What Is Audience Activation?
Audience activation is the process of making a defined audience available for use across marketing, advertising, sales, or customer engagement channels.
Audience Activation, Explained Simply
Building an audience is only part of the job.
After marketers determine which people or companies they want to reach, that audience needs to become usable within the channels where campaigns and engagement occur.
Audience activation connects a defined audience with those destinations.
Depending on the use case, that might include digital advertising platforms, social platforms, email programs, sales systems, or other approved marketing environments.
The goal is to move from knowing the audience to being able to reach the audience.
Why Audience Activation Matters
Audience activation can enable marketers to:
- Put audience strategy into action
- Reach defined groups across appropriate channels
- Support programmatic and digital advertising
- Connect data with media execution
- Coordinate cross-channel campaigns
- Use enriched or segmented audiences
- Reduce the gap between audience planning and campaign delivery
PAULA'S PERSPECTIVE
Marketers should think about activation while they are building the audience — not after the audience has already been created.
Where you ultimately need to reach people can determine which identifiers and data attributes are required.
A beautifully defined audience has limited value if there is no responsible, practical path to activate it.
Audience strategy and activation strategy should therefore be designed together.
— Paula Chiocchi
Audience Activation in Practice
- Step 1Senior Technology Executives
- Step 2Enterprise Segment
- Step 3Defined by Attributes
- Step 4Approved Advertising Environment
- Step 5Executable Audience
Imagine a B2B marketer creates a segment of senior technology executives at enterprise companies.
The audience has been defined using company size, job function, seniority, and other relevant attributes.
The marketer then makes that audience available within an approved advertising environment so a campaign can reach eligible members of the segment.
The audience has moved from a strategic definition to an executable marketing audience.
KEY TAKEAWAY
Audience activation makes defined audiences usable across marketing, advertising, sales, and engagement channels.
About Paula Chiocchi
Paula Chiocchi is the Founder and CEO of Outward Media, Inc. and host of B2B Influence: Spotlight on Industry Game-Changers, with decades of experience in data-driven marketing.