Who are the people following our brand online? What about their real life? What do they do, what do they like? With an interest based segmentation we can isolate all mentions a brand and know who are physicians, payers, patients or caregivers talking about us and competitors. A new research method on social media enabling to know the audience intimately through their interests, affinities, and the content they share and consume. You can ran lookalike models on key segments to find and analyze niche groups. With this approach, big data can be turned into quali-quantitative data and identify core targets for the client’s brand.

Through this analytical technique and vast data sets, one could evaluate brand equity, potential repositioning of the brand, test media targets, potential partners for the brand and get a much deeper understanding of a brand’s top of mind awareness in the market place. One could also evaluate each of these among its core audiences by analyzing the content of social media messages, affinities and demographics of the audience.

The advantages of an interest based segmentation are to:

IDENTIFY AN INTEREST-BASED AUDIENCE SEGMENT

Brands attract numerous audience segments with varying interests, passions, and lifestyles.

Each audience segment requires different communications.

UNDERSTAND THAT SEGMENT INTIMATELY

What are their favourite brands?

Who influences them most? Celebrities? Athletes? YouTubers?

What are they key interests?

How do they self-describe?

What content do they trust and where do they get it? Blogs? News?

IMMERSE IN THEIR CULTURE

Audiences are constantly changing. With new apps, media channels, and trends continually emerging, we need to connect with the audience at the speed of culture.

AMPLIFY THE CONTENT ON THE RIGHT CHANNELS

While content may be stellar, we still need to get it in front of the right people, we need to focus on our potential customers.  We need to identify what domains and channels are popular with our ideal audience segment.

FORGET VANITY METRICS

Big Likes, retweets, etc. don’t matter. When using an audience-first approach, goals are to identify, resonate with, and attract the right audience. The new standard of measurement should be the value of the audience and who exists within it. It’s the age-old matter of quality versus quantity.

Instead of discovering what the audience say about a brand, the methodology allows to know who the audience is. It allows to segment the targets online and identify the correlations between brands and personal interests. Big Data helps answering questions never asked.