Editor’s note: Robin Boytos is the VP of Ayzenberg Insights. AListDaily is the editorial and publishing arm of the Ayzenberg Group, the parent company of Ayzenberg Insights.
What if you could tell whether a daughter used her mom’s public social media account? What if you could tell if the person who commented on your post was a family man, or if the person who liked your page was quirky?
If you’re a content marketer, this knowledge is extremely helpful. You’re able to gear your communications to different people in ways that resonate.
As an analytics professional, I’ve recently discovered the power of audience profiling as a tool to understand consumer behaviors. With the emergence of AI and machine learning processes, computing capabilities have soared, and now analytics is catching up and using this information to create content and marketing strategies.
Social media is the largest source of unsolicited consumer opinions, giving us loads of information on target consumers ages 13 to 34—those who use social media the most. We’re presented with a well of information for marketers to better understand their consumers via audience profiling.
Audience profiling takes textual data from social media posts and translates it into personalities, needs and values. Audience profiling also gives us information about what kinds of branded and non-branded content our audience responds to, when they typically interact on social media and, most importantly, gives us insight into why they are more apt to respond to certain types of content.
The benefits of audience profiling are extensive. We can now segment consumers not just by demographics and general reported interests, but by personality and demonstrated behaviors, too. And this information allows us to develop creative that resonates more personally with the targeted audiences.
For me, the most exciting part of audience profiling is seeing a post like this:
playing D&D with the @GrokNation crew. #adulting #geekchic pic.twitter.com/sA1sBW1yDm
— Mayim Bialik (@missmayim) August 20, 2017
This one is easy—between image recognition and understanding social speech we know this person is a nerd and quirky.
But what about this?
A post shared by Jim Parsons (@therealjimparsons) on
This language is not so obvious. The way that the speech is written indicates a few things: he takes pleasure in life, he is highly curious, open to experiences and willing to try new things. Granted, this is just one post, and it takes much more than one post worth of speech to define one’s personality, but you get the point.
So how does this help me as a content marketer? Let’s take these opinionated political posts:
https://twitter.com/Chelseashow/status/905785230056841218
Old school marketing tells me I should feed this person with political ads because they’re talking about politics, right? But new school marketing with audience profiling tells me this person is a leader, challenges authority and has a high degree of emotionality.
That means we should serve them confident, bold messaging—maybe something that speaks to them as a leader. When I match that with the fact that they also liked a post about shoes several months ago, we have bold, confident messaging tied to a shoe brand. I think that’s powerful.
What if someone’s social speech revealed they have an impulsive personality, and they just received a promotion at their job? Their emotions are on high—hitting them with an ad at that moment is a recipe for success.
The industry isn’t that far yet, but with ever new computing capabilities, the possibilities are endless.