Tools To Help Find And Target Your Personas

In the coming sections, you’ll hear from notable tech companies who specialize in some part of the audience development process. Enjoy.

SparkToro

Rand Fishkin, Founder

What Is SparkToro?

SparkToro is a market research tool that helps you find previously
impossible-to-get data about your audience: what they listen to, watch, read, follow, and pay attention to online. Instead of running inaccurate, time-consuming surveys or attempting to cyberstalk hundreds or thousands of individual customers, you can use SparkToro to get aggregated data crawled from social + web profiles about any online audience.

What Is The Company’s Story And Purpose?

SparkToro was founded by Casey Henry & me because we kept seeing founders, marketers, and consultants struggle with identifying the sources of influence for their audiences. Google and Facebook dominate the advertising market by hoarding all the data about online attention. We want to democratize that data — put it back in your hands — so you
can decide where, when, and how to spend your marketing efforts.

What Does SparkToro Do?

SparkToro crawls billions of web and social profiles, aggregates them, and then makes that data available for you to search across. Want to know which podcasts architects in Canada listen to? Which social accounts are most followed by people who talk about craft cocktails? What YouTube channels are watched by economists? We have the answers. Run a
SparkToro search and you can have the results in seconds.

Why Is SparkToro Important?

It sucks to spend weeks (or even months) researching your audience to discover what sources influence them, especially when that research is often biased, incomplete, or missing crucial data points. SparkToro is here to fill that gap and save you time, so you can be acting on leads
instead of researching them. We make this crucial data incredibly easy — describe your audience based on their behavior, the words they use to describe themselves, or what other sources they pay attention to, hit search, and SparkToro returns this data in easy-to-read lists sorted by the % of the audience that shares/engages-with/links-to/follows that source.

How Much Does SparkToro Cost?

Plans start at $150/month. We also offer a one-week, single, heavy-use package for $450.

Top Three Most Used Features?

1) Audience intelligence searches — lets you see the podcasts, YouTube channels, websites,
social accounts, and profile data about any given group.
2) Comparison searches — the overlap and differences between any two audiences
(separate buyer personas).
3) List building — custom lists of sources
that you can create and save-to for exporting, analysis, report-creation, and outreach.

Conclusion

We wanted to make this data, which is hard to get, easily digestible for anyone. My favorite feedback has come from folks who look through the results and say “Yes! This is exactly what/who influences my audience… And wow… I never knew or thought about these sources before.” That’s the “Aha!” moment we’re hoping to give everyone who tries the product.

Outreach.io

Maggie Reese, Partner Marketing Associate

What Is Outreach.io?

Outreach is the #1 Sales Engagement Platform that streamlines effective
playbooks, so teams can focus their time, effort, and attention on driving better customer engagement. Leading companies choose Outreach because it fits every workflow; is secure and scalable, and applies AI to power better
engagement and rep efficiency. By leveraging continuous learning and AI to
test insights, our platform allows users to take better actions and make smarter decisions. Outreach enables teams to stand out and connect with prospects and customers in meaningful ways.

What Does Outreach.io Do?

Teams use Outreach to take the stress out of follow-up. Our platform acts as your new assistant, sending reminders and follow-up on your behalf, so you can focus on nurturing customers. No more clicking through multiple tabs, with Outreach you can manage all your tasks and actions in one screen. Teams can generate revenue faster when they have a flying start.

Outreach allows you to enhance buyer experience by fostering collaboration across your sales, marketing, and customer success teams to create a seamless customer journey. Close the performance gap amongst your teams by implementing best practices to replicate success, so everyone performs like the very best. Our platform enables brands to keep
organizational messaging on point by ensuring your brand messaging stays
consistent – we do this using snippets and templates.

Why Is Outreach.io Important?

We utilize audience development to target personas, allowing your reps to make connections, build trustworthy relationships, and not just blast prospects with emails. Developing an audience is all about making connections and learning what will engage your audience versus
push them away. Outreach targeting of personas allows you to carefully choose specific sequences designed to engage your audience.

Conclusion

By utilizing Outreach reporting and data, you can better understand what methods are working with your audience. Learn when emails are being read and opened, and which communication channels are responded to, so you can learn how to better connect with your audience. Giving managers the insight to lock down the right messaging, timing, and extra
touches drives success. Outreach helps teams get better by giving them clear, specific actions to improve their performance. We capture engagement data (so teams don’t have to), giving you concrete insights for winning playbooks. If you’re ready to make your entire team more effective and drive performance at every stage of the sales cycle, visit the Outreach website to schedule a demo.

Dstillery

Christopher Lee Boon, SVP, Enterprise Solutions Group

What Does Dstillery Do?

Dstillery is a custom audience solutions company that empowers brands and their agencies to maximize the value of customer data and transform the way they connect with their audiences. Our Custom AI Audiences are derived from custom AI models that are built for each individual brand. Because Dstillery continuously rescores candidates in and out of audiences, our audiences are always up to date and deliver the ideal combination of accuracy and scale.

How Does Dstillery Contribute To Audience Development?

Distillery’s Custom AI audiences help brands better understand who their true customers are. We go far beyond basic market research to identify new pockets of potential consumers who align with campaign goals, even if that audience falls outside of a brand’s initial idea of who its “core” audience is.

Benefits Of Using Dstillery In An Organization

Dstillery audiences allow brands to reach existing customers with much more precision and accuracy than basic off-the-shelf audience tools. Dstillery goes far beyond basic age and demo details to build multi-faceted audiences that reflect how consumers really think and act. This lets brands target on a granular level, providing efficiency and improved campaign
performance.

Dstillery Audience Insight Report

Download the example Dstillery Luxury Market Audience Insights report.

Final Thoughts

Audience targeting is the key to modern advertising. Even as organizations make announcements about moving away from the use of cookies, advertising will rely on audience targeting strategies. Cookies remain the best way to reach audiences, right now, but advertisers should also explore other potential avenues as they prepare for a new post-cookie era. Dstillery can help these agencies and brands manage this transition, providing
best-in-class cookie targeting capabilities and the transitional tools to ensure audience targeting never lags.

Leadfeeder

Andy Culligan, CMO

What Is Leadfeeder?

Leadfeeder is a buyer intent data tool that turns anonymous web traffic into actionable data. Leadfeeder identifies the companies visiting your site, how they got there, their behavior, and their intent to purchase.

What Is The Company’s Story And Purpose?

Leadfeeder was founded by Pekka Koskinen, Herkko Kiljunen, Vicent Llongo in 2012. It all started when Pekka, Leadfeeder’s CEO, was helping his dad generate new leads for his business. Pekka was frustrated that companies were visiting his dad’s website, but not submitting the form. So, Pekka built Snoobi which was later sold to a telecoms company. Then, Leadfeeder was built based on the same expertise as Snoobi.

What Does Leadfeeder Do?

Leadfeeder unlocks buyer intent signals throughout your buyer’s journey. In this era, buyers control their own journey. Marketers need to identify and understand the true intent signals early on in the funnel before it’s too late to influence the buying cycle. But, by the time they interact with a sales rep, they’re already in the late stages.

Leadfeeder identifies a buyer’s first point of interest in your website. Then, tracks activity across your site. Based on these signals, marketers qualify the leads they are generating to send SQLs to their sales team. Sales teams can then connect using buyer intent signals in their outreach to convert
deals faster.

Why Is Leadfeeder Important?

Leadfeeder is lead generation 2.0. Here’s how lead generation looked before Leadfeeder:

Lead generation 2.0 takes your sales to the next level:

How Much Does Leadfeeder Cost?

We offer a 14-day free trial, paid plans start at $55/month.

Top Three Most Used Features?

  1. Filters: Users can filter their data by different attributes like prioritizing based on the number of visits, visit length, lead score, location, and many more.
  2. Imported Lists: Users can import lists to track targeted websites, seeing how often these sites are visiting their own website and where they are clicking.
  3. CRM Integrations: The Leadfeeder integrations with Salesforce and Pipedrive, to name but a few, are two-way. This is unique to Leadfeeder. Giving the user the most up-to-date lead information,
    every time.

Final Thoughts

Picture Simon without Garfunkel. Cher without Sonny. You can’t do it. Okay, you can. Those were bad examples. Likewise, you can’t picture sales
without marketing. And, you can’t picture your martech stack without Leadfeeder. Leadfeeder allows you to understand your prospect’s needs, pain points, and potential to purchase at every stage of the sales funnel.
identify and understand the true intent signals early on in the funnel before it’s too late to influence the buying cycle. But, by the time they interact with a sales rep, they’re already in the late stages.