An audience strategy is a comprehensive plan for understanding, engaging, and growing your customer base. It goes beyond simple demographics to deeply understand the needs, motivations, and behaviours of different groups within your market.

In today's competitive landscape, an effective audience strategy is crucial for sustainable growth. It allows you to allocate resources more efficiently, tailor your offerings to specific customer needs, and identify new opportunities for expansion. Without a clear audience strategy, you risk wasting resources on ineffective marketing, developing products that don't resonate with customers, and missing out on potential growth areas.

Understanding your audience at a deeper level can drive business growth in several key ways:

• Product Development: Insights into customer needs can guide innovation and help prioritise features that truly matter to your audience.

• Marketing Efficiency: Tailored messaging and channel strategies based on audience insights can significantly improve marketing ROI.

• Customer Experience: A deeper understanding of your audience allows you to create more personalised and satisfying customer journeys.

• Market Expansion: Identifying underserved segments or emerging needs can reveal new growth opportunities.

By aligning your business strategies with genuine audience insights, you can make more informed decisions, reduce waste, and create sustainable competitive advantages.

Now+Next is an advanced audience strategy framework that goes beyond traditional segmentation methods. While traditional approaches often rely on static demographic or behavioural data, Now+Next focuses on understanding the underlying needs and motivations that drive customer behaviour.

Another key differentiator of Now+Next is its strategic orientation. It not only identifies current audience segments (Now) but also anticipates emerging opportunities (Next). This forward-looking approach, combined with its emphasis on actionable insights, enables businesses to develop strategies that address both immediate needs and future growth potential.

Now+Next also incorporates cutting-edge AI analysis and primary research methodologies, providing a more comprehensive and nuanced view of the audience landscape.

The Now+Next framework consists of several key components that work together to provide a comprehensive audience strategy. At its core are the four strategic audience territories:

• Now: Your current core audience actively engaged with your brand.

• Next: Emerging audience segments with high growth potential.

• Not Yet: Segments that aren't currently engaged but have future potential.

• Never: Segments unlikely to become customers.

Another crucial component is needs-based clustering, which uses advanced data analysis to group audiences based on their underlying motivations and category-related needs. This is complemented by the Opportunity Map, which aligns identified segments with specific business opportunities, providing a clear visualisation of growth potential. The framework also incorporates AI-powered analysis, which rapidly generates initial insights from vast amounts of online data.

Now+Next helps identify growth opportunities through its comprehensive audience analysis and unique Opportunity Map. By segmenting audiences based on their underlying needs and motivations, it reveals opportunities that may not be apparent through traditional demographic or behavioural analysis.

The Opportunity Map is a key component of Now+Next that explicitly links audience segments to specific growth strategies. It visualises how different types of opportunities—such as market penetration, product development, or expansion into new markets— align with the Now, Next, Not Yet, and Never segments.

The framework's focus on "Next" segments is also particularly valuable for identifying emerging trends and untapped market potential. By combining deep audience understanding with strategic business opportunities, Now+Next ensures that growth strategies are not just theoretical but are directly tied to actionable, audience-centric plans.

Needs-based clustering is a core component of the Now+Next approach. It involves grouping audiences based on their underlying motivations, desires, and pain points, rather than superficial characteristics like age or income. This method is rooted in the "Jobs to be Done" theory, which posits that customers "hire" products or services to fulfil specific needs or "jobs" in their lives.

This approach is crucial because:

• Predictive Power: Needs and motivations are often better predictors of future behaviour than past actions or demographic traits.

• Stability: While behaviours and preferences may change, underlying needs tend to remain more stable over time.

• Actionability: Understanding needs provides clear direction for product development, marketing messages, and customer experience improvements.

• Cross-Category Insights: Focusing on needs can reveal unexpected competitors or opportunities that transcend traditional category boundaries.

By centring segmentation on needs, businesses can develop more targeted, effective, and enduring strategies that resonate deeply with their audiences.

Now+Next leverages AI and machine learning to analyse vast amounts of online data, including social media posts, reviews, and forum discussions. This AI-powered approach offers several benefits:

• Rapid Insight Generation: AI can quickly process and analyse billions of online comments, ideas, and expressions to uncover patterns and trends.

• Complementary Data Source: AI-generated insights complement traditional research methods, providing a more comprehensive view of the audience landscape.

• Identification of Non-Obvious Patterns: Machine learning algorithms can detect subtle correlations and emerging trends that might be missed by human analysis alone.

For our Pro and Foundation Tiers, these AI-generated insights serve as a starting point for further analysis, providing rapid initial hypotheses about audience segments and their characteristics. These hypotheses are then validated and refined through expert analysis and primary research. This combination of AI-powered data mining and human expertise allows for a more comprehensive, nuanced understanding of audience segments.

Now+Next employs a diverse range of data sources to create a comprehensive understanding of audience segments. This includes AI-generated insights from online data, survey data from carefully designed questionnaires, transaction data reflecting actual customer behaviour, and social media data revealing real-time trends and affinities.

The integration of these varied data sources allows Now+Next to capture a holistic view of audience segments. The AI-powered analysis offers a foundational layer of insights by uncovering hidden patterns across billions of online interactions. Subject to which Now+Next tier you choose, survey data provides depth on attitudes and self-reported behaviours, transaction data adds objective information on purchasing patterns, and social data reveals cultural trends and emerging interests.

Now+Next achieves a balance between short-term results and long-term strategy through its unique framework:

• Now Audiences: Focusing on current core audiences allows for immediate optimisation and quick wins.

• Next Audiences: Identifying emerging high-potential segments prepares businesses for near-term growth opportunities.

• Not Yet Audiences: Recognising future potential allows for long-term planning and gradual engagement strategies.

• Never Audiences: Acknowledging segments unlikely to convert helps prevent wasted resources.

By providing insights into each of these audience territories, Now+Next enables businesses to allocate resources effectively across different time horizons. This approach ensures that organisations can drive immediate results while also building capabilities and positioning themselves for future growth opportunities.

Now+Next can be applied across various business functions to drive cohesive, customer-centric strategies. In marketing, these insights inform targeted messaging, channel selection, and campaign design for each segment. Product development teams can use the deep understanding of customer needs to guide innovation and feature prioritisation.

Customer experience teams can leverage segment profiles to personalise interactions and improve journey mapping. Sales strategies can be tailored to address the specific pain points and motivations of different segments. Even functions like HR can benefit, using audience insights to inform employer branding and recruitment strategies.

By applying Now+Next insights across these functions, businesses can ensure a consistent, audience-centric approach throughout the organisation, leading to more effective strategies and better business outcomes.