Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Audience
If business has any commandments, this certainly isn’t one of them. Going after your rivals’ customers is an essential part of growing your market share and becoming a dominant player in your industry. It’s not always an easy proposition, but thanks to advances in technology and audience intelligence, today’s marketers can identify and activate their target audience with unprecedented accuracy and efficiency.
Over the next few weeks, we’re going to follow a single use case in order to look at the ways a business can use an audience intelligence platform to poach customers away from the competition. We’ll start at the research stage, then move on to planning a multifaceted marketing strategy, and finally we’ll evaluate the campaign we’ve spent our hypothetical time and money on.
Our Example
As an aspiring golfer, I recently started watching PGA Tour events in a (mostly futile) attempt to improve my game. After watching way too many ads for, golf equipment, apparel, and “lifestyle gear,” I began to wonder what made people choose one golf brand over another. Are golf brands like razor blades, where the customer tends to stick with whichever brand he or she started with? Are they like peanut butter, where customers usually buys whatever is cheapest but still provides the quality they’re looking for? Whatever the case, I was curious about how these brands go about appealing to their market and expanding their customer bases.
So, here’s the scenario – golf giant Callaway wants to steal customers away from one of its biggest competitors, Titleist. Before we start planning the campaign, there are some pretty basic questions that need answering – what does Titleist’s audience look like, what are the most effective ways to reach these people, and, most importantly, are they even worth going after?
Understanding Your Audience
Before we look at Titleist’s audience, though, we’re going to want to analyze Callaway’s. This may seem counterintuitive at first – after all, if our goal is to convert Titleist customers into Callaway customers, why would we need to analyze the audience Callaway already has?
Later, once we’ve planned and run our marketing campaign, we’ll need a way to measure how successful it’s been. To do this, we’ll pull in and analyze a sample of Callaway’s Twitter followers in order to create a “snapshot” of our audience before we run the campaign. Later, when we’re measuring the campaign’s effectiveness, we’ll use this as a benchmark to compare with Callaway’s post-campaign audience. It’s also useful to have an understanding of Callaway’s audience so that we can compare it to Titleist’s and discern whether there are certain demographic or psychographic groups that Callaway was overlooking previously.
Demographic Summary of Callaway Audience
Understanding the Competition’s Audience
Now that we have our snapshot, we’ll dive into Titleist’s audience. We’re going to use analyze three different aspects of this group in order to understand it as completely as possible: first, aggregate statistics like demographics; second, user-created content like brand sentiment and significant terms; and third, individual-level insights like specific audience members’ level of influence.
Demographic Summary of Titleist Audience
Not particularly surprising – the Titleist audience is remarkably similar to that of Callaway. Callaway has a slightly more diverse audience, but in truth, the differences are negligible. Luckily, though, demographic segmentation isn’t the only way to break down our target audience.
Demographics are a useful tool, but the future of marketing is interest-based. Let’s look at the different areas that the Titleist audience expresses interest in.
Titleist Audience Interest Breakdown
Again, the result here isn’t a huge surprise. Titleist’s audience is interested primarily in major sports like football, basketball, and baseball, as well as leisure sports like golf, tennis, and bowling. After this, there is a significant drop-off before the next interest category, politics. One notable insight though, is that more members of this audience have expressed an interest in major sports than leisure sports (that is, only 16% of the people who follow Titleist actually reference golf on Twitter).
Let’s dig deeper. How do the people in Titleist’s audience talk about the things that interest them? Looking at the significant terms – the keywords, phrases, and hashtags most often used in each interest category – can give us a deeper insight into this audience. Hashtags in particular are be useful because they are often attached marketing campaigns and used to track the effectiveness of the campaign. Phrases are difficult to track properly, but they can give marketers a more nuanced understanding of their target audience’s conversation than simple keywords.
Phrases Used Most by Titleist’s Top Two Interest Groups
Hashtags Used Most by Titleist’s Top Two Interest Groups
Most of these significant terms discuss particular sporting events, like the Super Bowl or the Ryder Cup. An interesting insight here is the #golftips hashtag – looks like the Titleist audience likes to request and swap game advice.
We’ll also look at the accounts that Titleist’s audience talks about the most. Later, when we’re planning our Callaway media campaign, we’ll want to be aware of the organizations and media outlets that hold the most sway over the audience we’re trying to appeal to.
Accounts Mentioned Most by Titleist’s Top Two Interest Groups
These tend to be sports publications across a variety of media. Television, radio, print, and online outlets are all represented. One interesting note is the prevalence of other golf brands like Callaway and Taylormade among Titleist’s leisure sports interest group. This indicates the presence of a large amount of “switchers,” or individuals who have an affinity to both Titleist and Callaway with no specific preference.
Similarly useful is identifying influential members within your target audience. These influencers fall more or less into one or two categories: microinfluencers, who have roughly between one and ten thousand followers, and macroinfluencers who have more than ten thousand. Microinfluencers are “typically more connected with their audience because they cater to a specific niche,” according to Alyson Ezzone of Rave, an international advertising agency. Microinfluencers are seen as more authentic than major celebrities by their followers, and as a result, their followers tend to be more engaged than those following more major accounts.
Macroinfluencer in Titleist’s Audience
Microinfluencer in Titleist’s Audience
By combining both conversation sentiment and influencer score, we can also uncover major brand advocates and detractors. Identifying and appealing directly to these individuals is an easy and cost-effective way to ensure that conversation about your brand remains positive.
Callaway Advocate
Callaway Detractor
So, is it worth pursuing?
Running a competitive analysis confirms an assumption we already had – the golf equipment vertical is quite concentrated (verified by the significant overlap between the two brands) which tells us that, yes, Titleist’s audience is worth going after.
On the left side of the Venn diagram are individuals who only follow Titleist; on the right, those who only follow Callaway. Switchers are in the center. 45% of Titleist’s followers also follow Callaway.
So now we have an idea of who Titleist’s audience is, what their interests are, and whether or not they’re worth going after. In the next part of this series, we’ll look at the different ways we can operationalize the insights we’ve taken from our market research and begin planning our marketing campaign.
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