Three Steps to AI-Powered Precision Audience-Building: Why It Matters in a Shifting Economy

As uncertain economic conditions continue, marketers are under pressure to do more with less, from driving results to reducing waste and proving ROI. In this climate, one of the most powerful levers available to address all of these challenges is the audience data fueling your campaigns. But finding and engaging the right people isn’t a one-and-done task—it’s an ongoing process of refinement. We are well aware of this at OMI, where custom audience building is a top service we offer to leading telecom companies and other brands as well as agencies.

Today, with AI and its ability to analyze vast datasets, our team at OMI is enhancing our ability to uncover hidden insights at scale and further elevate our precision audiences into dynamic engines of growth.

Here are three techniques from our playbook for optimizing and iterating audiences across social media, programmatic advertising, and email, and why it’s mission-critical now:

1. Sharpening Audience Insights with AI Analysis

AI platforms can be used to ingest and synthesize data from multiple sources, including CRM systems, social media, email engagement, website interactions, and more, to build a clearer picture of who your audience is and how they behave. A few strategies these platforms use to increase audience precision include:

• Predictive Analytics: To anticipate behaviors like churn, purchase intent, or likely engagement.
• Sentiment Analysis: To understand audience attitudes based on social posts, reviews, and feedback.
• Psychographic Profiling: To move beyond demographics to capture motivations, preferences, and interests.

These techniques allow you to not only understand who you’re targeting but also why that segment is likely to engage.

2. Smarter Segmentation and Lookalike Targeting

AI can bolster your segmentation efforts. For example, you can use it to perform:

• Micro-segmentation: AI can reveal niche groups that offer outsized engagement potential.
• Real-Time Adjustments: Update segments in real-time as behaviors shift.
• Lookalike Modeling: This technique has been successfully utilized by OMI for years, leveraging our B2B Living File® database, which contains over 162 million director, manager, and professional-level contacts and above. Today, OMI is increasingly called upon to enhance clients’ AI-sourced company target lists. Our OMI data experts analyze the common attributes from the list (such as industry and employee size) and then identify companies in our database that match the same criteria. We can then also provide additional firmographic, behavioral, and consumer attributes (utilizing our B2B2C data matching service), as well as intent–based information and direct contact names, to enable deeper segmentation, improved targeting using the prospect’s preferred channels, and more personalized outreach. 

3. Closing the Loop with Integrated Intelligence

The true power of AI lies in its feedback loop—constantly learning and iterating to improve targeting, messaging, and outcomes. The more you use it, the more it will learn and the better your audience data outputs will be. We use this strategy at OMI and incorporate new AI-powered audience insights and profile attributes continuously into the Living File® database, which fuels our custom audience-building service.

As described in our recent blog, when working with OMI, you gain access to a comprehensive suite of custom audience-building tools including our massive B2B database, intent data (for identifying buyers whose online activity indicates they are warm leads), B2B2C data matching (for combining B2B and B2C attributes that enable you to deeply personalize your reach with decision-makers on the personal and professional channels they prefer), and much more.

We also integrate our custom audience data into clients’ preferred platforms for campaign activation across a variety of channels including email, social media, programmatic and CTV advertising, and more.

Why It Matters Now

When every marketing dollar is scrutinized, precision audiences enable brands to:

• Cut through the noise and reach real people, not just impressions.
• Focus on what's working and continuously optimize.
• Align budget and strategy with audience intent and behavior.

By pairing emerging AI capabilities with data intelligence and audience-building expertise from data partners like OMI, marketers gain the precision, agility, scale, and performance edge needed to succeed—no matter what the economy throws their way.

Reach out to our team today at request@outwardmedia.com for a complimentary consultation on how to create a precision custom audience that will have a meaningful impact on your omni-channel campaigns and your business.