When a retail business makes the decision to open or expand, they need to conduct extensive research on potential locations before making the big decision to invest. Traditionally, this process involves poring over demographic data and sending out surveys and questionnaires to determine local interest level. While these techniques are often effective, they’re also expensive and time-consuming, which can render them impractical for businesses on a tight budget – and in these uncertain economic times, who isn’t on a tight budget?
The Alternative
Audience Intelligence platforms like People Pattern use social data to answer key audience questions. While location-specific demographic information can be sourced from United States Census Bureau data, psychographic research is another story. Marketers need to understand their audience’s interests, how they talk about those interests, which media sources they consume, and which brands they already have an affinity towards.
![]()
Example: Garden City, Kansas
Let’s say we want to open a restaurant in Garden City, a town of roughly 26,000 in southwestern Kansas. We’ll start by pulling in social profiles from people who state their location as Garden City, as well as followers of local institutions like schools, municipal government bodies, and after a quick glance at the demographics, we notice that Garden City is somewhat more ethnically diverse than Kansas as a whole. This is helpful in a broad sense, but let’s see if we can drill down and discover some food-specific insights about the town’s residents in order determine our menu offerings and shape our content strategy.
Here, we get a sense for some of the food items that Garden City residents prefer. From the above screenshot, we can tell that our audience is interested in foods like jalapeno cheese soup and western beef tips, and “breakfast served” appears as a main subtopic within the “food” interest category. If our hypothetical restaurant was planning to serve any of these dishes, it would make sense to highlight them in our promotional material. Since breakfast is an important consideration for our audience, we might decide to include a selection of breakfast items and open earlier in the day.
To get a sense of where we would want to promote our new restaurant, we’ll take a look at the top influential media sources within the Garden City audience. Beyond the obvious outlets, like the local newspaper, what do these individuals watch and read?
Catch It Kansas is a site for statewide high school sports news and information that a full quarter of our audience follows on Twitter. Advertising on (or outright sponsoring) this site would be a cheap and effective way to get the word out about our restaurant in our target market. Using an Audience Intelligence tool like People Pattern and doing some surface level research into the audience of Garden City Kansas, we’re able to construct a campaign that targets a diverse audience, and promotes our top breakfast item, reaching them either directly through social media or via a sponsorship or ad placement in the CatchItKansas blog. With data-driven insights, we can be confident that this will resonate with our target audience.
In just a few minutes, an Audience Intelligence platform can deliver actionable insights to marketers and business owners for a fraction of the cost of traditional market research techniques. From conversations to media consumption information, social data can be a wellspring of knowledge about your potential customers, no matter whether they live in Garden City or Manhattan.
To see audience intelligence in practice and get an understanding of the types of insights that are produced contact us for a demo.
Recent Comments