Consumer InsightsHow-To Keep Your Marketing Relevant with Interest and Affinity Data

THE MARKETING INTELLIGENCE PLATFORM

01 Foreword

02 Part One: Why Interest Graph Analysis Should Fuel Insights

05 Part Two: Affinio Use Cases Uncover Insights Faster and Consolidate Your Research Toolbox Across Departments

Find Naturally-Occurring Audience Segments

Build Data-Driven Buyer Personas

Identify and Validate Ideal Influencers, Partnerships, and Sponsorships

Monitor Changing Audience Dynamics and Trends

Conduct Competitive Analysis

Expand Into New Markets

14 Want to Learn More?

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1FOREWORD

“It’s so bloody confusing out there. If you have the right data in front of people and if you present it in the right way, and analyze it in the right way, you can really open people’s eyes to what’s going on; you can really help people to make better business decisions.”

— David Boyle, EVP of Insight at BBC Worldwide

Consumer Insights Manager, VP Consumer Insights, etc.) has grown exponentially. Chances are if you’re reading this eBook, you may have one of these titles or work closely with an insights team. While the titles may vary, these roles share in the business of understanding consumers – and their cultures – intimately. They must understand what connects the London waitress and Denver pipefitter and guide brand and business decisions with these insights.

At Affinio, we are lucky to work with best-in-class Consumer Insights teams from around the world, spanning many industries including Retail, CG and Media & Entertainment. We are the first platform to pull advanced audience insights from the interest graph as opposed to the mention graph. By segmenting an audience based on interests and the content they engage with, we can understand consumers on a richer, deeper level that was not possible until now.

We wrote this eBook because we know the pressure that is placed on businesses, and the Consumer Insights teams within them, to find insights that keep them ahead of the curve and remain competitive. Whether this is through building accurate buyer personas, consulting on the move into a new global market, uncovering trends for product development, or optimizing content strategies, we know that teams need empowerment with timely, high quality insights.

Relevance is the new currency of brand-to-consumer relationships. With today’s

empowered consumer, gone are the days of vague, all-encompassing labels to define a homogenous audience. We are living in a marketing reality where defined consumer groups exist, each with unique passions, behaviors, preferences, and cultural influences that are subject to change in an instant.

The world of consumer insights is being disrupted by both the rapid changes in consumer behavior, and the means by which we capture and analyze that behavior. Consumer segments are no longer defined by gender, age, or location but bound by their shared interests and passions. To illustrate this point, imagine a waitress in London and a pipefitter in Denver. Both may be your ideal customer and have far more in common than you think.

Over the past decade, the number of professionals with ‘insight’ in their title (e.g.

2PART ONE: Why Interest Graph Analysis Should Fuel Insights

Surprisingly, market research still leans heavily on the demographic characteristics

of an audience, and when there is so much more data available about the actual people in an audience and what they care about, the lack of forward progress in approaches to research is glaring. We know customers are more than simple demographic segments, they are individuals with diverse passions and interests, and our marketing should strive to align with that.

Consumer Insights teams are mining for quality insights to paint a picture – or cultural profile – of their target customers. In an ideal world, consumer insights should feel like you’ve invited each one of your ideal customers into the boardroom for a one-to-one in-person interview.

We don’t live in an ideal world, but we should be striving to understand consumer data in a way that gets us a lot closer to answering these questions than we currently are. Here are the things you should be trying to find the answers to:

What influencers do you actually listen to?

What brands or products do you already trust?

Where do you shop and why do you shop there?

What content do you care about and respond to?

What trends are you paying attention to?

What is just noise?

What information sources do you trust? Why do you trust them?

49ers Fans

Tech + Software Nerds

Fashionistas

3PART ONE

Not sure what INTEREST GRAPH ANALYSIS means?Let’s break it down:

At Affinio, the thing we care about is the network. Social media analysis and machine learning let us look at the billions of connections between individuals, evaluate them, and provide insights about their interests and passions in aggregate. Using our custom graph engine, we can uncover naturally forming segments and develop customer personas and profiles within any audience.

We do this by segmenting individuals based on their shared interests and affinities. Immediately this gives us insight into who customers are, what they care about, who they are influenced by, what links they’ve shared, content they consume, and many more attributes that begin to tell a story and paint a cultural profile of the consumer.

I can’t get enough of the new season of #Riverdale!

Zoe Doe @zoedoe

Marketers

Health & Fit

Netflix Bingers

R&B Fans

News & Media

Fashionistas

Digital NativesPop Culture

How teams identify insights, and the speed at which they come to these findings varies depending on data sources like traditional research, data scientists, transactional data, social listening tools and analytics platforms, in-house databases, etc. In fact, consumer insights teams are overrun with data sources. How many of these sources does your team use currently? Many of these research methods are time-consuming, expensive, or constrained to a sample-size environment. Today’s insights teams need to find methods that can overcome research participants’ self-identification biases. The truth is this: the attention-to-detail and level of analysis required to truly connect with customers, provide the products and services they want, and understand their behaviors cannot be garnered from data sources like social listening, demographics, and traditional

4PART ONE

research methods alone.

Instead, there is a better way to arrive at these conclusions and elicit true interest-based consumer habits, almost immediately. With more demands on marketing teams to tie efforts to ROI, and the speed in which consumer trends develop and dissipate, they need to be empowered with timely data and insights that capture consumer culture and trends as they emerge, not after the fact. That’s why, at Affinio, we recognize the value in taking an entirely different approach to better understand both your current and potential customers. By analyzing the interest graph and focusing on an audience’s interests and passions, we have helped marketers understand their audience as human beings and not one-dimensional data points.

Adventure Seekers

5PART TWO:Affinio Use Cases

Surprisingly, market research still leans heavily on the demographic characteristics of an audience, and when there is so much more data available about the actual people in an audience and what they care about, the lack of forward progress in approaches to research is glaring. We know customers are more than simple demographic segments, they are individuals with diverse passions and interests, and our marketing should strive to align with that.

Consumer Insights teams are mining for quality insights to paint a picture – or cultural profile – of their target customers. In an ideal world, consumer insights should feel like you’ve invited each one of your ideal customers into the boardroom for a one-to-one in-person interview.

We don’t live in an ideal world, but we should be striving to understand consumer data in a way that gets us a lot closer to answering these questions than we currently are. Here are the things you should be trying to find the answers to:

Uncover insights faster and consolidate their research toolbox across departments

Find naturally-occurring audience segments

Build data-driven buyer personas

Identify and validate ideal influencers, partnerships, and sponsorships

Monitor changing audience dynamics and trends

Conduct competitive analysis

Expand into new markets, product development, and wholesale strategy

Affinio keeps you ahead of the curve, and relevant to consumers in a fast-paced world. Our platform allows teams to run major studies that analyze billions of relational connections as often as they like with only the click of a button. There is no waiting on data scientists, outsourced research, consumer surveys, or focus groups which can take weeks or months to organize and receive the results. Instead, imagine results that are available in hours and pick-up on consumer trends as they happen. Depending on your research requirements, reports can be updated on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

By pairing our Interest Analytics platform with some of the existing data sources we’ve already covered, marketers can act on global insights quickly, and at a fraction of their annual research budget. With Affinio, you can consolidate your research toolbox and arm multiple departments in your company with report capability. This gives teams access to consistent data that can be viewed through

6PART TWO:Uncover Insights Faster and Consolidate Your Research Toolbox Across Departments

their own lens.

Understand Large, High-Quality Data Sets at Speed

For example, the below Interest Graph is the result of crunching billions of data points and the relational connections within an audience. All of the relationships between the people within the audience, the content read and shared by audience members, and specific interests of this audience were analyzed and clustered. This research would take a human months, or even years, to understand. By then, the analysis would be outdated and irrelevant. These results and the visuals were generated in under one hour and only show the tip of the iceberg.

Customizable Solutions with the Affinio API

Depending on your insights needs, we offer a premium API. The Affinio API offers solutions for mass report creation, big data consumption, custom integration, and data enrichment.

Speed-to-Insight: Run major research studies with the click of a button

Scale: Crunch billions of data points and audience connections

Cost Savings: Spend a fraction of your budget and pull insights from a single source

Flexibility: Customizable solutions for your insights needs available via the Affinio API

TAKEAWAYS:

Marketers

Health & Fit

Netflix Bingers

R&B Fans

News & Media

Fashionistas

Digital NativesPop Culture

Affinio analyzes everyone within a target audience and segments them

into clusters based on their shared interests, affinities, and the content they consume. For the first time, companies can see who their customers are, who their competitors’ customers are, what people actually care about, and why they are connected to that brand or company. Using this approach, companies can find naturally-occurring audience segments and uncover completely new groups of consumers they may not have known existed.

Affinio empowers marketing and insights teams to get the full perspective on consumer behaviour that transverses the silent audience consuming content but not vocalizing it.

By understanding the different communities attracted to your company or brands, both silent and vocal, you can fine-tune your marketing strategies to connect with each audience segment in a meaningful way. Affinio insights eliminate “spray-and-pray” methods, and empowers companies to use the signals from these clusters to develop marketing that truly aligns with consumers’ interests. This is what today’s consumer expects, and in order to stay relevant, brands must comply.

7PART TWO:Find Naturally-Occurring Audience Segments

TAKEAWAYS

Identify the niche communities in your audience - or - your competitor’s audience you never knew existed

Validate who your customers are and understand why communities have an affinity to your company

Skating & Surfing

Using Affinio, we analyzed a popular consumer brand on Twitter. Immediately, we can see the breakout of several interest-based clusters. These communities have been segmented based on their shared interests and affinities. For example, let’s say the brand would like to focus on reaching an audience segment we’ve identified as

Buyer persons are used to help teams get to the heart of the consumer and allow them to be more strategic in catering to a target audience. Traditionally, personas were heavily based on demographics, likely because this was the most readily available information accessible to marketing and insights teams. But today, consumer attention is limited and consumers will only respond to the content and brands that speak to their interest and passions.

Through interest graph analysis, it’s easy to dive into audience segments and their unique cultures, and understand everything needed to build a data-driven, detailed persona.

8PART TWO:Build Data-Driven Buyer Personas

University Girls

University Girls

Build personas that include:

• How they self-describe

• Where they live

• The brands, influencers, blogs, music, and news they care about most

• The content they love as well as the links they share most

• The domains they read and extract content from

• The hashtags, keywords, and even the emoji’s they use the most

9PART TWO:University Girls

Have you ever looked at a sponsorship deal and wondered where the match was? Or selected an influencer based on gut-feeling and limited data like follower counts? It’s OK, that’s the way it’s been done because until now, there wasn’t a better way.

Using interest-based segmentation, marketing teams immediately have access to a list of the most contextually relevant individuals, media, brands, events, TV shows, etc. to their target audience. No more gut-checks necessary. Using the example in our buyer personas section, we can see the interests most relevant to a the University Girls community at the click of a button.

10PART TWO:Identify and Validate Ideal Influencers, Partnerships, and Sponsorships

TAKEAWAYS

Develop strategic partnerships opportunities

Validate how effective sponsorships pairings are

Identify media channels you know your customer relies on

Interests can be selected at the overall audience level, and on a cluster-by-cluster basis. Using this approach, marketing and insights teams are able to identify interests that encompass the entire audience, or select interests that speak to each culture within the audience.

By understanding audience interests in context, marketers can now better craft their marketing and communications strategies to align with those interest for higher acquisition at significantly lower costs and higher predictability.

4. Typical Girl DoDamnTrue 5,670,000 followers

HI babes, I tweet about things that are SO DAMN TRUE!

58. Kim Kardashian West KimKardashian 53,000,000 followers

Kimoji available NOW!

People are constantly changing, therefore so are your customers. Audiences aren’t stagnant, they are living and breathing things; picking up on new trends, and shooting down others. Marketers and insights teams need to stay ahead of the curve and understand changing audience dynamics as they happen, without having to organize and pay for repeat studies.

Using Affinio, marketers can actually see how their audience changes over time. They can measure the growth from date-of-acquisition to see what communities are growing or shrinking, and what new communities are emerging. This can be tied directly to ROI and measure how well different marketing initiatives are performing in each interest-based community.

By analyzing hashtags, mentions, and other keywords with affinity data, it’s easy to quickly understand the context of how a term or trend is being used and what interest-based communities are engaging with them. Using the proper terms and hashtags can strengthen your relationship with a desired community, or can be the reason you are alienated from it. Knowing what conversations or topics are relevant to your ideal audience, and knowing when these might change, is critical.

Like trending topics, influencers can come and go. Using Affinio, marketers can also see how the interests of a given audience change over time. This allows brands to identify up-and-coming influencers who are gaining traction with a specified audience – or – identify which influencers may be losing influence over their audience.

11PART TWO:Monitor Changing Audience Dynamics and Trends

TAKEAWAYS:• Understand how your audience evolves on a daily, weekly, monthly basis

• Track trending hashtags, mentions, or other keywords to understand how your audience is responding to them

• Identify changes in content and media shared over a set time

• Optimize targeting and content strategies based on audience trends

• Validate campaign efforts by tracking audience adoption

• Track how the interests of your audience changes over time

Affinio’s premium Monitoring feature enables you to update your Affinio reports at regular intervals to see changes in followers, interests, topics, and trends.

Crazy Football Fans

Dads Who Love Sports

Today, brands vie for the attention of consumers, and are constantly creating and pushing new content to their audiences in hopes of gauging their attention and customer loyalty. Yet, these teams are still struggling to understand how well they’re performing in the minds of consumers, and more importantly, how they’re faring against their competitors.

Your online audiences are a strong indication of who your most loyal customers are. All of a brand’s marketing efforts taken online and offline influence consumers, and ultimately influence the decision on whether or not to follow them. By understanding your brand’s audience intimately, as well as your competitors’ audiences, you can make informed decisions and optimize social strategies; ultimately driving real business results. Therefore, conducting a thorough audience competitive analysis cannot be ignored.

Using the ‘Competitive’ analysis capabilities baked into the Affinio platform, you can understand what percentage of an audience cluster you hold over your competitors. This competitive information highlights which audience segments a brand or company ‘owns’. But not only that, it also helps to identify new market opportunities you didn’t know existed or audience segments you may want to conquest.

12PART TWO:Conduct Competitive Analysis

TAKEAWAYS

Identify new market opportunities

Create targeted data-driven content for niche segments where you lag behind competitors

Understand your current position within key audience clusters (or market segments)

Understand how you stand against your competition in niche communities

Extreme Sports Enthusiasts

Imagine having the data and insight to expand into new markets without having to conduct quantitative research on a local area that could take months, and dollars.

Unknown Audience Segments

Are you attracting customers you didn’t know about? Using Affinio you can uncover interest-based audiences you never knew existed. Leverage these insights to develop communications that attract more people like them and build your customer base.

Geographic Expansion

Identify untapped geographic audience segments and validate expansion into new locales. Use Affinio’s competitive analysis to understand how well your competitors are performing on a city, region, country, and worldwide level. Use these insights to inform your next moves moves and take it a step further by understanding the different

13PART TWO:Expand Into New Markets

TAKEAWAYS

Identify new market opportunities

Create targeted data-driven content for niche segments where you lag behind competitors

Understand your current position within key audience clusters (or market segments)

audience segments within each location – how do their interests vary?

Retail and Wholesale Expansion

Using Affinio’s interest tab, marketers can identify the stores and retailers most relevant to their audience. Use these insights to identify new retailers for your products where you know your ideal audience shops.

Content CreatorsMagazine Readers

Fashionistas

14WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Consumers are constantly changing – they don’t stop. Whether you’re a VP of Global Insights, a Brand Manager, Data Analyst, or a Content Marketer, insights are at the heart of all avenues of business.

So for the companies serving and selling to them, staying current with timely, high-quality, scalable, and actionable insights is needed to make a long-lasting, meaningful connection.

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