Relevance - How to successfully create audiences that drive action for your brand - BrightonSEO Spring 2021

Editor's Notes

• #6: But you might’ve heard of some of our clients. (here comes a bit of a flex, sorrynotsorry)
• #7: [open to slide with logos - don’t say a word - let the slide speak for itself for a moment] We work with global brands to more niche companies. We also work with governmental organisations and the odd non-profit.
• #8: Our real specialism is targeting high net worth individuals for luxury brands,
• #9: But - yes - we also know how to reach other audiences and have a great process of how to get our clients seen by mass and niche audiences.
• #10: But that’s not why I’m here today. I’m here today to talk to you about data.
• #11: More specifically – How to successfully create audiences that drive action for your brand.
• #12: And yes, we do that with data!
• #13: Let’s start with a question. How often do you spend money that’s truly independent from other people in your life? Like making the decisions of when and where to go on holiday, or making the decision to attend BrightonSEO.
• #14: In those decisions were you the person who had the inspiration to make the decision? Did you drive the decision forward? Or did you pull out the credit card and make the purchase? And Vice Versa, how often have you been the one driving the decision-making but it was someone else who put their name on the contact form or paid with their own card?
• #15: By understanding this we can make an important distinction: just because you’re spending money or making a purchase, doesn’t mean you are the one who is consciously deciding how that money is being spent.
• #17: So, what would happen if you made the mistake of just talking to people who fit the bill rather than the ones who really inspire and drive the action forward. Let’s look at some examples.
• #18: Children and teens are a powerful audience driving action for many kinds of campaigns. A simple but classic example is cereal commercials… would the parent won't even know about the product if the child doesn't request it? But what about today?
• #19: How about v bucks for Fortnite? Or any other in-app purchase for that matter… The players are your action drivers here and it doesn’t matter if they have the card details in their name.
• #20: These are quite straightforward but let’s now think about a few cases where this gets a little bit more nuanced...
• #21: It’s not just kids’ products which can sometimes be targeted toward children. One of our colleagues used to work at Cartoon Network and mortgage, real estate and car companies would all advertise in between kids shows or during the hours of children’s television. She told me that they conducted extensive research and focus groups to help prove this connection to the media buyers. Worth remembering here that it’s not just commercials that can tap into this audience. The message can also be in other formats: giveaways, tie ins, events, and the like organised by brands (have you heard about the movie screenings or concerts in fortnite?).
• #22: We work with a financial services client and their goals are to reach and engage very specific kinds of professional investor. Now we could just go after the presidents of their target organisations or the ones we know who are approving all the decisions, but it's important to remember that there are other members of the team. While these C-suite senior executives sign off on proposals, you have a chain of individuals from them to the chief investment officer, market strategists and analysts. It’s quite likely that it is these other - and some of them more junior - members of the team who are actually doing the research, formulating the strategy, creating the budget, and delivering the business plan for sign off from the c-suite. So when planning our b2b campaigns for this client we made sure that ad spend was targeting at all rungs of the audience to ensure that we weren’t missing the action-driving researchers who might be the ones behind the decisions of the more senior members of the team,
• #23: Or if we consider the HNW household, the family is actually run a bit like a business and there can be a lot of people involved – executive assistants, a security detail, tutors, legal advisors, and a family office are all there to research, vet, and analyse options before they get anywhere near the actual family members who would be approving the purchase. We had a client in the aviation sector speak with us last year and their service was designed to save time and money for the people looking to book private flights with a disruptive online platform. While their target flyer is clearly a high-net-worth one, the real benefit would actually be seen by the executive assistants - or whoever is managing the family’s calendar. So for this client in this specific niche, the assistants would be a real action-driving audience and should also be targeted with clear and distinct messaging to help drive action for this brand. The family members would care about the bottom line - for sure - but they may only wish to know when their car is coming to pick them up.
• #24: But you don’t need to be UHNW to be disconnected from the decisions that you are making. Creating an action-driving audience all comes from understanding more about the relationships between people: in families, in workplaces, on social media, between people and influencers, and so on.
• #25: You all should know what an audience is by now so I’m not going to go over the ‘what’ here, instead I want to try and challenge you to think about what you mean by an audience in 2021. How have audiences, and how has audience building, changed? What should we be bearing in mind as we get into 2021 with so many changes to privacy coming?
• #26: The first thing to always remember when you're thinking about audiences is they aren't data, they’re people. Data may unify people in easy to manage buckets for your ads team but to really connect, engage, it's important to discover what unites them on a more emotional level.
• #27: Who are the people you wish to engage with your brand? What customers would you like more of? But more than that, think about the passion which may unite some or all of them. [next slide] Sports like football, golf, skiing. [next slide] Music - are they a jazz fan or maybe a metal-head? [next slide] Do they love horses?
• #28: Sports like football, golf, skiing. [next slide] Music - are they a jazz fan or maybe a metal-head? [next slide] Do they love horses?
• #29: Music - are they k pop stans, metal heads, or musical theatre kids? [next slide] Do they love horses?
• #30: [next slide] Do they love horses?
• #31: What is their tribe?
• #32: To engage the people you wish to reach and drive them to action you have to find a way of really putting something on a screen which resonates with the person you're showing it to. What can you show people to connect with them, and make them know you’re speaking just to them? It’s by finding the tribe, and its emotional common ground, that you can help your campaigns (again - not think advertising, think content, PR, video, experiences when we’re allowed out again) to not simply convince the people who were going to buy from you anyway, but also convince those who are on the fence or those who weren't even considering you in the first place.
• #33: We are thinking, feeling, sentient creatures and after a year like 2020 which really brought mental health to the foreground for so many, the need for an emotional connection suddenly feels far more important and relevant for everyone - brands included. So I’d challenge you to think beyond the buckets of people. Ask how your creative can be more human and how it can connect and engage the humans you want as customers.
• #34: There’s so much you could go into when it comes to audiences, but I hear you remind me: Ned, this is a data talk. Where does data come into all this?
• #35: You need data to understand who, among everyone you could possibly reach, is among your action driving audience.
• #36: But the metrics that matter can really differ depending on your service and indeed who you want as customers.
• #37: If you were an interior designer, the individuals who spend a lot of time on your site and who view many of your project pages, show strong signs of being the action driving audience because interiors are a very personal and emotional decision.
• #38: Conversely, if you were a helicopter charter company looking for repeat business clients, someone who spends a lot of time on your site browsing trip ideas could just be dreaming about a one-off special occasion, while someone who goes straight to your pricing or airports pages, and enquires on these pages, could indicate someone who is familiar with your service and could be an excellent action driver for long-term business.
• #39: So the beauty of data in digital is that we are able use specific information about people and their behaviour online to create the buckets of individuals who are action-driving and non-action driving, and then we can further use data to refine these buckets by their interests, passions, so brands are able to deliver the resonant or emotional message they need to hear
• #40: But before we go wild looking for this data I wanted to share a story and highlight a few caveats.
• #41: This is from “How Not to Be Wrong” by Jordan Ellenberg and I’ve paraphrased an excellent story from Penguin Press on Medium about the quite brilliant Abraham Wald and his role within the USA Statistical Research Group. In case you haven’t heard this before, here’s the context: You don’t want your planes to get shot down by enemy fighters, so you armor them. But armor makes the plane heavier, and heavier planes are less maneuverable and use more fuel. Armoring the planes too much is a problem; armoring the planes too little is a problem. Somewhere in between there’s an optimum. In World War 2, when American planes were coming back from engagements all over Europe, they were often covered in bullet holes but the damage on the aircraft wasn’t uniformly distributed. There were more bullet holes in the fuselage, not so many in the engines.
• #42: The military officers presenting this data saw an opportunity for efficiency; you can get the same protection with less armor if you concentrate the armor on the places with the greatest need, where the planes are getting hit the most. But the statistician Abraham Wald, looked at the data and asked a different question: where are the missing holes? The ones that would have been all over the engine casing, if the damage had been spread equally all over the plane? The armor, said Wald, doesn’t go where the bullet holes are.
• #43: It goes where the bullet holes aren’t: on the engines. Now… this account may be dramatised a little (or a lot)… but the core concept is real: this is something called survivorship bias and it refers to the mistake of concentrating on the people or things that made it past a selection process while overlooking those that did not.
• #44: So, while there’s any amount of data out there which you can use to your best advantage, it's important that you're also aware of any limitations, gaps, or where you might see false positives.
• #45: On Facebook you can target by interests, but some of these are from your page likes. I don’t think I’ve updated my likes on Facebook since I had a flip phone…
• #46: I recently made a list of central banks for a non-profit organisation we work with. Turns out the Bank of England is 18-24.
• #47: And I’m sure you’ve all also seen the news of the death of the cookie and the coming of F-L-O-Cs - flocks? - so this is another thing to have in the back of your head when it comes to audience building and the data you have to build your audiences with.
• #48: I highlight these points to ensure that when you think about data you don’t take what’s on the face of it. Try and look around the curtain a little bit. Be critical. Don’t be afraid to ask questions of the data you have access to when you are profiling your audience and exploring who your action drivers are.
• #49: “Okay” I hear you say. “I get it that data might not be 100% accurate or I need to take it with a pinch of salt sometimes. What next - will you tell me where I can find the data I need to identify my action-driving audiences yet? Let’s dive in.
• #50: In short: there lots of places and quite a few of them are free though free does also tend to equal time consuming.
• #51: Firstly, just ask your customers!
• #52: Go ahead - just ask them things like “Why did you pick me?” “What do you like?” “What do you dislike?” Does this reveal any common grounds? And beyond this, does this reveal how they found your brand? Was it them or someone else that recommended you?
• #53: Your customers, however, may not always reveal the full story, or reveal the larger trends. So here we need to turn to different and larger sources:
• #54: Your customer database.
• #55: If your privacy policies allow, you can plug your crm email lists into online tools (paid and unpaid) that can reveal interesting insights about your audience. Platforms like google ads, linkedin, twitter, facebook, can all do this. And what trends emerge vs market or regional averages?
• #56: Going slightly larger, what about your analytics? Doesn’t have to be Google Analyticsthough I presume most of you use that and that’s my reference point here too.
• #57: Pages per session, session duration, and specific pages visited are all useful metrics to look at within your analytics to understand how your action-driving audiences interact with your website. What can you see when you compare segments against one another? Are there any significant differences between the people who download brochures vs those who make a purchase or submit a contact form? Can you create retargeting lists off of these attributes or lookalike audiences to help broaden your reach?
• #58: If you have audience insights turned on within GA or Adobe - if not, maybe a question for your legal team - this could tell you interesting insights about age, gender, in-market segment, affinities, and other interests. What stands out from one user segment to the next? What are the striking trends of certain groups of site visitors and what qualities are revealed about them which you can load into an advertising platform? If you have the dev power, why not set up a custom dimensions to report the type of customer to your analytics provider so you can segment based on this information - it could be something as simple as professional vs individual client, or more detailed depending on how you categorise individuals in your CRM
• #59: And now number 4, social media. This can be done for free if you know your action driving audience. Twitter and Instagram are also both great places to learn more about your target customers and explore what’s important to them by looking at their followings and whose content they share. Twitter’s a bit easier to work with but both allow you to learn the same kind of information if you just look at their followings, what hashtags they use, and whose content they share or retweet. I know many times where we’ve researched people to explore their common job titles, skills, locations, and interests to help tailor campaign for them.
• #60: First start with your own followers - who are they? What’s in their bio? What do they tweet about? Have you been able to attract who you want as a customer to follow you on social media? If not why not?
• #61: If you can do this for yourself - what about your competitors? Are there any differences? Have they been able to do better? Not going to share who we think of here!
• #62: And most importantly, look at your specific audiences. Who do they follow? Who are in their circles of influence? What are their particular interests, are there any local or industry-specific groups they follow or share content from?
• #63: This combination of anecdotal first-hand information from your customers, your owned CRM data, site and social engagement data, and tools or platforms that can perform analysis at scale, are the key methods of discovering the data that can allow you to define the key attributes of the action driving audiences for your brand.
• #64: In sum:
• #65: To successfully create audiences that drive action for your brand, you need to be able identify which audiences are the ones who will push for change within their circle of influence.
• #66: These action driving individuals may or may not be the final decision maker or the end purchaser. Do you need to target the head of the household or the executive assistant, the child or the parent, head of the bank or the analyst.
• #67: Data in all its various forms can help you differentiate between the action-driving and non action-driving audiences for your or your client’s brand and different ad platforms can help you reach these individuals with varying levels of granularity.
• #68: So where could you get started with this?
• #69: 1: Look at your buyers and challenge your preconceptions about them. Are they likely to be buying for themselves, for someone else, or on behalf of a group of people?
• #70: 2: who else might be involved and who might be the one driving the purchase forward? What intermediaries might be involved who you should be asking to recommend you?
• #71: 3: Look at the non-converters on your site and on social media. These are your planes that don’t return, your missing bulletholes. Who has been engaging, coming from the right places, but not making that final action? Who might they be representative of and is there hidden value in these visitors which you aren’t using because they don’t convert?