Beyond Social Media: Using Behavioral Analytics for Messaging Strategies

The right messaging strategy to connect with your customers, especially on social media, can take your brand to the next level of success. As businesses become savvier and savvier in ensuring a market fit for a product, their marketing heads are also constantly thinking about bringing about a strong message/customer fit. What does this mean?

Simply put, to be able to create enough demand in the market, a business needs to not only solve an unmet need or a pain point but also be able to communicate that value effectively to the right customers, at the right time and place. Without a message and customer fit, a product and market fit can fail. This corresponding value proposition with what customers are actually looking for is the missing piece for many marketing strategic plans. Without that keystone to hold the whole plan together, the projected ROI won’t match the actual outcomes of the strategy and initiatives.

With this in mind, and with the digital revolution manifesting itself in the form of on-the-go touchpoints, social media, review platforms, blogs, location-based targeting, etc., nudges to drive interactions with the brand have become easier. Brands can better answer the following questions:

• What is the context?
• Who is the audience?
• What should trigger a message?
• Where should the target audience receive the message?
• When was the last contact made, and how intrusive is it? Is it too intrusive?

Yet, when people receive targeted social media advertisements that are marketing services or products that aren’t relevant to them, we all wonder, “where are marketers going wrong?” We have a ton of data and access to customers, thanks to social media advertising and digital channels. Then why is it that we are still going by simple demographic and attitudinal segmentation to design messaging?

It turns out the vast amount of data we store is not sufficient to devise thought-through, perfectly-timed, messages that deliver the greatest impact. What is missing in this puzzle is a smart platform to churn all this data and understand your customers’ decision-making process. Enter behavioral analytics.

Behavioral analytics go beyond the “who” and “what” to understand the “how” and “why” behind your customers’ choices. In that sense, it is a forward-looking method, as it can tell you how your customers will behave in the future. With this intelligence in your arsenal, you will know which messages will resonate the most with your customers, and lead to the highest customer responses. An added layer of behavioral analytics will help you answer questions like:

• What is the value of each individual message element for my product on key parameters, such as:

1. 1. 1. 1. Motivation / Call-to-Action?
         2. Believability?
         3. Uniqueness / Differentiation (Clarity/Relevance)?

• What statements/claims resonate best overall with the stakeholder groups and individually with each group, and why? How believable are they?
• What statements/claims will effectively address the unmet needs that my product solves?
• What order of statements/claims builds the most compelling story across all stakeholder groups and for each group?

These, and similar pointed questions, can help build a more targeted strategy for reaching and engaging with customers and even general social media audience members who haven’t become customers yet. Marketers need to know not only who would receive these social media messages, but which message to match to which potential or current customer persona, to make the best impact of marketing investment.

With technological advances in the targeting of social media ads and posts to specific audiences, businesses have the tools they need to take action on the insights they can gain from behavioral and cognitive analyses of their customer base. Their audience can be segmented down to the individual level to make sure their customers get the right nudge at the right time and place to push them towards action, and eventually to a purchase.

How can OSG help design the most effective communication strategy for your business?

OSG’s technology platform provides the methodology that can help capture whether the messages chosen (starting with more than 50 tested messages) will help change behaviors, are unique and resonating, and will reach the largest audience.

OSG begins with a client workshop to deep-dive into historical data and identify the key messages and claims that need to be tested. This is followed by customer immersions to identify the jobs, outcomes, constraints, and benefits customers seek along their journey, as well as their reactions to the product and key messages and claims. Then, brainstorming sessions are conducted to identify what messages work and what don’t. Once a broad list of relevant messages is developed, OSG uses behavioral analytics to identify messages that resonate the most with your customers. Our TURF analysis (Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency) identifies groups of messages that, when combined, are the most compelling to the greatest number of customers. With all this intelligence in place, OSG works with you or your agency to build brand concepts that have the most resonance, irrespective of the marketing or social media channels used.

We hope this information has been interesting and valuable to you. We welcome discussing this topic further with you and understanding your specific challenges.