In the era of big data, information reigns supreme as marketers try to mold their message to a seemingly infinite number of consumer segments with different affinities. Companies might have a good sense of which of those segments they want to target from a demographic perspective – gender, generation, household income, and other factors – but how to target them with a message that resonates is a greater challenge.
Understanding the psychographics of each target segment – the interests, attitudes, values, personality, opinions, and beliefs that drive them – enables marketers to craft marketing messages and campaigns that are most likely to get attention and action. Unfortunately, while demographic information can be obtained from a variety of sources, this kind of psychographic information about a segment is not readily available.
To provide brands with a solution to this challenge, O360 is proud to introduce our Consumer Portraits offering, specifically designed to provide a rich, in-depth view of a target audience based on the information they are already sharing publicly online. With Consumer Portraits, brands can better engage specific customer segments based on nuanced details that otherwise might go unnoticed and, thus, never adequately be leveraged to help customize and guide messaging and tactics.
With targeted content, a company's messages and offers can be better tailored to specific characteristics, interests, and values and aligned with the right media channels, celebrities, and complementary brands to drive greater engagement and, ultimately, higher ROI and conversion rates. O360’s Consumer Portraits provide companies with a far more in-depth understanding of a customer base and what impacts consumer behavior. In a crowded, noisy marketplace where differentiated and targeted content is king, O360 gives brands the ability to let their message genuinely reflect the voice and mindset of the customer.
Leveraging Profiles for a Personalized Message
Social profiles afford brands a unique understanding of the many affinities that shape the different consumer segments’ decision-making process. From personal interests to favorite brands, and from binge-watched television shows to celebrity crushes, social profiles provide an accurate and thorough reflection of an audience’s thoughts, emotions, passions, and perspectives. O360's Consumer Portraits mine social profiles for each identified segment according to specific criteria. This then enables companies to create and deliver nuanced content, messaging, and campaigns within the segment using many different factors, including:
- Gender
- Generation (Boomer, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z)
- Location (country, state, city)
- Specific Interests (lifestyle, hobbies, music, TV, sports, etc.)
- Values (nonprofits, politics, family, law, etc.)
- Personality (OCEAN model)
Such criteria drive the development of a holistic audience structure built around identification, consumer segmentation, and persona development. Collectively, this criteria can serve as the foundation for all effective audience activations and inform a highly customized and effective approach to marketing and branding.
A Short Aside: Anonymized, Aggregate Information - Not PII
Concerns over personal data have dominated the news cycles over the first half of 2018. Such concerns will not be dissipating anytime soon with Europe rolling out GDPR and seemingly every large company naming a Chief Data Security Officer. At O360, we justifiably take data security extremely seriously and base our Consumer Portraits exclusively on publicly shared information on social profiles that is anonymized and aggregated at the segment level.
We don’t store or provide our clients with any personally identifiable information (PII), as our dashboards present the results from our models’ analysis of qualitative natural language in an aggregate, quantitative manner. Simply put, we won’t tell you what would resonate with “John Doe,” but we can tell you what will likely resonate with a Gen-X male from Seattle in the segment that “John Doe” belongs to in your CRM, DMP, or other databases.
Persona Development & Consumer Segmentation
The critical first step in developing a compelling message that engages the audience is insightful consumer segmentation or, in simpler terms, dividing customers into groups by shared characteristics. The resulting segments allow companies to market to each specific group with precision and impact according to their unique affinities. In business-to-consumer marketing, consumer segments typically get divided and organized according to basic demographics, including age, location, marital status, or life stage (single, married, divorced, empty-nester, retired, etc.).
Obviously, in a dynamic, ever-evolving marketplace, thorough consumer segmentation needs to incorporate many more data points than merely the most basic of demographics. To that point, with the help of insightful and innovative technology, brands can segment their audience within each segment using finer psychographic data points to hone their message further. From favorite songs and athletes to loved movies or hobbies, finely-tuned characteristics of specific segments give brands the information needed to craft targeted campaigns that engage at far more profound levels.
O360’s AI-driven solution, Consumer Portraits, serves as a foundation for refining and defining much more precise personas of whom a brand should target as well as how -- the nuanced characteristics best used to influence marketing, product development, and the overall brand.
