I love a strong piece of audience insight. It can be enlightening and is crucial to driving forward a strong creative strategy. Understanding your audience is obviously an important and required step towards achieving your goal and creating something your consumer will enjoy and engage with. This becomes even more important when talking about content in social channels.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and many other social channels are designed as platforms where people can easily pick up and share content that they come across. Most of this is found through people users know (both virtual and real-world) and most of it is personal content created in real-life situations, using friends, family, cats, dogs and holidays. Consumers are definitely not desperately waiting for brands to provide them something to entertain them; they certainly won’t be able to give you the key to what they will or won’t engage with.
Insight should inspire and direct creative to break new ground. Being the first with something in social can often be the difference between success or just going down as a rip-off of something that’s been done before. A consumer most likely won’t share something if they’ve seen it before, no matter how clever it may be.
Insight should be concise and focussed on certain elements of the lives of your audience – things that make them different to the crowd and hopefully inspires something to pique their interest and standout. Discussing how millennials interact using their phones isn’t going to help break the new creative ground, which should be your brand’s mission if it wants to stand out.
Most millennials also hunt for new content and innovative new experiences because they want something to share with friends. They want something that will make them stand out and give them social currency. Who doesn’t want that? It’s the same as having a good story to tell when you meet your mates down the pub.
So look to focused, realistic insights about your audience, but don’t be blinded by it. Be customer-focussed, not customer-driven. Go with the new; go with something you’d want to tell your friends about down the pub. Insight should inspire and direct creative to new ground and to be the first.
Chris Hassell is founder of Ralph and Co
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