Last updated on August 1st, 2017 at 10:22 am
These days it’s all about the data. The more data we have, the more information we are armed with. When you have deep insights into your audience, that data is even better.
Maybe you’re like me, and get excited about data. Or maybe you shy away from data, because of the sheer volume, or you don’t like having to make sense of it. By happy accident I was introduced to Affinio, a SaaS platform that turns incomprehensible amounts of customer data into actionable insights.
What is Affinio?
Affinio is a marketing intelligence platform that powers deep audience discovery and interest-based segmentation. Affinio’s technology lets marketers look at the billions of connections between individuals, evaluate them, and reason about them in aggregate. Affinio uncovers like-minded communities within any audience by segmenting individuals based on their shared interests and affinities. Affinio features enable complete and robust audience discovery that informs precise and targeted marketing strategies.
The Basics
There are two pillars to Affinio: Audience Discovery, and Audience Segmentation.
Advanced machine learning algorithms analyze billions of interest variables and network connections to produce easy-to-understand graphics and charts.
Affinio takes your first party data sets (from your CRM, surveys, and other transactions) and third party data sets like social media (Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, and LinkedIn), and combines them to provide what might otherwise be hidden insights into your audience. What you end up with is a visual of users in “clusters”, based on the commonalities they share across those datasets.
Looking For Insights
“When tasked with analyzing the likes, habits, and trends of a group, our go to methodology is usually to consider each individual’s personal inclinations and extrapolate those to say something broadly about the group as a whole. We see this in opinion polls, in user surveys, and sometimes, in social analysis.”[1]
Segmenting and clustering your audience can be an eye opener.
Uncover hidden audience segments with interest-based segmentation. Do you know your audience interests, affinities, and the content they share and consume intimately enough? There are natural forming communities based on united passions.
Create data-driven buyer personas with deep audience insights that combine psychographic data that goes beyond demographics. Target with precision and provide a consistent reference point for informing strategies, creating content, providing customer service, building new product features, and more.
Empower your content strategy by understanding what content already resonates with your key audience segments. Proof positive of the keywords, hashtags, images, and media that your audience is already consuming, and what they aren’t.
Know your activators, and identify relevant influencers and partnership opportunities, based on the interests and affinities of your target audience. The results may surprise you.
Monitor changing audience dynamics and trends over time to ensure your communications are always relevant. Benchmark how marketing initiatives are performing by monitoring how audience segments are growing, shrinking, or emerging.
Gain competitive intelligence with insight into untapped geographic audience segments and understand how well your competitors are performing regionally or globally.
Data Visualization
Algorithms can provide us with data in hours, or even minutes. Understanding that data could take months. Data visualization is the future, and not to sound cliché, but that future is now.
At the heart of your business is your audience, your customers. Affinio is the way to understand them.
[1] Affinio, Leveraging the Interest Graph to Gain Insights at the Speed of Culture. http://go.affinio.com/l/273392/2016-11-24/88t/273392/1566/eBook_Leveraging_the_Interest_Graph.pdf
