Microaudience marketing works: Spectrum Group

Shipley.

The concept of personalised marketing is more advanced than ever in a digital age where opinions are transmitted at the speed of the Internet on social media. "The audience has a bigger appetite for the right type of content than we necessarily understand," said Ben Shipley, MD, Spectrum Group, who linked learnings from the election of US President Donald Trump to bring this home at the first Kopi with Spectrum Group in Singapore. 

In How a giant orange hate carrot won the US Election and changed communications forever, Shipley shared that US President Donald Trump's election win has many new lessons for marketers around the world. He is already seeing some of the same techniques put into place by brands in Australia and New Zealand, he said.

The idea of a clear single message that a brand can keep returning to is no longer marketing gospel, as Trump has been able to stretch his brand to mean different things to different micro-audiences, Shipley explained. "(Trump) biffed that concept right out of the window," Shipley said. "To each group he delivered a message that was relevant and which was contradictory to the one that was delivered the day before."

"He bridged issues that in the past would have absolutely ended his campaign," Shipley added, pointing out that with a stretched brand the failure of one message does not mean catastrophe for the brand as a whole. "Brands need to work out how to be more relevant to more people, and less unitary."

While being all things to all men is unlikely to work in a group setting, finding common ground with separate micro-audiences is effective, Shipley said. Despite conflicting messaging, people tend to connect to the messages they feel are relevant to them, the "one thing that made the difference", and compromise on or ignore messages which they did not like, he said.

"More and more people are sitting in smaller and smaller rooms surrounded by (other people who) vigorously agree with that opinion...niche interest groups definitely work."

The Trump election experience reinforces the idea that brands should build media channels of their own, as it is harder now to get media coverage in a shrinking media landscape, Shipley said. "If you can write good content that is not full of brand wank (it will resonate with your audience) but you do have to make sure it's not about you, it's about the audience," he said.
  
Digital tools such as Taboola, and Outbrain can also increase the longevity of content, Shipley added. "Sustaining a piece of coverage and keeping the right audience engaged is an interesting (concept) that not enough brands are making use of yet," he said.

Another digital concept that is emerging relies on long-term analytics. Shipley said that with new people joining audience every day, what is effective one day may no longer be so in the next. "It may be better to have a publishing approach," he said. "Upload stories regularly and then get the data and see how they are performing."

The industry now has the ability to make decisions based on real behaviours instead of theoretical insights, with companies such as Cambridge Analytica able to generate psychographic profiles that can determine more about mindset and intent than was possible before, he said. The University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre has come up with ways to analyse social media feeds that can say a lot about a person, Shipley said, and additional data can be gathered through various means including quizzes on Facebook, which typically require permission for the quiz maker to do data mining on that user's account.

"We're not too far away from the point where we are have a model of an ecosystem and be able to test campaigns and ideas and messages before they get to market. We (have to try) to get our heads around modelling and having machines in charge of campaigns definitely makes marketing a lot more complex but potentially a lot more effective as well," he concluded.

Interested?

Try the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre psychometric profiling test, which is based solely on social media