Capturing brand relevance with audience-first marketing
Craig Davis, former creative director of J. Walter Thompson, once told marketers to “stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.” As consumer goods (CG) companies and retailers struggle to stay relevant with consumers in a tempest of content, media, and products, this advice is more poignant than ever. Let’s find out how Ophelia and the CG company she works at leverages Affinio’s powerful audience analytics solution to discover hidden audience insights that enable her to build successful campaigns that drive revenue and brand relevance.
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Gain insights by collecting and analyzing billions of consumer interest data points
Ophelia manages her company’s flagship soda brand, Cool Cola. She’s just stepped out of a meeting that established the campaign schedule for the following quarter. Now that she has a clear idea of when the new campaigns will launch, it’s Ophelia’s job to figure out what those campaigns will be, and who they will target.
Ophelia returns to her desk and opens her audience analysis solution. She enters the name of her brand, Cool Cola, and the solution begins analyzing billions of audience data points to reveal the naturally occurring interest segments. As the solution continues working, Ophelia heads to the kitchen to set up her French press.
An hour and a half later, the solution notifies Ophelia that her results are ready for review. Front and center on her dashboard is the interests graph, an easy-to-read visualization of the different clusters within her audience. Ophelia recognizes many of them – sports fans, gamers, and moviegoers – but somewhat more surprising is a large group of environmentalists. She looks at the solution’s affinity graph to see how her company is performing within this group, and realizes that neither Cool Cola nor its competitors are effectively marketing to environmentalists. Even though it’s a niche market, she knows that a compelling campaign that resonates with this group will lead to a notable boost in sales and brand relevance especially given that Cool Cola’s parent company is well-known for their focus on environmental issues.
Drive revenue-generating campaigns and land them successfully with your audience
Ophelia clicks into the environmentalist group to see what other brands, media outlets, and influencers they follow. She sees several niche blogs and forums dedicated to environmental issues, but one surprising influencer is Sebastian Randol, a well-known soccer player in Toronto. Ophelia realizes that in addition to tweeting about soccer, Randol often tweets about environmental issues. She surmises that Randol would also resonate with her brand’s sports fans. Sure enough, clicking through to his followers, she sees a significant amount of Toronto sports fans, many of whom also follow a small, local sports blog.
Leveraging these insights, Ophelia reaches out to Jordan Randol’s agent to talk about a strategic partnership. Over the next several weeks, Ophelia and her creative team develop a campaign centered around a new partnership between Cool Cola, Randol, and the city of Toronto, to grow awareness about sustainability. To ensure her campaign lands successfully, she targets the environmentalist forums and local Toronto sports blog uncovered by the solution.
When the campaign goes live the next quarter, Ophelia’s company sees a notable increase in engagement from their sports fan and environmentalist subgroups. Equally significant, when Ophelia runs her consumer data through her audience analysis solution again, she sees that her brand has jumped well ahead of competitors in loyalty and relevancy within both subgroups.
As represented above, Ophelia’s audience analytics solution enabled her to uncover hidden insights surrounding the passions and interests that segment her audience. She utilized these insights to create an effective campaign that resonated with consumers, enabling her brand to connect with its consumers and drive brand relevance, affinity, and loyalty.
Microsoft’s partner, Affinio, offers an Integrated Audience Analysis solution that empowers CG companies and retailers to gain similar audience insights from their consumer data as part of a suite of cloud-based retail and CG solutions. To learn more about these solutions including Inventory Optimization, Pricing and Promotion Execution, Retail Execution, Retail Personalization, Demand Planning and try the Affinio Integrated Audience Analysis solution today, visit Microsoft AppSource.
