Scaling Audience First
We can discuss scale in 2 ways; firstly scale of data; and how that impacts insight and scalability of the reachable audience as a result of that insight.
In this episode, Dr. James Piecowye discusses with Paul Kelly how better decisions are made when you have the largest possible audience pool to give greater confidence in your decisions.
LISTEN HERE:
TRANSCRIPT:
Dr. James Piecowye: Welcome to know your audience, a marketing mini cast that explores how knowing an audience can unlock greater insight. In this episode, we address the issue of scale, and how we deal with it through understanding audience behavior.
One word for you; scale, {big word}. It’s a huge word. This is that word that seems to dominate conversations. And if it’s not in the conversation, it’s the elephant in the room. {Yep}. Is scale universal? How do we deal with it,
Paul Kelly: Scale is incredibly important for anything, anything you want to sell that is reaching as many people as possible with your message, and then hopefully getting them to convert, you know, it’s a numbers game. So the more people will see your message, maybe influenced, you know, keep the brand, Top of Mind, you’re in the supermarket, you’re putting your designs on the floor, and then suddenly, all those cues are incredibly important to that purchase behavior.
James:Every manager is going to say, how do we scale this?
Paul: Yeah, and that’s, I mean, that’s the most important thing of, of anything, right. And, I think when you’re, when you’re looking at, for instance, audience first, when you’re able to sort of apply the tools that are available out there, that you’re able to apply a huge amount of scale, and get a huge amount of results, about what an audience is interested in, within hours of having hundreds of millions of results of people, you know, audiences that you’ve you’ve followed and watched and got this information, it can take a matter of weeks to sort of coming up with a report with all this. And then your decisions about that scale. So you just mentioned, then what’s the marketing manager going to do to scale? You know, the academy scale is, the great thing is that it gives you a bigger, broader pool. So if you’re doing research, you probably going to get 1000 to 1500 people max in that research pool, you know, but if you could start that research with 10s of millions, it changes the dynamic because it gives you more confidence about what the markets doing, what people are doing what they’re doing inside the market, which then enables you to go, yeah, you know, what, we actually do need to invest in this, which will give us a lot of scale very quickly, or we actually need to take over YouTube, or we need to … actually scale isn’t that a problem, you know, we’ve, we’ve actually, we need to segment a lot more because we need to personalize a little bit more because that audience really values that.
James: So, the audience allows us to make better decisions.
Paul: Yeah, and then allows you to scale those decisions. So that’s the really interesting part is, it gives you unlimited scale, in terms of observation, power, and then it gives you the minutia that’s needed for those big decisions in the sense of recommendations and everything like that. So it’s a bit like starting from like an hourglass, you know, you start from a really wide funnel of stuff coming in, it gets filtered down, and then goes back out, you know, into a wider pool of how you’re going to reach those people. We’re going to talk to those people, and what platforms and what decisions you’re going to make? And do I need to get my salespeople involved in this, because what everything’s pointing towards actually running a bit more promotion, or we need to do a lot more brand building and what are all these decisions, and then I need to really brief better, my creative or any brief My Media guys a lot better, because you know what we’re ignoring some channels that really should be a part of, and we’re actually investing in channels that we shouldn’t really be a part of.
So all of that stuff gives you better scale for the budgets that you have. And whether those budgets are huge or small, it just enables smarter decisions, which in turn makes everything more effective, which in turn, in turn, means you for what you’re spending, you’re getting better results. And that that’s it through, you know, like and then scale means a lot of different things in this circumstance.
James: Interesting question that I think fires right on top of what we’ve been talking about. How do we deal with the fact that not everyone’s on social media, though, when you’re talking these sorts of numbers. So already, you know, you’re looking at, if we take where we are, we’re based in the United Arab Emirates and neighboring countries, Saudi Arabia, between them accounting for say, 40 to 45 million people, I think for probably closer to 45; of those daily active users, for instance, on Instagram are over half that. So you’re talking about a very large representative sample. And really where our recommendations’ sort of can come into play. If you are worried about that percentage of people that aren’t there, then this allows a much stronger brief for research and this approach. So, yes, social media is a limiting data set. But in some parts of the world, like where we live in the Arabian Gulf area. So many people are on social media, and it’s such an important communication tool. And there’s very little overlap between the different platforms that active users across different platforms. While there’s a lot that there are people who use them for really different things, you know, it’s all well defined and you’re talking about a large audience, you have a great degree of contour certainty. Yeah.
James: So that when we’re talking scale in the sense of this conversation, we’ve got the scale of the data we’re collecting. But we’ve also got the scale scaling of what we’re doing in our marketing, in our product rollout, because of the data. So we’ve actually got scale, we’re talking about scale in multiple ways.
Paul: Yeah, into really different ways. And I think the better informed the decisions are, then it just comes back to that original question about like, when you sort of taking this approach of ‘audience first’, it doesn’t change the dynamics about what works in the marketplace? What it does is enriches our understanding of how the next generation consumer, first of all, is going to be interacting with our product so and by the next-generation consumer that could actually be doesn’t, that’s not age-dependent at all. It’s how we could change somebody who’s not a consumer right now into our consumer. By understanding large-scale audiences, you begin to better paint that picture of whom it is going to be interested in what we do.
James: The takeaway from this episode is that better decisions are made when you have the largest possible audience pool to give greater confidence in your decisions.
You can get in touch with me across the socials @thejamescast or [email protected]
Paul:And get in touch with me both through d-a.co or otherwise, email me at [email protected]
Thanks for listening.
