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Audience building: Best practices for enterprise marketing campaigns
Published on January 27, 2025

Your customers want to feel connected to your brand. They even want to be marketed to – just not in a way that feels like they’re simply another record in your database. They expect relevance, authenticity, and a personal touch from every interaction. Every time.
As an enterprise brand, meeting these expectations begins with accurate and actionable audience building – the foundation of any marketing strategy. Yet many marketing teams struggle because of fragmented data, siloed teams, and an inability to leverage their full tech stack.
This article explores why audience building matters and shares practical best practices to help you optimize your segmentation strategies for precision and scale.
What is audience building?
Audience building is the process of identifying, segmenting, and organizing individuals into meaningful groups based on shared characteristics, behaviors, or preferences. When done right, it transforms raw data into actionable insights, helping you craft campaigns that feel personal and relevant to every customer.
Audience building is the bridge between data and great marketing. It’s the foundation for building scalable marketing strategies that unify data, optimize workflows, and empower brands to adapt to evolving customer needs.
The importance of audience building
Effective audience building goes beyond creating a bunch of segments and calling it a day. For brands trying to bridge the gap between marketing, data, and IT teams, it helps create smarter workflows, foster collaboration, and unlock more impactful campaigns.
Precise targeting
Gone are the days of blasting out generic campaigns to everyone on your email list. Customers expect relevance – and they’ll quickly disengage if your messaging feels in any way impersonal. By leveraging real-time data and behavioral signals, you can create campaigns that feel tailored and personal rather than generic and pushy.
For example, a fashion retailer using real-time browsing behavior to identify customers eyeing specific products, such as winter coats. Sending that customer a time-sensitive discount for that particular category is far more likely to convert than a nonspecific “shop now” message, or even a more generic discount offer.
Precise targeting reduces the risk of alienating your audience with irrelevant, excessive, or intrusive messaging. The results are better engagement, higher click-through rates, and customers that feel understood.
More marketing ROI
When you focus your efforts on well-defined segments most likely to convert, you can minimize wasted ad spend and maximize your ROI. For example, a luxury car brand targeting high-income households in select zip codes will see better outcomes than casting a wide – and expensive – net with generic campaigns.
Allocating your marketing budget where it’ll make the biggest impact is a win-win for your brand and your customers.
Cross-functional efficiency
Advanced audience building tools improve collaboration between teams by eliminating bottlenecks and cutting down on manual data handoffs. Instead of waiting for IT to extract data or build custom segments, marketers can take control – independently creating and refining audiences using live, accurate data – whether it’s customer behavior, inventory levels, or beyond.
All your raw data stays secure and centralized in your data warehouse – keeping sensitive information protected yet always accessible for sophisticated audience building.
Controlled data and processes
Fragmented data remains a major obstacle for many enterprise brands. Tools that can read straight from your centralized data repository break down silos by building your audiences – and ultimately, your campaigns – based on a single, complete view of your customers. This eliminates redundant processes and makes sure every team – from marketing to IT – is working from the same up-to-date customer data.
AI-powered personalization
Consumers want – and expect – brands to anticipate their needs. AI-powered segmentation makes this possible. Leveraging machine learning, predictive models can analyze demographics, behaviors, and preferences in real time, helping you accurately forecast customer needs and deliver tailored messaging.
Think of how streaming platforms like Netflix use AI to dynamically curate 1:1 recommendations for millions of subscribers based on viewing habits and ratings. This level of personalization keeps customers hooked and coming back for more.
Simple platform integrations
A clean, well-organized audience building strategy reduces complexity in your martech stack, making it easier to integrate new tools and switch between platforms.
With warehouse-native solutions, not only are you building your audiences using reliable data directly from your Customer 360, but you can then ship those audiences wherever you need them to go – without exporting CSVs or duplicating data.
This reduces downtime, avoids bottlenecks, and keeps your teams agile – no matter how many tools you have in your martech stack.
Audience building best practices
How can you use audience building to create scalable, efficient, and impactful marketing campaigns?
Centralize and unify your data
Your audiences are only as good as the data you put behind them. One of the best investments you can make as an enterprise brand is consolidating all your customer data across systems into a single source of truth. Building your audiences using this centralized data foundation will give you accurate segments and reliable insights, as well as reduce redundancies and manual data wrangling.
Leverage automation and dynamic segmentation
Invest in tools that offer dynamic segmentation capabilities. Use real-time data inputs from your data warehouse to automatically update audiences based on behavior, intent, lifecycle stage, and more.
The use cases are endless. For example, as soon as a customer’s profile changes to indicate they’re at risk of churning, you can automatically add them to a re-engagement campaign that very moment to stop churn in its tracks.
Or, if a customer buys a new piece of tech, add them to an automated campaign offering complementary accessories, such as a premium case or extended warranty, based on the timing and relevance to their purchase cycle.
Directly access all your data
The most important aspect of any audience builder is the underlying data. Fancy UIs and UXs can be copied, but architecture is much harder to change. Most audience builders today only give you limited access to customer data – usually behavioral events.
MessageGears gives marketers access to a low-code audience builder where they can directly query all of the data in your data warehouse, making it far more flexible when it comes to supporting custom data models unique to your brand. Data teams simply define customer data models once, and marketers can then create as many custom audiences as their hearts desire. Marketers can also leverage unlimited attributes without incurring extra fees.
This flexibility empowers marketing teams to self-serve, leveraging your entire brand’s dataset to build audiences and activate more personalized campaigns – without rigid data models holding them back or constantly leaning on data teams for SQL queries.
Prioritize cross-channel activation and consistency
Your audience definitions shouldn’t exist in silos. Make sure they’re portable across all your marketing channels to deliver a seamless customer experience. For example, if you segment users by purchase history in your email platform, that same segmentation should be actionable in your social ads, push notifications, and website personalization efforts.
Invest in platforms that make it easy to integrate and activate your audiences everywhere – without requiring duplicate effort. This approach not only avoids fragmented campaigns but also maximizes the ROI of your martech investments. Stakeholders love seeing how aligned, consistent campaigns lead to measurable success.
Build for scalability and flexibility
When building your audiences, scalability and flexibility are key. Design strategies that can grow alongside your brand. Modular, reusable segments that easily adapt to new tools and processes help you stay agile, even as your martech stack evolves.
Consider a brand migrating to a new CRM. If they’ve built flexible audience segments from the start, they can minimize disruption during the transition, keeping campaigns running without a hitch and teams focused on what matters.
Start building your best audiences
Audience building has the power to unify teams, cut our inefficiencies, and deliver more impactful campaigns. By focusing on precision and scalability, you can transform how your teams work together and how your brand connects with customers.
MessageGears’ data activation and engagement platform connects directly to your data warehouse and gives marketers a non-technical interface where they can visually build audiences and sync them to over 250 destinations.
Whereas most audience builders only allow you to build audiences using a subset of your data, MessageGears gives you access to any and all customer data directly from your data warehouse – no moving, copying, or storing required.
Ready to learn how MessageGears can help your marketing teams build scalable, accurate audiences faster than ever? Book a demo with one of our solution experts.