Royal Bank of Canada: An Example of How Financial Institutions Can Uncover Actionable Customer-Centric Strategies

Download the full Audience Analysis presentation for RBC here.

Financial institutions around the world promised to focus on customer-centricity following the financial crisis in 2008. However, these institutions have been struggling to deliver on this promise. A large reason is that to deliver customer-centric experiences, financial institutions must have a good understanding of who their customers are in terms of interests, values, and preferences. Nevertheless, financial institutions have traditionally painted all of their customers with a single brush. To be fair, financial institutions are not the only ones to do so.  In order to begin to build a personalized experience for its customer, financial institutions must understand the people behind their brands’ conversations.

People Pattern performed predictive modeling and exploratory data analysis on the digital audience of Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). This analysis applied advanced data science techniques to uncover persona segmentations. Moving beyond “hunches”, we used clustering based on correlated interest areas to formulate customer personas. The study analyzed a random sample of 1,000 individuals who have a proven affinity to RBC (e.g. followers from Twitter). An analysis was then performed to understand the audience’s current demographics, psychographics and behaviors, which uncovered opportunities to identify high-impact audience segments.

Audience Insights: Overall RBC Demographics

We sourced RBC’s audience data using social conversations and brand affinities found in social data. We then applied our library of predictive audience classifiers to give structure to this unstructured dataset. Additionally, we tapped People Pattern’s Portrait DB, a compilation of 300+ million portraits that have structured demographic, psychographic, behavioral and sentiment attributes derived from 16 billion unstructured documents such as tweets, Facebook wall comments, Instagram posts, blog posts and customer reviews.

There are few sources for pulling information about your audience that are as large, open, rich and real-time as Twitter. Using Twitter data introduces a couple biases (e.g.Twitter does not represent 55+ year old equivalent to the Canadian census), as all sampling strategies do. But these are real people with real opinions. People Pattern has methods to work around those biases.

We used the US Twitter population benchmark for the gender and age demographic breakdowns and the 2011 Canadian Census for race comparison. Benchmark selection is a critical component as to how analysts interpret the audience.

• The overall RBC audience has a gender base representative of that found within the US Twitter Benchmark Audience.
• The overall RBC audience is more evenly distributed amongst the age segments. Both tails (younger segment 13-24 years old and older segment 45+ years old) index higher than the US Twitter Benchmark Audience.
• 8% of the Overall RBC Audience identifies as Hispanic, which is significantly over indexes for that ethnicity according to the 2011 Canadian census. 

Audience Discovery: RBC Audience Personas

One of the questions marketers often have when it comes to analyzing their social audiences is “what’s next?”. While demographics are good indicators of the attributes of an audience there are often blanks in uncovering the core personality and interests. What are the psychographic insights that tie an audience together in order to develop campaigns that grow brand and attract new customers? How can one cluster digital audiences into actionable segments? To answer those questions, People Pattern offers “Discovered Personas”, which are data-driven audience segments based on correlated interests of individuals. Discovered Personas allow clients to capture additional opportunities they might not have uncovered otherwise. 

Overall, the RBC audience have diverse interests ranging from a love of professional sports to tweeting about real estate. The Discovered Personas allow RBC to delve deeper into who their unique segments truly are, helping them to deliver more on their promise to focus on customer-centricity.

For the RBC audience, there were seven discovered personas. Of all seven discovered personas, the three that had the highest percentage of portraits were what we will call Mainstays, Female Millennials and surprisingly, a younger Gen Z persona.

• 27% Mainstays (or Major Sports Aficionados)
• 20% Female Millennials
• 12% younger Gen Z persona.

Mentions

RBC’s largest data-driven persona, Mainstays, are not surprisingly, professional white collar males between the ages of 25-45. This result validates a key persona thesis we had before we looked at the results. Outside of the office, they’re an audience who is passionate about their hometown NBA and NHL teams and love watching and attending their games. This is evident in their social conversations – six of the top eight keywords for this persona discuss the NBA’s Toronto Raptors or the Montreal Canadians. Although their beloved hometown team, Toronto Raptors, did not make the NBA finals, the Mainstays tuned in anyway as we found that the NBA and Cleveland Cavaliers were top mentions within this persona. Beyond their passion for professional sports, this persona keeps up with business and finance news, humorous content and business travel updates. 

Finance is the third largest interest within the Mainstay persona. As this is an audience following a financial services company, this is another data point validating that RBC is engaging with the right group. Specifically, within finance, the mention data not only validates their affinity for RBC & RBC Canada but also identifies direct competitors such as Toronto-Dominion and Scotia Bank. This helped us understand RBC’s competitive landscape (See overlap analysis below). As you look at how this audience talks about “finance”, one clearly sees that real estate is a topic of interest. This can help your content team get the right products and services around real estate in front of the Mainstay audience. People Pattern uses natural language processing (NLP) to boil down large collections of unstructured social media posts into semantically related groups of words. Predictive analytics brings forward larger semantics themes across wider audience discussions. 

Inside the Mainstay persona, the mentions of RBC have been positive. Additionally, there are six advocates who could act as champions of the RBC brand. Advocates are those individuals who have mentioned the brand positively and have an influencer score above a specific threshold. People Pattern’s brand analysis functions allow marketers to understand not only the sentiment of the conversation but also the people behind them. The importance of advocates within an analysis is that you go beyond “share of voice”. “Share of voice” or “share of positive voice” is a noisy metric. “Share of audience” normalizes those individuals who repeat or retweet brand messages multiple times. The identified advocates created an opportunity to reach out to those individuals, build an influencer marketing program within the Mainstay persona and learn how to continue to cultivate content to grow additional influencers. Below you’ll find the top six influential Mainstay persona individuals to whom RBC may want to reach out. Every profile is given an influencer score from 0 to 100 where 100 is the highest influence.

Audience Expansion Opportunities: RBC

After uncovering the demographics and audience segments of RBC, we sought to find competitors for expansion opportunities. Overlap and side-by-side comparisons of Twitter followers allow you to quickly access your share of audience against a competitor’s.

This analysis also showed that 34% of RBC’s audience also have an affinity towards its competitors, TD Bank and CIBC. While 27% audience overlap with Scotiabank. The overlap indicates a strong interest in finance. As illustrated by the Mainstay persona, this is an audience that has an interest in finance and wants to keep up with business and financial opportunities. Deeper analysis into the People Pattern app can help identify more targets for RBC.

Performing an overlap is a simple and effective way to mine your competitor’s audience to not only identify “at-risk” customers but also prospects who would be open to your content initiatives.

ACTIONABLE RECOMMENDATIONS:

By matching the rigor of traditional market research with proven data science, RBC can construct an audience ethnography using public unstructured data with significantly larger sample sizes in a fraction of the time. People Pattern approaches the interpretation of audience data using its Q3 (Quantitative – Qualitative – Quantitative) methodology. Armed with audience insights from People Pattern, RBC is emboldened to:

Identify and activate high-value personas and audience segments to drive favorable business outcomes

• 27% Mainstays (or Major Sports Aficionados)
• 20% Female Millennials
• 12% younger Gen Z persona
• Performing a deeper audience analysis on RBC’s audience segments such as the “Female Millennials” and “Gen Z” personas identified in this exploratory data analysis will uncover additional opportunities for marketing and audience growth,
• Building an RBC-centric panel to help benchmark audiences and conversations around product lines will keep an eye on how best to drive business.

Build a reliable people-based dataset to define brand health, perception and competitive threats with the depth and sophistication expected from traditional market research

• 34% of RBC’s audience also have an affinity towards its competitors TD Bank, CIBC and Scotiabank.
• By keeping tabs on the conversations and overlap status of competitors, RBC can quickly gain an understanding of their positioning on social media relative to their competitors.
• Product line analysis can also be a key component defining brand health and perception.

Personalize content marketing strategies by understanding how your audience uses top keywords, keyword phrases, hashtags, and accounts

As highlighted in the Mainstay persona, both sports and finance were topics of interest. There may be sponsorship opportunities with favorite sports teams. In finance, subtopics can be monitored to see where content growth and offers need to happen. If real estate is of interest to the audience, an offer on application fees may be appropriate.

Activate key segments or individuals using integrated social ads platforms such as Twitter’s Tailored Audiences and Facebook’s Custom Audiences directly from People Pattern

• In the initial analysis six brand advocates were identified for RBC.
• By building a look-a-like list, RBC can identify target audience, who do not currently have an affinity toward RBC, but would be likely to align with RBC content and products.

Measure the impact of your data-driven campaigns using engagement and conversion metrics of the targeted audience segments

• Develop a Twitter tailored audience for the Mainstays persona segment.
• Using audience intelligence for identified audience segments, test A/B targeted programming suggestions.

Amazingly, these customer-centric recommendations were derived from public opinions posted from RBC’s audience. We do not apologize for the lack of “like” and retweet aggregations in this study. The days of “shiny” vanity metrics posing as analytics are over. Have any comments or questions, tweet us @peoplepattern. 

Download the sample report for more insights.