How to Interpret TikTok's New Audience Insights for Growth
TikTok’s Audience Insights can give you a better understanding of your core customers, audience reach, and marketing strategy.
The tool, which builds upon TikTok’s general Analytics (showing view count, shares, best time of day to post, etc.)—is located in TikTok Ads Manager and provides data from active users over the past 30 days.
Brands can define audiences via traditional filters like location, language, age, and other demographics. TikTok’s psychographic features are also illuminating—allowing marketers to sub-filter based on how users interact with ads, hashtags, creators, interests (both users’ top and bottom interests), and videos. You can even filter by device operating system, including iOS versus Android, what version someone is using, and its price range. Additionally, Audience Insights allows you to select a custom audience where you can target anything from engagement, lead generation, business accounts, or website traffic.
Understanding your audience segments more holistically (i.e. their other “groupings,” interests, top hashtags, etc.) can help your brand to branch out to new and nearby audiences. For example, if you’re in the jewelry business and see part of your core audience also follows beauty hashtags, you may want to start to play around with hashtags, creators, and general content targeted towards beauty-lovers. This is a great way to try to scale your reach because you have some data backing your experimentation.
How to Interpret Audience Insights for Growth on TikTok
There are several key ways to interpret your Audience Insights for growth on TikTok.
Utilize data during the planning stages of a new campaign.What does your current audience look like? What are they interested in and why? How do they engage with your brand and with other TikTok profiles? Understanding your audience can help you create some “target personas” (i.e. a fictitious character that represents your target customer based on characteristics and behaviors). This research can help you build content and customer experiences that most align with your top consumers.
Consider top hashtags and interest categories to help your content reach specific audiences—both loyal and new.
Explore audiences beyond your go-to target. If you see any filters standing out in your data (specific interests, locations, etc.), experiment by intentionally targeting them and then analyze how your test performs. You may be surprised to find a whole subset of followers who would love to engage further with your brand.
Remember, marketing is both a science and an art, and marrying these two together is a key to brand success.
