Now more than ever, marketers are striving to incorporate a more data-driven, quantitative approach into their strategy. But what does that actually look like? Where do you start? And what’s wrong with the tried-and-true methods of market research that marketers have been using for decades?
Phone surveys and focus groups have long been standard operating procedure for marketers looking to learn more about their audience, but these strategies are far from perfect. For one, they’re expensive. According to the Houston Chronicle, just 200 completed phone questionnaires will run you between $5,000 and $15,000, while a 90-minute, 8-person focus group costs roughly $6,000. Small sample sizes, recognition of interviewer-induced bias, and plummeting survey response rates have also contributed to traditional market research’s decline in popularity. Of course, older methods still offer some value – a focus group, for example, allows participants to explain or clarify their responses – but they’re best used in conjunction with a more data-driven approach.
Not long ago, taking a truly data-driven approach to marketing was extremely difficult. The majority of information that market research provided was qualitative and collecting it took a significant amount of time and money. The past decade, however, has seen a meteoric rise in social media use, which has in turn created a veritable Spindletop gusher of free demographic information and unbiased opinion data. And just as the early oilmen needed refineries to turn their black gold into usable petroleum, a marketer needs an audience intelligence platform if he ever hopes to extract actionable insights from social data.
Audience intelligence can now take advantage of this untapped social data resource by ingesting and analyzing the profiles that follow your business across a variety of social media platforms. Using a combination of natural language processing and machine learning to analyze both structured (i.e. name, age field, location field) and unstructured data (like individual posts), an audience intelligence platform can determine everything from basic demographic information to more complex information, like individuals’ personal interests and brand sentiments.
By all measures, audience intelligence arrived just in time. The marketing landscape is changing fast. In days past, there were only a few paths that customers took from initial product awareness to purchase evaluation, but today, these paths are far more numerous and far less defined. Marketers also need a way to quantify the return on investment from the campaigns they run – using an audience intelligence platform, marketers can create a “before” and “after” snapshot of their audience to measure how successful the campaign has been.
Data-driven marketing in action: Applebee’s example
To better understand the benefits of a data-driven marketing approach, we’ll use the People Pattern platform to examine Applebee’s customer base, look at the insights we can take from the data, and then explore the ways we can take action on these insights.
The basics: demographics
By analyzing a large sample of the profiles that follow your business on social media, an audience intelligence platform can determine the demographics of your customer base almost instantly. The data is then compared to People Pattern’s benchmark population, which was custom-designed using a database that contains over 300 million (and growing daily) portraits in order to create the most realistic possible representation of the general public. Now, you can see which demographic groups are under and overrepresented in your audience.
Demographic breakdown ofApplebee’s social media followers
So how is this useful? Looking at the demographic info, you’ll notice that about eight percent of the profiles in the sample posted in Indonesian. That may not seem particularly significant at first, but when you compare it to the benchmark, you realize that this figure is over 11 times greater than expected. Turns out Applebee’s is really popular with Indonesian speakers! Using this knowledge, Applebee’s could decide to set aside a portion of its marketing budget for Indonesian-language advertisements.
But are the people posting about Applebee’s in Indonesian living in Indonesia, or do they live abroad? All the Indonesian-language advertising in the world won’t do any good if it’s not directed to the right place. An audience intelligence platform will also determine the locations of the profiles in the sample (again, comparing them to the benchmark) to show you where your business is particularly popular and where there is little awareness.
Metro areas with the most individuals in the Applebee’s audience. Nearly 4% of the Applebee’s audience is located in Greater Jakarta.
“Interest groups” aren’t always a bad thing
For most people, the phrase“interest group” conjures up images of political lobbying and gridlock, but inmodern marketing, it takes on a different (and more positive) meaning. The marketersof the past primarily relied on demographic data for insights into theiraudience, but recently we’ve seen a trend towards interest-based marketing –that is, segmenting an audience by psychographic traits like personal interests.This can act as a compliment to traditional demographic segmentation to giveyou a more complete idea of who your audience is. Thanks to advances incomputing technology, marketers can now collect and analyze psychographicinformation on a large scale.
Here are the top six interests of the Applebee’s audience. 18% of Applebee’s followers express an interest in family, 12% express an interest in food, and so on.
Looking at the Applebee’s audience, we see that their primary interests are family, food, and humor (in that order). Each interest group is paired with a set of representative posts – understanding the language audience uses to talk about the things that interest them allows you to craft more relatable content.
Imagine if you could identify significant terms (keywords, phrases, and hashtags) commonly used by the people in the sample who express an interest in family. With the Applebee’s audience, birthdays are a common theme across all three categories. With this in mind, marketers can tailor their content strategy to appeal to an audience’s interests – Applebee’s, for example, could produce an ad featuring a family celebrating their son’s birthday in the restaurant.
The top five keywords, phrases, and hashtags used by the members of the Applebee’s audience who are interested in family.
Figuring out your core customer
Marketers want to identify different personas – composite sketches of various segments within an audience – so that they can direct their efforts to reach their core customers more efficiently. In the past, this was largely done with a combination of demographic research and guesswork. Today, though, an audience intelligence platform can quickly identify different audience personas that include psychographic information. This is useful in two ways: first, it can validate existing assumptions about your customers, and second, it can uncover previously unknown demographic and interest clusters within the current audience.
Top audience persona discovered by the People Pattern platform. People in this category are mostly white females, age 21-30, who are interested in family, food, music, multimedia, and religion.
Sizing up the competition
Applebee’s isn’t the only player in the fast casual game – TGIFridays offers a similar menu at a comparable price. As a marketer, you want to learn more about the customers that are loyal to you, those that are loyal to your rival, as well as the “switchers,” customers who patronize both restaurants with no strong preference for one over the other. Using an audience intelligence platform to run a competitive analysis allows you to isolate these groups and study each one individually. If, for example, Applebee’s notices that many people who prefer the competition have taken to the internet to complain about TGIFriday’s lack of tacos (a product Applebee’s carries), they could then target these people with online ads featuring a picture of a delicious-looking brisket taco and a friendly reminder of where they can get one.
The Venn diagram on the left shows the overlap between Applebee’s and TGIFridays’ Twitter followership. On the right, a brief analysis of each business’ loyalists.
Leveraging influence
Another way to understand your audience is to look at the people, organizations, and media outlets that they follow on social platforms. Identifying these “external influencers” can help you with media planning; if, for example, a significant portion of your audience reads Parents Magazine, you might consider running an ad in the next issue. It can also help you reach out to the individuals that your audience listens to. According to a recent Nielsen study, recommendations from friends are still the most effective form of advertising – marketers can leverage this insight to create an influencer outreach program (i.e. using Twitter to offer these individuals a free appetizer and encourage them to bring their friends).
These are the twitter accounts most followed by the “family” interest group. 3% of this audience segment follow Parents Magazine, 2% follow Today’s Parent, and so on.
The marketing landscape is changing quickly, but marketers who take a data-driven approach (augmented by some traditional research methods) will have a huge advantage in identifying, reaching, and building a relationship with their customers.
An example of how Applebee’s could leverage the insights gained from audience intelligence – significant terms, influencer identification, and language familiar to their audience – to run a cheap and effective campaign.
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