Audience Maps, the Only Tool You Need to Make Sure You Understand Your Audience Correctly
Defining Audience Maps:
To start off this blog we’ll define what an audience map is. Audience maps are an in-depth way to profile your target audience for marketing purposes. Audience maps are very important because they allow you to target the ideal members of a community for your campaign . eCairn’s Conversation™ platform maps communities and reveals many unique insights on these audiences.
Before we demonstrate how eCairn maps an audience we’ll show you what the process would be like if you were to do it manually. Our example for this manual mapping will be in a B2B context. Let’s say that you want to map an audience of oncologists on Twitter for your marketing efforts. This would require you to sift through hundreds if not thousands of profiles to make sure that you are targeting the right people. Here is a more detailed look into the manual process…
The Manual Process:
Our exact goal will be to list the top oncologists based out of the U.S. This means that to start off we have to ignore all of the oncologists that are not in our target area. eCairn is able to do this automatically through Conversation™ because we have all of this valuable information in our database. The below screenshot is taken from inside the Conversation™ platform. In the red circle you’ll see that we have automatically gathered the city and country for this example profile.
Location is easily accesible in Conversation™
Once you filter out by location, you’ll have to figure out the size and relevance of those that you want to target. This means that you will have to check the follower count of every profile to make sure it fits within your target range. As you can imagine this is a very time consuming process. We simplify this process by having an “influence” and “reach” ranking in our platform. Our “reach” metric automatically uses follower count to sort people in a community. Our “influence” metric is a little more convoluted than this. With our influence score, we take into account many measures that would be near impossible to do on your own. We look at metrics such as how many likes, retweets, comments, and shares people get within their community. Below is a screenshot from Conversation™ that shows you how easily you can sort through and access reach and influence.
The next step in my manual process would be to filter out on other factors such as age, gender, etc. Depending on the goal of the campaign, there are many different demographics and factors that would need to be weeded out. With our platform, we have all of these niches covered in our database.
Above you can see the variety of information that we have stored for our profiles. You have access to gender, an age range, company name, and the contents of the Twitter bio.
Now that we’ve gathered all of the attributes of our influencers we have to start looking for them. One popular method of doing this is by using Twitter’s search feature. To find influencers in your niche you should search hashtags that are popular in that specific community. To find oncologists we would search up hasgtags such as #oncology, #MedTwitter, etc. Searching these hashtags will reveal hundreds of influencers. We know would have to measure their influence by looking at the amount of likes, retweets, and replies that they are receiving on a regular basis.
Another way to find influencers in a niche is through Twitter Spaces. Twitter Spaces is a relatively new feature on Twitter that allows thousands of users to gather in an audio chat room. Many of these chat rooms are hosted for a discussion around specific niches and fields. For our example of oncology we would have to find a Twitter Spaces that is hosted by some promininent members of the Oncology community.
Now that we’ve discussed various ways to manually create a list of influencers for a marketing campaign, we’re going to show you how we would accomplish this with eCairn.
The eCairn Way:
Our first step is very similar. First you start by identifying an initial group of people that you want to target and map.
Then we look at the network of that group and filter people out who meet the initial criteria.
After that group of people has been collected, we can filter further based on further criteria.
This cycle is better depicted by the diagram below.
source: How to track video views in Google Analytics
Here is another diagram that visually shows how we filter networks at each step.
Check out one of our older blogs to see the results we got from an actual mapping of the oncology community on Twitter. You’ll see that were able to compile a comprehensive list of the 500 most influential people in the Oncology community. These accounts were chosen out of a total of 10,000 influencers.
If you are interested in learning more about our software and/or are curious about your own influence score, leave your info in the form and we’ll get back to you shortly.