Referrals: The customers who provide the most identifiable referrals
Feedback: The customers who have provided feedback or reviews regarding your company, products, or services
After you’ve identified this information, you can perform an analysis to discover and understand your customers’ defining characteristics. From there, you can create your audience profiles and then target people who fit the same mold.
Here are some of the data points you’ll want to include in your analysis:
Personal information: This kind of information includes your audience’s age (a rough age bracket), gender, income, and occupation.
Geographic information: This is where your existing customers live, as well as their time zone.
Language: Don’t assume your customers speak the same language as the one that’s dominant in the place they live. Identify their native language.
Interests: Interests are a hugely varied piece of the target audience. What do your customers like to do, besides using your products or services?
Purchasing potential: This not only includes the amount your current customers spend but also their income. It’s better to have a set bracket of income (for example, $50,000 to $65,999).
Stage of life: Are your customers likely to be college students? New parents? Retirees?
By the time you’ve analyzed your data points, you’ll have defined an understanding of each of the following:
Who is going to engage with your campaign
Which gamification platform will appeal best to your customers
Why your audience should choose to click on your campaign
Tailoring for B2B
If your campaign is targeting a business-to-business (B2B) audience, you’ll want to change the data points:
Contact’s details: Define the ideal position you’re looking to engage with (for example, marketing managers or sales managers).
Communication: Don’t assume that email is the best way to communicate. With certain professions, it may be more appropriate and engaging to inform them of your campaign via LinkedIn.
Company: This information includes the industries your audience are typically working in, as well as the size, location, and department.
Decision making: Look at what decision criteria your customers have when it comes to finally making a purchase. It would be ideal if you could understand what was most attractive and unique about your product.
These points can help you tailor your campaign to better appeal to and engage with your B2B customer base. To do this, your campaign will need to contain the same unique features and benefits you’ll find in these data points.
www.surveymonkey.com), shown in Figure 3-1.
FIGURE 3-1: DIY online sites such as SurveyMonkey allow you to obtain important data points via polls and surveys.
Mining Your Social Media Accounts
Your existing social media data can provide in-depth insights on strategy and growth for your gamification marketing campaign. Social media data is the collected information from all your social network channels that show how your users share, view, and engage with your company.
In this section, I look at how to target the key data points in your social media data, and then look at a few individual social media platforms. Then I look into the difference between meaningful social media data versus useless vanity metrics.
Identifying key data points
The data from your social media channels will contain key data points for you to analyze. These key data points show the overall progress your company is making on social media. By analyzing these data points, you and your team will be able to make far more informed decisions on your future campaign’s content.
Follower growth: Although your company may have a growing number of followers, you will find that it’s more important to identify who these followers are.Is the growth a healthy rise or was there an unusual spike due to a viral post? If it’s the latter, you may find that most of the influx of followers may not identify with your company and, therefore, won’t engage with your campaign.Ultimately, you need to identify if this audience matches up with your gamification marketing campaign’s objectives.
Engagement: I find this one of the most effective of all the social media data points you can analyze. Engagement is usually measured by looking at the number of likes, comments, and shares your company’s social media posts generate.Analyzing your engagement metrics can help illustrate what type of posts creates more user interaction. For instance, you may find that picture posts engage more with your audience than text-based ones. You may also find that articles or blog posts that focus on your industry create more shares than ones that talk about your company. I’ve even noticed that an interesting article can generate more engagement than special-offer blog posts.Generally, a high engagement rate indicates your company is connecting well with your audience.
Social reach: Your social reach metric will show you how many people have seen your messages and how far your messages have traveled. Social reach is a good indicator of how well your social media accounts and content attract new audience members.By analyzing your social reach, you can work out if your company is, in fact, connecting and interacting with the right people.Your social reach metrics are usually easily accessible on the insights page on each of your social media channels.
Impressions: This can be an extremely complex metric to obtain. Impressions show how many times your company’s posts showed up on an audience’s news feed or timeline. In some instances, audiences may see your posts several times on their newsfeed due to some of their friends sharing it. So, one user can have multiple impressions.
Follower count: In my experience, this is the one metric that, when analyzed on its own, is the most useless. You’ll probably be looking at this metric to see how big your company’s social media audience is reaching. However, if all those followers are not constantly engaging, then this metric holds little to no value.
Likes and shares: Likes given