If you attended my talk at Brighton SEO this year, you’ll know I am all about audience analysis! So I’ve been looking forward to this talk by Rob McGowan at Response One, who promises to tell us how we can deliver better integrated campaigns by understanding our audience.
Rob doesn’t consider himself a digital marketer. His background is in data analysis. He’s also a big fan of Glastonbury and compares his move to what he calls ‘the graveyard shift’ in the agenda to closing the festival weekend. Nice guy, fun to watch.
Pint of the usual?
You step into a pub. The barman says ‘pint of the usual?’.
Have you ever thought about how much audience understanding he’s showing there? He knows who you are, what you like and your experience is improved because of it.
However, not every person who goes to the pub is the same (cue photos of Nigel Farrage with a pint!).
If you think back to the pub landlord, he’s stitched together all sorts of information about you to better understand you. We as marketers need to think in the same way, and use the data well.
Find data everywhere
There’s so much data available to us as marketers these days. But it’s not just about what we’ve got, it’s also about what we can derive.
Rob has worked in a wide range of companies within the cinema industry, where his challenge was to get people to visit one more time, which would make them money. It’s so important to drive one incremental visit per customer but it’s difficult. It’s a very different ball game to retail, for example.
Your CRM is a hugely valuable source of data. You can combine those details to derive even more.
For example, the cinema industry has lots of information on the date of visit, time, film, ticket purchase history, location, registration details and more. From this, they can derive the audience size, they can learn from the type of film. It’s about treating all that information as data points to classify an individual and create audiences.
But, that’s all about looking backwards at what people have done, not what they will do.
Dig beneath the surface
YouGov is a really useful tool which can add to your own data. You can incorporate research and social data into your segments, which is brilliant when you’re thinking about content because you’ll have so much information about your audience.
Audience analytics must feature early in the roadmap
- Behavioural
- Demographic
- Contextual
- Social
Make sure you’re doing everything you can to use these data points to understand your audience from day one.
There are multiple ways to activate this insight:
- Programmatic media
- Email marketing
- CRM insight
- etc
CRO driven by audience analysis
- Analytics audience and setup
- Multivariate testing
- Personalisation testing
These can’t happen if you don’t have all the audience insight first.
Audience analytics will drive marketing ROI:
Customer analytics
- Profiling
- customer satisfaction
- 360 view of customer
Onboarding
- Customer data
Personalisation
- Content
- Communications
But, this only works for you if your idea, message and product are also great! Your data will show you if the product you’re trying to sell is resonating with your audience, which makes it even more important to keep updating your audience insight.
Food for thought
- Deliver value, quickly
- Measure the day to day, insightfully
- Integrate data, programmatically
- Create an iterative roadmap, simply
- Engage the business, imaginatively
