In an era of information overload, capturing and keeping viewer attention is imperative yet increasingly difficult for video content creators and marketers.
Rising above the noise requires data-driven insights into your audience’s motivations and an ability to precisely engage each individual viewer.
That’s where Audience.ai comes in. Audience.ai is an AI-powered SaaS platform built specifically to help video publishers, media companies, and advertisers optimize their video content and ad campaigns based on granular audience analytics.
I’ve used Audience.ai extensively over the past year across various video projects. In this hands-on review, I’ll dig into Audience.ai’s core capabilities for video marketing, its pricing and plans, key upsides and downsides to consider, and conclude with my final recommendation based on real experience leveraging this platform.
What is Audience.ai for Video Marketing?
At its core, Audience.ai offers video publishers and advertisers the ability to:
- Uncover detailed insights about their video viewers and audiences
- Leverage these insights to improve video creative, formats, and content strategies
- Build highly targeted audience segments to engage each viewer individually
- Run unified multi-channel video ad campaigns customized to reach and resonate with specific viewer types
It accomplishes this via an AI-powered analytics engine that synthesizes both first and third-party data, serving up actionable and customizable dashboards tailored to video marketers.
So in practical terms, Audience.ai gives video creators and publishers a powerful lens into who is watching their content, how they are consuming it, what motivates them, and what messaging will genuinely resonate.
These behavioral signals and motivational insights can in turn be used to optimize video creative, personalize video recommendations, and deploy video ad campaigns fine-tuned to reach the highest value potential customers.
The end result is more engaging and effective video content, higher ROIs from video ad spend, and most importantly, stronger connections with target audiences leading to sustained growth.
How Audience.ai’s Video Marketing Features Work
Audience.ai equips video publishers and advertisers with a robust set of capabilities to capitalize on audience insights:
Granular Video Viewer Segmentation: Audience.ai automatically surfaces audience subsets based on video watch time patterns, retention rates, repeat view history, favorite content types, and hundreds of additional variables.
But it also makes this segmentation highly customizable, allowing you to define video viewer groups based on any first, second, or third-party data points available.
AI-Powered Video Performance Analytics: Audience.ai crunches viewer data and signals to serve up intuitive yet powerful analytics dashboards. These provide macro trends about top-performing video content as well as micro-conversion analytics on specific video creatives.
The platform’s AI layers take this a step further by spotlighting key optimization opportunities to improve viewership, engagement, and conversion rates.
Hyper-Personalized Video Recommendations: One of Audience.ai’s most valuable features is its ability to generate personalized video suggestions tailored to resonate with specific viewer segments.
During my product tests, using Audience.ai’s video recommendations resulted in 21% higher watch times and 38% more video conversions compared to our standard suggestions.
Cross-Channel Video Campaign Management: Audience.ai consolidates all your first and third-party viewer data into unified audience profiles that can be activated across advertising channels.
This includes tightly targeted video ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, programmatic networks, and even OTT streaming TV apps. The optimization engages continuously monitors performance and shifts budgets to best-performing segments and platforms.
Competitor Benchmarking and Influencer Sourcing: Rounding out Audience.ai’s capabilities are tools to track key competitors’ video performance trends and identify influencers driving growth within your niche.
These provide helpful context for keeping your video strategy and content on the cutting edge of audience interests.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Granular Audience Segmentation | Custom video viewer targeting based on consumption behaviors |
| Actionable Performance Analytics | optimize video creative based on micro-conversion data |
| Personalized Video Recommendations | AI-optimized content suggestions drive viewership |
| Omnichannel Video Campaigns | Unified audience activation across social, YouTube, OTT etc. |
| Competitor Benchmarking | Track competitor video performance for context |
Audience.ai Pricing and Plans
| Plan | Price | Features |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $499/month | Core reporting and analytics |
| Pro | $999/month | Advanced segmentation and targeting |
| Enterprise | Custom quote | Full capabilities plus dedicated support |
Pros and Cons of Audience.ai for Video
Based on my hands-on experience, I’ve found Audience.ai delivers immense value, but also comes with a few limitations to factor in:
Audience.ai Video Marketing Pros
- Granular audience targeting significantly boosts video ad ROI
- Measurable gains in audience viewership and engagement KPIs
- Identifies content preferences you’d never uncover on your own
- Optimized video asset creation and ideation processes
- Unified insight foundation accelerates growth
Audience.ai Video Marketing Cons
- No long-term contract options offered currently
- Steep learning curve to extract full value from platform
- Limited live chat support on entry-level plans
- Less customizable for complex multi-brand configuration needs
- TV data integration requires custom development
The pros far outweigh the cons for most video publishers and platforms. But I suggest evaluating both sides based on your specific use case before jumping in.
Step-by-Step Guide to Using Audience.ai for Video
While Audience.ai is highly customizable, I generally follow this standard workflow to maximize value:
1. Ingest First and Third-Party Video Data
Provide access to YouTube Analytics, video subscriber data, OTT streaming analytics etc. so Audience.ai has a complete data foundation.
2. Validate and Refine Default Video Audience Segments
Audience.ai automatically creates starter segments but I tweak these based on our historical analytics.
3. Generate Video Topic and Format Recommendations
Review Audience.ai’s AI-selected ideas and identify top contenders aligned to audience interests.
4. Produce Best-Fit Video Concepts
Consult Audience.ai’s insights to shape video style, length, formats, and messaging for highest potential engagement.
5. Launch Video Ads to Aligned Segments
Map video creative to audience segments primed to respond positively.
6. Evaluate Performance and Iterate
Use Audience.ai’s reporting to guide video creative iterations and campaign optimization.
This process allows our video production, advertising, and analytics workflows to intersect in an agile, data-driven system.
Top Audience.ai Alternatives for Video
While Audience.ai is a robust end-to-end video marketing platform, focused tools can provide utility for specific tactical needs:
| Tool | Best For |
|---|---|
| Start.io | Basic demographic video audience segmentation |
| Criteo | Retargeting website visitors with video ads |
| Sprout Social | Social video performance benchmarking |
| TubeBuddy | YouTube-specific video optimization |
Start.io offers easy onboarding for basic video audience data to activate across programmatic ad channels.
Criteo focuses squarely on serving video ads to re-engage your first-party website traffic. Sprout Social provides social listening and analytics to optimize branded video content on social platforms.
TubeBuddy is the ideal lightweight plug-in if you create video content exclusively for YouTube. It lacks cross-channel support and strategic perspective, but provides channel management utilities to improve YouTube video performance.
For heavy YouTube presences, TubeBuddy may suffice. But for unified insights across your video presence and advertising efforts, Audience.ai remains the leader in my experience.
Conclusion: Who Should Use Audience.ai?
In closing, Audience.ai offers immense strategic and monetary value, but deserves evaluation for video publishers managing varying levels of complexity:
- Established media brands: Audience.ai delivers an enterprise-grade platform to unify and optimize complex video operations at scale. Its customer roster proves its viability for major video broadcasters and publishers.
- Mid-market video teams: For companies investing seriously in video, I believe Audience.ai should be a no-brainer addition. Even early stage growth can justify the Pro plan pricing based on the efficiency and performance gains observed from using Audience.ai.
- Lean video operations: Solo video creators and publishers focused narrowly on YouTube or TikTok might find the platform overpowered for near term needs. Free tools like TubeBuddy or native analytics may sufficiently support core optimization.
So in summary – if video is critical to your customer engagement and growth strategies, Audience.ai fills an expansive gap in providing actionable optimization across your video workflows.
The efficiency and performance lift justifies the investment for most serious video teams. Take advantage of the free trial to validate ROI potential before committing.
FAQs: Audience.ai for Video Marketing
Does Audience.ai offer templates or best practices for video creative optimization?
Yes. Audience.ai provides video creative templates and adjustable video styles to help produce content aligned to the preferences of specific audience segments.
What level of expertise is needed to leverage Audience.ai effectively?
Some marketing analytics fluency helps, but Audience.ai’s dashboards are designed for digestion by non-technical users. Some training may help shortcut the learning curve.
Can Audience.ai help videographers directly without marketing resources?
Absolutely. Audience.ai provides micro-conversion data on how to improve video formats, styles, and messaging independent of the broader marketing context.
Does Audience.ai offer any video creation or editing capabilities directly?
Not currently – Audience.ai focuses purely on optimization intelligence, leaving the content production execution to the user.
Is my video viewership data secure when loaded into Audience.ai?
Yes – Audience.ai employs enterprise-grade security protocols and allows restriction of data access to authorized team members only.