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Social Media Consumer Behaviour Marketing

Fear factors: What you don’t know about your audience can hurt you

By Tim Burke, CEO and co-founder

June 3, 2016 | 5 min read

It’s easy enough to become complacent about your audience, once you believe you know their common demographics and tried-and-true lifestyle points. That core definition – age, gender, geo and a few interests – quietly becomes the default engine that drives your consumer marketing and media choices, year in and year out.

Tim Burke

Tim Burke

But what about all that juicy stuff you don’t know? Their hobbies, who they follow on social media, their content affinities, how they message, what content or online experience they consume and digest, what they share with friends, where and exactly how they spend their time in media channels? There’s exactly a 100 per cent chance that these pre-canned biases are keeping you from even taking the time to discover those things let alone appreciate and leverage them.

The root and peril of our biases

Complacency here is not really the marketer’s fault. For decades, standard media practices have been based on the use of fixed demographic, psychographic definitions or profiles to plan and buy media. In turn, publishers and ad tech providers have packaged their inventory and solutions, made their businesses, perpetuating the same core audience definitions.

Even as the industry advanced a bit and ventured into slightly more sophisticated audience behavioral options and approaches to transacting media, it remained easier for a brand to fix its understanding of its own consumer or audience to a static definition. That pat definition felt easy to understand, consistent and like all you really needed to execute. So, many a promising marketing campaign would plateau and never reach scale as a result of this complacency.

The myth of the persona

Agencies and creative teams participated in the problem by wielding the seemingly imaginative but truthfully just as static, so-called persona. This nifty little asset was essentially a use case that showed the day-in-the-life of a given consumer, through the lens of demographics and a few lifestyle or behavioral points, to help the marketer decide where and how much to buy as well as what the creative should be.

The problem with the time-honored convention of the “persona” is that it still pulls on a finite set of available inputs and doesn’t really look at the composition, myriad attributes and affinities of the audience. It’s a habit we’ve needed to break.

An intelligent approach

And now we have. Thanks to advancements in social graphing, data science and the available tech, marketers and their agencies are learning that the key is getting beyond the fixed, long-standing, pre-determined personas – “I sell high-end minivans and therefore my audience is female, 35-55, well-educated and spends their time shopping at Big Box retail, planning vacations and reading mom blogs” – and figuring out the full galaxy of people who are drawn to a brand and everything about their culture. They are using real, living, breathing data on what’s happening online right across the graph now vs. canned short-cuts.

What you will see is that the communities who like to congregate or are already congregating around your brand, constitute tribes, with their own far-reaching, detailed affinities and rich cultures, therefore opening up a much more scalable, extensible opportunity over time. This is a rich cultural fingerprint that can tell a brand so much that it absolutely needs to know about resonance and potential. Yet, very different than the handy, fixed demographic stats or even slightly richer “persona,” this open-ended opportunity for audience discovery is sometimes scary to marketers. Why?

The chronic fear of audience discovery

The agency or audience data solution provider is often in the difficult position of having to reveal that a marketer’s audience is quite different than what the brand previously believed. Why is this difficult? Because, once revealed, this may be the source of excitement or dismay, depending on what the marketer has invested in their belief. Positioning collateral, sales and marketing material, social media, media and advertising have all been planned and funded accordingly. Initiatives have been waged.

However, it should take only a moment to realize what this juncture represents. At this crossroads, you realize you have the chance to stop leaving opportunity on the table, to pivot and explore your true audience and deepen it. So, this level of transparency becomes vital, to step out of the chronic fear of audience discovery and embrace the higher importance of transparency. It is after all the discovery of your true audience and total transparency on its composition that will help you own the future.

Tim Burke is the CEO and co-founder of Affinio Inc

Social Media Consumer Behaviour Marketing

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