyze the behaviors, preferences, and needs of your target audience. This helps craft a value proposition that is not only clear and compelling but also deeply resonant with your clients' expectations. By understanding what your potential clients value most, you can tailor your messaging to highlight your unique strengths and win more pitches.

2. Your existing customers 👑 

Questions to consider:

• How can you leverage testimonials and case studies from our existing clients to build credibility? 

• Do you have a referral program in place, and how effective is it at encouraging clients to refer others? 

• Are you segmenting your clients base in a data-driven way? 
• How do you propose unique strategies to your existing customers and use your customers' knowledge to carry out your assignments? 

Leveraging Audience Intelligence:

Leverage audience intelligence to turn your existing customers into powerful advocates. You can also use data-driven segmentation to understand and address the unique needs of different customer segments, making your proposition unique.  Finally, leveraging the knowledge and experience gained from your existing customers will help you develop personalized strategies and execute missions effectively.

[Using a tool like Soprism, agencies can import their own custom audiences or "lookalikes", previously built on Meta Business Manager. This enables them to discover who their customers really are, as well as potential customers, and to create targeted, relevant campaigns.]

3. Your online presence 💻 

Questions to consider:

• Is your website professional, user-friendly, and mobile-responsive? 

• Does your website clearly convey our value proposition and make it easy for potential clients to contact you? 

• Are you creating valuable content that addresses the pain points of our target audience? 

• How well-optimised is your website for search engines (SEO), and are you utilising Search Engine Marketing (SEM) effectively? 
• Are you maintaining active and engaging profiles on relevant social media platforms, and what type of content resonates most with your audience?

Leveraging Audience Intelligence:

Audience intelligence can transform your online presence by revealing exactly what your audience is looking for. Analyse visitors and prospects’s behaviour and preferences to ensure your website and content strategy meet future client needs. Once you've identified the content that addresses your target audience's pain points, audience intelligence then helps you to create quality content that matches their expectations. Furthermore,, it enables you to understand which social media content has the most impact (and which to prioritize), helping you to prioritize and create active, engaging content on the appropriate platforms.

[The Online habit tab in Audiense Insights helps agencies to identify on which device and content type to focus on. Agencies have a view on the relevance of social media compared to the chosen baseline.]

4. Your acquisition channels 🍻

Questions to consider:

• What industry events, conferences, and local business meetups can you attend to build relationships with potential clients? 

• Are there strategic partnerships you can form with businesses that complement our services? 

• How effectively are you using paid advertising channels like Google Ads, social media ads, and industry-specific platforms to reach our target audience?

•  Do you have an email marketing strategy to nurture leads and maintain engagement with potential clients? 
• How can you better target our ads and content to specific demographics that match our ideal client profile?

Leveraging Audience Intelligence:

Maximize your acquisition efforts with audience intelligence by Identifying the most valuable industry events, conferences, and local meetups to attend and influencers to collaborate with. Audience intelligence can also help pinpoint potential strategic partnerships and evaluate the effectiveness of your paid advertising channels. Develop a highly targeted and data-driven communication strategy to nurture leads and maintain engagement, ensuring your ads and content reach the right demographics and attract your ideal clients.

[The Media affinity tab in Audiense Insights helps agencies to identify the affinities between the target audience and the offlines/online media such as TV, radio, events but also everything digital such as online shows, apps, etc.]

Improve customer retention with audience intelligence - The secret sauce to keep them coming back for more!

Acquiring new customers is great, but keeping them for as long as possible is even better! To improve customer retention, in addition to the quality of the work delivered, it's essential that agencies make effective use of audience intelligence. Ready to take your client retention game to the next level with audience intelligence? 🚀

Continuous audience monitoring

Continuous audience monitoring is the key to understanding the evolving needs and preferences of your existing clients. By leveraging advanced Audiense intelligence tools, you can stay attuned to the shifting behaviors, interests, and pain points of your target audiences, enabling you to proactively adapt your strategies and maintain strong client relationships.

Hot fact 🔥 it only takes a few minutes to generate a complete set of insights using Audiense Insights or Soprism. You can get your insights quicker than you can drink a cup of coffee!

Personalized marketing campaigns

Personalised marketing campaigns are a powerful way to leverage audience insights and keep clients engaged. By analyzing data on their preferences, demographics, and past interactions, you can tailor campaigns that resonate deeply with each individual client. Highly personalized content, offers, and communication channels not only enhance the client experience but also demonstrate your commitment to understanding their unique needs. 

Case study: Agencies using personalized campaigns can have seen significant increases in client satisfaction, loyalty, and lifetime value.

“[Audiense] gives us real-time insights about our clients target groups without investing time & money in traditional market research. Thanks to the collected data we are able to refine our overall strategies from content to advertising plan.” From Sabina Gishvarova, Managing Director at Brand New Day Agency 

Agile and data-driven adjustments

But above all, audience intelligence enables agencies to quickly gather valuable insights and gauge the effectiveness of campaigns. This isn't just about graphs and data; it's about understanding the sentiment and impact driven by data-targeted strategies, allowing agencies to swiftly adapt and avoid wasting time and resources on ineffective efforts. By analyzing engagement metrics, you can quickly identify areas for improvement and make data-driven adjustments to meet or exceed customer expectations. This agile approach ensures that your strategies remain relevant, impactful and aligned with your customers' changing needs, fostering lasting partnerships based on trust and mutual success.

Actionable tools and strategies for agency teams

To unlock the full potential of audience intelligence for client acquisition and retention, agency teams must (well, I highly recommend it 🤓) adopt advanced tools and cultivate specialized skills. Investing in trustful audience intelligence platforms like the ones powered by Audiense can provide valuable insights into consumer behavior, preferences, and market trends. The beauty of all these "Audiense made" platforms is that they complement other solutions such as: 

1. Social Listening with Meltwater and/or Pulsar, 
2. Survey panels with GWI and/or Kantar, 
3. CRM with Hubspot and/or Salesforce and finally 
4. SEO solutions with Semrush

• Insights & Affinio: Both tools harness the power of social intelligence to discover authentic consumer segments based on real behaviors and affinities with brands, personalities and influencers. By analyzing the conversations, interactions and shared interests of consumers "in the wild", these tools offer a unique window onto the authentic passions and values that drive individuals across all social communities, enabling agencies to design campaigns that really resonate.
• Soprism: Agencies should take advantage of the unrivalled insights offered by Soprism, which leverages Meta, the world's leading source for digital audience analysis. Soprism harnesses vast data on global digital interactions, activities and engagements, giving agencies a holistic view of the digital footprint of their target audiences. From browsing habits and content preferences, to behavior outside social networks, Soprism enables agencies to identify and reach the most relevant and receptive audiences across different digital channels. We call it digital intelligence!
• Demand: In addition to social and digital intelligence, agencies could also master the power of demand intelligence, a cutting-edge solution developed in partnership with Audience Strategies, that monitors and analyzes multiple digital and social signals to uncover audiences' demand for talent, brands, and intellectual properties. By understanding the underlying desires and interests of their target audiences, agencies can strategically position their clients' offerings, creating campaigns that tap into these demands and drive meaningful engagement.

“We normally use the platform hand-in-hand with our existing social listening and third party audience survey tools (GWI, TGI), and find that the data and insights provided are complementary rather than overlapping”. From Sam Coates, former head of data and Analytics at Ogilvy UK

However, technology alone is not enough; agency teams must also prioritize skill development to effectively leverage these powerful tools. Key competencies to cultivate include data analysis, consumer psychology, and creative storytelling. Through comprehensive training programs and hands-on workshops, team members can hone their ability to interpret complex data sets, uncover actionable insights, and craft compelling narratives that resonate with target audiences.

To recap 

1st takeaway

Agencies must leverage every available advantage to acquire new clients and retain existing ones. Audience intelligence has emerged as a game-changer, providing agencies with deep insights into consumer behavior, preferences, and market trends. By embracing advanced tools like Audiense Insights, Soprism, and Demand, agency teams can unlock a wealth of data-driven strategies to supercharge their client acquisition and retention efforts.

2nd takeaway

The true power of audience intelligence lies not only in the tools themselves but also in the ability of agency teams to effectively harness and apply the insights they provide. By cultivating skills in data analysis, consumer psychology, and creative storytelling, agencies can transform complex data sets into compelling narratives that resonate deeply with their target audiences.

3rd takeaway

Agencies that will thrive are those that foster a culture of continuous improvement and learning, staying ahead of the curve by actively seeking out the latest developments in audience intelligence and integrating them into their client strategies. By combining cutting-edge tools, specialized skills, and a growth mindset, agencies can position themselves as industry leaders, delivering exceptional value and forging long-lasting relationships with their clients.

A final word 🙏

Audience intelligence represents a powerful ally for agencies, empowering them to acquire new clients, retain existing ones, and navigate the challenges of today while preparing for the opportunities of tomorrow.