[00:00:01] Speaker A: If your team is still treating audience research like a one time project, then you are leaving exponential growth on the table. The brands winning right now don't just do audience research, they continuously layer insights from every campaign conversation and click to execute audience first campaigns.
In this episode, you're going to hear how one skincare brand achieved amazing results with a single insight about zodiac signs and why a B2B SaaS brand's bold campaign worked so well it boosted branded search overnight. If you want your marketing to go from predictable to game changing, keep listening.
Hey everyone, I am Paxton Grace, CEO of 97th Floor.
97th Floor is a digital marketing agency built to deliver world class organic and paid channel strategies for mid level and enterprise organizations.
Thank you so much for joining us today for another episode of the Campaign.
The Campaign is a marketing podcast about better knowing your audience, innovating beyond best practice, and converting visitors into customers. You can find past episodes of the campaign on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify
[email protected] today we're joined by our very own Rachel Bascom. Rachel is the Head of content marketing at 97th floor, boasting over a decade of experience in the realm of digital marketing and a fervent dedication to crafting audience centric content strategies. In her tenure, Rachel has been a trailblazer in the development of the Content marketing department, playing an integral role in the transformative journey that has positioned 97th floor as a comprehensive, award winning, holistic digital marketing agency.
Beyond her professional pursuits, Rachel enjoys snowboarding, Taylor Swift and thanks to her upbringing in the uk, the sport she calls football.
This episode is all about shifting from audience research to an audience first approach, a mindset that compounds in value. Over time, we are going to cover why most marketers stop short in truly knowing their audience, how to mine insights you already have but aren't using real examples of how seemingly small audience discoveries can unlock whole new channels and creative strategies.
Stick around until the end because Rachel shares one of my favorite stories about a competitor event takeover that turned years of accumulated audience knowledge into massive win.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Okay, I am so excited to have Rachel on the show today. Rachel and I have been working together for over 12 years. 12 years, which is longer than school.
It's a long time that we've been working together and I'm really excited to talk with you Rachel. Your background is in college content and has been for at least 12 years.
So I'd love to start our conversation off by asking the question, what in your opinion is the biggest opportunity in marketing today as it pertains to Content.
[00:03:01] Speaker C: So the biggest, for me as it pertains to content, I think the biggest opportunity is for marketers to be more focused in their audience.
[00:03:14] Speaker B: Okay, what does that mean? To be focused in your audience?
[00:03:19] Speaker C: To know your audience intimately.
And that means knowing who they are, which is usually where people stop.
Knowing who they are, but more importantly what they're doing, where they are and what they need and what they want.
[00:03:37] Speaker B: What they're doing, where they are, what they need and what they want.
[00:03:40] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:03:41] Speaker B: Okay, I like that.
So I think the reason a lot of people get hung up on audience research is because it to, to know a person, just one is a lifetime, you know, pursuit.
To know a, a large market and group of people can, you know, I think for a lot of people it feels daunting.
So what would you like? How should people be thinking about what do I need to know about them? There's the obvious, as you mentioned, they often stop at who they are, which is the demographic data.
What should they be looking at? What pieces of information should they be looking at as they research an audience?
[00:04:22] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a good point. You can't know everything about a person. You can't know everything about every person that you are marketing to, but you can know where what they want intersects with what you can give them.
And so the most important things that you can know about your audience is what motivates them and what pain points they're dealing with, cross referenced with how you can help.
[00:04:53] Speaker B: So there's the like, should they be thinking about this from a product standpoint or can it go deeper than that? So for example, if I am selling cybersecurity software, obviously I need to know what my audience needs as it pertains to cybersecurity software.
Or are you talking deeper than that?
[00:05:15] Speaker C: I would say deeper.
I think that can be a pitfall of where people stop is you're thinking about your cybersecurity software and you know how amazing it is and you know you have this unique value that you can give.
And so you just want to push that to everybody possible and just talk about how great this feature is.
But if you don't know what that person who's working their 9 to 5 and has frustrations with certain things, even little things that become big things in their day to day job that they're just so frustrated with, or things that, that they, whether they know or not, would motivate them or make their job easier, those are the things that are going to help you to talk to them in a better way.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I'd love, like, could you share? I mean, I know you can. I would love for you to share like a story of like what this looks like in practice.
[00:06:15] Speaker C: Yeah, I have a pretty good B2C example actually.
We worked with a skincare company and they hadn't really done much performance marketing. They've been focusing on brand and they also had focused on a really, really narrow audience that they classified as a Gen Z influencer.
And that's how they thought of their audience.
It's we want Gen Z influencers.
And that wasn't really telling us much. And that was obviously a reason why it didn't make sense to focus on other marketing techniques because we didn't really know what they were doing or who was really buying the product and how they were interacting online.
And so we ended up taking a lot of their existing audience research. They had tons of market research that they had done like decks upon decks of insights and all of this stuff that they just really didn't know how to leverage in the right way. And I think that's common and that's a lot of invested, a lot that they've invested in these resources in this market research that they weren't really getting.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: Anything out of just sitting on a hard drive.
[00:07:36] Speaker C: Yeah. And so they gave it to us and we sorted through it and we supplemented it and we dove in and we instead of having our Gen Z influencer, we broke out their audience into five different audiences sorted by motivations. And so, you know, one was like sustainability motivated.
They were looking for sustainable skincare options. One was similar to the Gen Z influencer but more broad in that it was more like a trends focused. They were motivated by what's the newest trends.
One was like product focus. They would find their product and stick to it and do a lot of research about it and then once they found it, they would stick to it anyway. So that opened the door to a whole new strategy that incorporated social media advertising on social, expanded search.
Um, we even had more organic opportunities to create content for certain audiences.
And the results were just incredible and proof of concept, I think, and I will share those. But yeah, that was an example where they kind of had in their mind that like one demographic was who they were going to market to because they had seen some success in the past.
But upon diving in and focusing on the motivations rather than the demographics, we were able to open a whole new avenue, whole new channels of marketing that allowed us to increase their revenue.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: So what were some of the insights that the team gained and Then what do they do with, with that insight?
[00:09:31] Speaker C: Yeah, there was a lot. We worked with them for a long time. One example that springs to mind is we found that and it was similar to their Gen Z audience.
It was this trends focused audience were really into zodiac signs, zodiac content.
And so we ran a campaign around pairing products with your zodiac sign and it outperformed everything else that we were doing or that they were doing.
Incredible results. But it was just a small insight that we worked, that we actioned on and helped us to select the right channel to meet the audience and then also the exact right message to give the audience.
[00:10:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that story. And it's one that I know well. And the reason that I love is because it demonstrates an understanding of an audience beyond your product.
I think marketers have a bad habit of looking at this audience as just they only understand them in as much as they are potential buyers of my product or service and they don't care to understand them deeper than that. But if you can find these overlapping interests, in this case interest in zodiac signs among these different audiences, then you can reach them in a way they have. They're not used to being reached before. Like every other skincare company is talking about, here are the benefits of a product, here's a price break on our product.
And then we reached out and said zodiac signs and it caught their interest and is like something they hadn't ever heard before.
But it was thanks to looking at their broader interests that had nothing to do with skin care. But then we connected those dots afterwards, you know, so like we can see time and time again that like understanding an audience is the way that you generate game changing results.
Like that's what levels up companies is, is through understanding audience and giving something they haven't seen before.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: And yet.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: So many people are reluctant to spend time in or invest in audience research.
In your opinion, your experience, what is holding people back from diving deeper into audience?
[00:11:59] Speaker C: I think it's that I think they conflate audience first marketing with audience research itself.
Audience research is a tactic. It can in some cases get us to audience first marketing. In fact, it's pretty necessary in most cases.
But it's also something that a lot of companies have already done or they have access to on some level.
And so when you start talking about audience all of a sudden it's like, well, we're going to invest even more money on like audience research, do more surveys, do you know, do all this stuff when you already have so much already. And it's, it's more of a way to action it more effectively and get the most out of what you already have at your fingertips.
[00:12:49] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's this, like, big cost.
It's a mountain of time and effort.
And then even if I do it or I've already done it, now what do I do with that? So what's, what's the remedy?
What's the better way to look at it, would you say, versus, like, this big research and these big decks and then not actually doing anything with all that information?
[00:13:16] Speaker C: I think you have to approach it with that new mindset and say, okay, based on what we know, how do we reach our audience?
And then what gaps do we have? So we will map it out. We'll do customer journey mapping and map out everything we know about the audience and what their journey looks like and then say, oh, we actually have a gap here. We don't know what they're doing here or what they're feeling. And then that's when you can supplement your audience research. But that's much easier to do than just start from scratch again.
[00:13:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:54] Speaker C: So I would say your first step, whether you use that approach or a different approach, your first step is to look at the lay of the land and audit what you already have and see what you know about your audience and how you can action that.
[00:14:11] Speaker B: I love that.
It also seems like people can be doing this without it being an entirely separate job or entirely separate role.
You know, for example, at Nice and Floor, we've got SEO specialists and ad specialists, and we've got content specialists, account directors helping with strategy, and we've got designers putting together design. Who, in your opinion, who of those people should care about the audience?
[00:14:41] Speaker C: Everyone.
Yes.
[00:14:42] Speaker B: All of them. Yeah. It's like it's part of SEO, it's part of advertising, it's part of content, obviously, as part of design. Like, everyone should be learning about, caring about and trying to reach these audiences in new ways. Right.
[00:14:57] Speaker D: Content production exploded last year thanks to AI tools, and most brands jumped on board. More content meant more chances to rank. Right. Well, it's 2025 now and the game has changed dramatically. My name is Alondra Melo.
I'm a senior Enterprise SEO specialist at Nice and Floor. And right now, we're seeing reputable sites hit with serious penalties.
Google's quality guidelines are actively flagging unhelpful content, and some organizations are losing millions of monthly sessions.
Meanwhile, Google continues tightening crawl budgets across the board. And we don't even need to mention the impact of AI overviews. If your SEO efforts aren't delivering results despite investing in content, you're not alone. The solution may not be creating more content, but strategically consolidating what you already have.
Right now, I'm giving away the tools you need to complete the same content consolidation audit that we use for our very own clients.
This audit reveals what content to consolidate or optimize to support stronger rankings, a cleaner experience, and higher conversions on your site. When we ran this audit for a client with an exceptional social media presence but no search authority, we used the audit recommendations to increase organic revenue by 42%.
Everything you need to get started, including a video walkthrough, a Google Sheets template and a decision matrix, is linked in the show notes.
Get that heavy content out of your way and watch your site traffic grow. If you'd like help completing the audit on your site, you can get in touch with a marketing
[email protected] LetsTalk hey.
[00:16:20] Speaker E: Everyone, it's Emma Lammy here. I produce the campaign and today I'm bringing you the latest in marketing and AI news.
First up, Google just announced new advances in how they're fighting invalid traffic. That's ad activity that doesn't come from real humans with genuine intent. Think bots, click farms, or shady ad placements. This isn't a small issue. Invalid traffic eats into your budget, skews your performance data, and erodes trust in paid channels.
Now, Google's Ad Traffic Quality team, working with Google Research and DeepMind, has started using large language models to more accurately detect invalid behaviors. These models are now scanning app content, web pages, ad placements and user interactions in real time.
Google says this upgrade has already cut invalid traffic from deceptive ad practices by about 40%.
They're also doubling down on automated and manual checks, so advertisers aren't charged even if a bad click slips through.
If paid search and display ads are part of your growth engine, this move makes Google a safer bet, but it also raises the bar for the industry.
Expect AI driven fraud detection to become table stakes across all major ad platforms.
Next up, let's talk about a major shift in where ad dollars are going. According to new data from mdi, Primetime TV is no longer the powerhouse it once was.
In the past year, Linear TV primetime ad sales fell by $1.2 billion. Broadcast is down 2.5%, ca 4.3%.
Meanwhile, streaming picked up the slack and more, pulling in an additional 5 billion in ad sales. Now to be fair, Linear still has some big anchors. Sports remains its saving grace. NBC has the winter Olympics, the Super bowl, and just landed a new NBA deal for primetime. Fox has the World cup coming up, and these kind of events are helping traditional networks keep advertisers at the table. But the momentum is clear. Streaming is where brands are betting.
Netflix, for example, doubled its upfront commitments this year, driven by categories like retail, CPG and tech. And the hook isn't just bingeable series anymore. It's live events like WWE Raw and even two NFL games they'll broadcast on Christmas Day. So what's the big takeaway for cmos? Control has shifted. Viewers are dictating the terms of attention, and advertisers are following. Streaming offers flexibility, precise targeting, and premium content that feels closer to digital than traditional tv.
That said, streaming platforms aren't invincible. Ad supported tiers and fast channels are driving CPMs down, which means buyers have more leverage than they did a few years ago. For marketing leaders, the question is this Are you still treating linear TV as the centerpiece of your media mix, or are you planning around where the audience actually is? The dollars are already moving.
Finally, here's some fresh data to have on your radar. Buffer just analyzed more than 2 million Instagram posts from over 100,000 accounts. And the takeaway is clear the the more you post, the better your content performs. But let's unpack what more actually means.
According to the study, posting three to five times per week is the sweet spot. The cadence can double follower growth compared to just one or two posts a week, while also giving you about a 12% boost in reach per post. If you've got the bandwidth, going, up to even 6 to 9 or even 10 plus posts weekly can drive more growth.
But with diminishing returns and the risk of burnout or quality drop off. And here's a key Posting more doesn't hurt reach. In fact, the algorithm seems to reward consistency. Accounts posting 10 or more times per week saw roughly 24% higher reach per post compared to those posting just once or twice. Why does this matter? For marketing leaders, a few things stand out.
1 Consistency is a growth lever. Even modest increases in posting frequency deliver measurable games.
2. Silence is costly. Accounts that don't post at all actually see follower decline, what Buffer calls the no post penalty.
Third, quality still matters. Posting more only works if content maintains value, otherwise you risk eroding brand trust. So the question isn't just are we posting enough? It's do we have a sustainable content engine that lets us scale frequency without sacrificing quality? Because according to the numbers, consistency is one of the Most powerful growth levers left on Instagram. Now back to the show.
[00:20:35] Speaker A: Let's get into maybe a little bit.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: Of the tactical because again, great to say that everyone should be doing it, but what does that, what does it mean? Like, what can it mean in practice?
[00:20:49] Speaker C: You want an example?
[00:20:50] Speaker B: Sure, yeah. Yeah. Like what, what, what, what could they be doing? Like, somebody listening today, what could they go start doing right now to better understand their audience?
[00:20:59] Speaker C: I think back to my point about taking stock of what you already have.
That could be nothing.
We work with clients who are coming to us and they have like, maybe they're a startup and they have some funding and they're like, we need everything. Like, we, we're investing in marketing for the first time and we need to know who our audience is and where they are. And in that case, yeah, you might do a deep dive and say, all right, why do people like this product? Who are they? What else do they care about? Right.
But we also have a lot of cases where it's the situation that we just discussed where they've previously invested in a lot of audience research and they know a lot about it.
And even if you don't think you have, you probably have.
Right?
So, for example, audience research is not just market research. We did a bunch of surveys, we did, we did some focus groups and things like that. It might include that, but it could also be we have hours of sales conversations under our belts. We know what people care about, we know what they're talking to us about.
We have a product team. They know what people care about and why they want our product, whatever it is. We have a content team. They know what content people are engaging with. We've invested in SEO previously. We know what keywords people are engaging with.
So that's where you can start. What do we already know? And then what can we action to know even more, to build on it and know even more. So I think there's a difference. The reason I'm so clear about the difference between audience research and an audience first approach, I think if you're just thinking of it in terms of audience research, it's like a cyclical thing.
It's like every so often we'll do some more audience research and see what's, See what's poppin, see what's going on.
And that's just it. That's probably why people don't see value in it because it's just starting from scratch every time. It's like, you know, buying a whole new pantry of groceries every time you make A meal.
But if you have an audience first approach, it's cumulative so you can build on what you already know and keep learning and add to it and keep learning. And so you can look at your current SEO strategy and look at what topics people are engaging with and then say, here's a similar one, let's test this and see what happens. And then you're going to learn again, people really are engaging with that topic or actually no, they don't care about it at all. And then you have another piece to the puzzle of your aud.
And then when, if you're talking about paid advertising, like obviously those insights come a lot quicker. So.
[00:24:00] Speaker B: Yeah. Do you have any thoughts around how somebody should kind of store or record those pieces of the puzzle? Because I think a lot of marketers will develop a good understanding of their audience over time just by the nature of doing stuff and kind of seeing what works. And then silos start to develop of like this person really only knows this. And then if they leave, the company has to start over again.
Or a salesperson made learn this piece and the marketing person may learn this piece, but they don't really share that information.
And as a result the organization as a whole doesn't grow and learn.
You have thoughts about like some of the best ways to store that information.
[00:24:48] Speaker C: I mean the best way we could probably argue about, but I think the only way to your point is that you actually are doing it. I think you have to whatever way, whether it's a spreadsheet of the, where you keep track of all your learnings or a Google Doc or you could use AI now and have a dedicated GPT for your audience or for each audience or whatever it is, as long as you have somewhere where you're recording everything and revisiting and saying this worked. This didn't they like this, they don't like this.
I think that's, that's the most important thing. Yeah, I don't know if, I don't know if even I know the best way to do that.
[00:25:39] Speaker B: But yeah, I agree. I mean just having something and yeah, the custom GPT, I think that's going to be really big when it comes to audience research.
And just like the more, you know, you just keep dumping it into that custom GPT and then that should you be able to query it, you could run future marketing campaigns through it and kind of test it. Preliminary testing, you know.
[00:26:01] Speaker C: Yeah, it's exciting.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: I love that.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: So if somebody is not starting from scratch at a new company or reaching a new market and they have been doing this for a while, they've learned a little bit about this audience, but maybe they haven't started recording.
What, what could an audience focused approach look like to them? What, what could they hope to benefit from still doing this even though they kind of, they kind of do know this audience? What, what do they stand to gain by continually, continually pushing for the learning of this audience, recording and iterating and all that stuff?
[00:26:41] Speaker C: Yeah, as I mentioned, it's not a cycle, it's cumulative. So when you're at that stage, if you are thinking of it as that same old kind of audience research way, you're probably going to stay at a similar level the whole time because everything feels new. It's like, here's another insight and I'll act on it.
But if you're building up all of these learnings and these insights, then the results that you are seeing from them are also going to build.
I have an example of this, a client of ours, an observability Chronosphere.
Over the years we've done a lot of work with them, tried a lot of different tactics and learned so much about their audience, which is exciting and B2B because I think that's where sometimes we can fall into those firmographics and marketing to businesses as though that's a person.
But their audience is really niche and really unique and quirky.
And so over the years we really learned about what kinds of things they respond to.
And we advertised with certain messaging on typical B2B channels like LinkedIn.
But then we also tried out Reddit and talked to them in the way that they talk on Reddit and learned about what they're responding to there. We tested out creating a video game that they could play and like saw how they responded to that and that performed really well.
And then we learned that or we knew that events were really important for this audience.
And that also is something we hadn't always been able to take advantage of because some of those events were run by competitors, but because we knew that this audience might respond to sort of snarkier sort of messaging, they were okay with that. They were responding to that.
We were able to play with that. And so what we did was um, we used digital out of home and other out of home methods around the events run by their competitors, their competitor, one of them being Datadog.
And we ran messaging around the idea of ditch the dog and we plastered it on like airports, taxi tops, you know, we had put it all around that event that we knew that our audience would Be attending.
And it worked. We saw branded search increases, we saw increases of search for that term ditch the dog.
And that was all because we had built up that knowledge over the years of our audience that we knew that that was something that we could do.
And so a great example of how the results just get better the more that you can learn, right?
[00:29:45] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. The initial investment in audience research may yield like 10% improvement in results, but if you continue to push that, I mean, you can, your batting average for messaging and channel strategy goes way, way up over time. And that merits further investment into understanding and recording insights in that audience. Yeah, I love that. Okay, so Rachel, somebody today is listening and they're thinking, okay, I'm convinced of this new way of looking at audience understanding as being an ongoing, never ending exponential process rather than a big initial lift and then nothing.
What do I, what, what am I supposed to do? So, like, what tools would you recommend? Where would you point them? What sources of data should they be looking at to better understand their audience that maybe they don't? They're not, they haven't thought about yet.
[00:30:40] Speaker C: Well, you can reach out to us at 97. No, but there's a lot of tools that can use and I'm all about following rabbit holes. So where you've seen the most, the biggest insights. Look there. You know, I mentioned like what content people are engaging with or maybe you have ad campaigns and you've have insights about how they've performed.
We have other tools that we use internally.
We use SparkToro a lot to help us to see, learn more about our user behavior, where they are, what they're talking about. That's a great tool that we've used.
A lot of it is just like I said, using what you have and diving into analytics and seeing how people are engaging with our content, diving into Reddit. We have tools to also crawl Reddit activity or other platforms, but sometimes we just go in there and look and stalk our audience.
But it's. Yeah, it's all about following rabbit holes for me.
[00:31:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Have you played around with Gummy Search yet?
[00:31:51] Speaker C: I haven't, but I'm excited, so.
[00:31:54] Speaker B: Good. Gummy Search is a great tool for browsing Reddit en masse.
It's really, really good. Okay, Rachel, thank you so much for joining and sharing this today. I think the discussion is extremely important and is the differentiator between like, great marketing and just mediocre marketing.
And yet despite that, I think a lot of people still know that intuitively. But despite it, they just struggle for many different reasons to make that investment, but honestly, I think it will.
If you're looking to make it like a game changer in marketing, understanding your audience better and continually understanding them is going to be the difference between mediocre and great.
Rachel, what's the best way for our audience to connect with you?
[00:32:40] Speaker C: Find me on LinkedIn.
[00:32:41] Speaker B: Rachel Bascom Rachel Bascom on LinkedIn. Great. I love that.
Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure talking with you. Yeah, thank you for having me. Yeah.
[00:32:51] Speaker A: That's all for today everybody. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a five star rating and subscribe so that you don't miss future episodes. Big thank you to Rachel Bascom for joining us today. You can find her on LinkedIn if you want to talk with her more about audience first Marketing.
Rachel, in fact recently wrote a fantastic article about how to create high quality content that is audience focused. You can find the link to that article in the show notes. Go check that out. If you want more insight into how to apply your audience knowledge to create great marketing, you can find past episodes of the campaign and marketing tools and information at 97th floor.com.
also, you can learn more about the agency and get in touch with the marketing specialist if you want support for your own marketing campaigns.
That's it for now. Thank you for listening. We'll see you back here next week. Until then, keep innovating, keep converting.
