Social media intelligence is evolving at an incredible pace.  As brands and brand agencies look to uncover deeper behavioral characteristics of consumers, understanding a brand’s social engagement and mutual interests are logical starting points.  Brand engagement can be thought of as how much someone interacts with a particular brand on one or many social media networks.  Brand affinity captures all of the consumer’s brand expressions and maps them to others with like affinities in a multi-dimensional way. The more people with common interests the more apparent the affinities become.

As a brand marketer, you should immediately recognize the value of this information.  Understanding a consumer’s interests relative to your brand takes the guesswork out of your brand strategy.  Some of the most valuable brands in the world are employing brand affinities to gain insight into their consumers, and here are a few of the innovative ways they are using our social data to map out their marketing strategy.

We have all been there, working at a business thinking we understand the customers’ wants and desires, and complain that a competitor is lucky or teamed with better salespeople when they are killing their sales goals.  Fact is, there is something you don’t understand about your customer, the products and services you offer, and what your competition is doing.  Maybe your competition has a popular band sponsor that resonates with their target market, maybe their advertising is more effective.  There is no way of knowing unless you have a true understanding of how your market perceives your business relative to your competitors.

Product marketers have few to no tools to help with product segmentation. Neilsen and others can offer some demographic help based on the percent likelihood of a sample from surveyed people. But we all have learned that what people tell you and what they actually do are two different things. Relying on actual behavior is a significantly more accurate predictor of future behavior than demographics and also allows you to create a much more accurate persona – one that will allow you to define advertising strategies, messaging, and promotion in a clear and concise way.

In the market for an endorsement and being told Dennis Rodman and Maria Sharapova are the best matches based on your talent agency’s suggestions? While many factors play into celebrity and sports endorsements/sponsorships, understanding who your customers engage with online and offline is a proven success factor for sponsorship opportunities. By following your brand’s true mutual engagement, you will have a much clearer picture. Who knows, your customers may not engage with either!

Internet marketers have known for years consumers will click on an ad that interests them when they least expect it. In part, this is why double-click was so successful.  People didn’t expect to receive an ad on something they were interested in a few days or weeks ago.  Granted, as people learned that they were being tracked when they visited a site, Double-clicks success dropped with increased awareness.  That approach was great, but now that social media analysis is here we can predict engagement based on consumer behavior.  These targeted keywords not only generate amazing CTR, but they are often undiscovered by competitors at a very low CPC/CPM.

In the past you were possibly told that your “demographic” was online more than any other medium and you should dedicate your media spend accordingly.  Reality shows that your demographic is tightly attuned to online gaming and a few select TV shows rather than typical digital media – something that cannot be parsed by coarse grain, demographic research. Discovering that a few select TV programs lets you not only target your audience, but save money that would otherwise be wasted from targeting the “demographic” is a better use of your limited advertising budget.

The biggest brands validate everything. It is very hard to determine advertising effectiveness without the proper tools.  Social media gives an immediate glimpse into a campaign’s success or failure. How? The high-level social media metric is through monitoring engagement, and an increase in tweets, picture posts, replies of social media shows that your audience is responding to your advertising campaign.  When coupled with affinity growth, the ability to corroborate campaign spend to affinity growth and forecast product sales is an industry first.  As the saying goes… that which is not measured, is not managed.

Joint partnerships are hard even if they are a perfect match.  Picking the wrong brand to partner for co-branding can be tragic and guesstimating without social media affinity is difficult, costly, and time-consuming. There is no more ideally suited market research tool for evaluating co-branding than with affinity analysis.  In minutes, the top candidates can be narrowed and determined with the highest confidence. What previously required years of intuition and research can now be accomplished factually and quickly across not only categories, but media as well!

Virtual prototyping is an amazing new frontier for evaluating the viability of products and their potential market success.  By understanding attraction and engagement businesses can adapt products to markets and uncover new product opportunities.  Imagine all the products that social media analysis could have saved if available sooner.

Music drives a highly emotional response and can either help drive business or drive business out.  Retail franchise stores can quickly develop background music playlists and select featured iTunes or CD’s to offer patrons using insights from social media.  Starbucks and others are well known for their in-store music selections.  Wonder why?

By evaluating social engagement from predominately location-based entities like radio stations, sports teams, local news, and regional franchises, businesses can unlock where and how they should roll out their franchises. In & Out Burger is a storybook example.  Their franchise rollout approach is classic – use buzz to drive a frenzied awareness.  Initially, this was accomplished through regional rollout, but In-n-Out burger realized it had a huge opportunity to deploy in the Dallas area after years of Dallas business and vacation travelers developed a remote fondness for the tasty meal.  By evaluating brand and business affinities, businesses can effectively predict and target the best cities to target to find their next biggest fans.

Marketing movies to moviegoers makes perfect sense.  Marketing trailers that moviegoers don’t like irritates your audience and is a wasted opportunity. Using brand affinities movie studios can predict and precisely target which trailers resonate the best with the movie to help make future movies a success.

Taking the guesswork out of your marketing strategy by understanding your customer’s interests is a huge unforeseen bonus of social media.  We’ve been there all along to help you make informed decisions that you cannot find with social media monitoring software or dated demographic, panel-based data.  These are just a few of the applications for using social media for market intelligence and planning. Contact us now to learn more about our products and services.

Want to know more? Contact us at audiences@affinityanswers.com today.