Social Segmentation & Monetization

As an Influencer agency, a lot of our campaigns begin from “the beginning” – we help brands identify their most powerful Influencers across the web – based on their demographics, psychographics, socialgraphics, personality, Reach, Resonance within their communities and Relevance to the brand’s ethos and messaging.  We build search algorithms and canvass every single social network to find YOUR Influencers.  But what if I told you that your existing social community ABSOLUTELY was home to an array of influencers who could help push your brand’s social success into the stratosphere?

It is.  Whether you’re ESPN and you have millions of fans on Facebook, or you’re a small business with 10,000 fans total, each and every one of those fans could conceivably play the role of “key Influencer”, if only you had a mechanism to uncover WHERE their influence resided.  Facebook is an amazing social tool on so many levels, but most importantly, Facebook is THE ONLY PLACE ON EARTH where the majority of the US population actually posts dozens if not hundreds of personal details about all aspects of their lives – favorite music, sports, clothing designers, artists, age, marital status, location, ambitions, favorite quotes, alma matter, purchasing power, and so much more.  And if you dig just a bit deeper, you can find out just how influential each of your existing fans is within each of their niche passions.  And if you dig deeper still, you can leverage all your existing fans to get this SAME insight about every one of their “friends” – on average 333 to be exact.

What we’re talking about here is Social Segmentation – creating a database of your existing fan base, extrapolating key information about all of your “fans” and their “friends”, and ultimately building an invaluable insight tool that allows you to craft communications that literally treat ALL existing fans as potential influencers in specific niche areas.

And it all begins with a simple social optin.

You promote this opt-in across your digital and social footprint, and provide a simple incentive to maximize the number of fans who push “allow.”  And as soon as they press that button, the magic begins.  Your database begins filling up, segmenting your entire fan base (and their friends) but over 500 classifications.  And although most large brands have a pretty good understanding of who their fan base is in the aggregate, almost NO brands know each individual social fan (and their friends) like our clients do.

It’s safe to assume that ALL Adidas fans on Facebook – for example – like Adidas.  That’s fairly obvious.  But sometimes it’s more effective for a brand to target their communication based on more personal consumer passions or insights.  Maybe Adidas is launching a new technology product and would like to know who among their fan base are early tech adopters, or fans of particular brands like Apple or Android.  Perhaps Adidas is pursuing a partnership with Kraft Foods, and is interested to know who likes Mac & Cheese (or whose FRIENDS like Mac & Cheese)!  By extrapolating key personal insights, suddenly Adidas can target communication to very specific audiences that represent the “lowest hanging fruit”.

One after another, Adidas’ entire fan base begins to opt-in both themselves and their friends, and the segmented database continues to grow and expand.  Everything of course is fully searchable, so no matter what we’re trying to accomplish, we can quickly and effectively uncover who within our database is the ideal audience for any and every campaign or outreach.  Perhaps we’re looking for married men 18 to 24 who like Eminem and live in Boston.  We can quickly build an outreach list of both Adidas fans and all their friends who match these criteria.

What’s more, clusters begin to form, essentially informing us of which groupings of fans and friends are most powerful, have the largest reach, or the greatest number of social influencers.  Now that we know, we can focus more attention on these groups and craft message accordingly, because they may very well represent our greatest opportunity to drive success.

And then comes the fun part – creating messaging targeting specific segments or clusters of our fan base (and their friends).  Instead of assuming we know what messaging will resonate with the social universe, we’re effectively crowd-sourcing everything, relying on the insights we glean from our fans and their friends to create messaging campaigns that cater directly to their passion points, and incentivize them to take action… and share with their friends!

Whether it’s through CRM, email, social, events or other channels, we target our messaging to specific segments of a brand’s fan base, catering to their passions and treating them ALL as potential valued Influencers.

And in a perfect world, we’re running multiple campaigns at the same time, each targeting different segments of a brand’s social footprint.  More advanced campaigns involve building coded messaging into the program, tracking redemption, online metrics and offline revenues, and measuring ROI and other KPI’s to the dollar through our platform.

This is the future of Influencer marketing and social media monetization, and the future has just begun!