Note: This is a new article updated to reflect 2024 data.
Consider this scenario… You are an insights researcher at an advertising agency and are trying to build a report for the award-winning eyeglasses manufacturer Warby Parker, which will help quickly inform one of their upcoming campaigns. Or another possibility: your client has already launched their campaign, and you want to understand how their consumers and clients are responding. In order to achieve either of these tasks (or many other ones), you need to determine the specific audience you wish to target, understand what messages resonate with that audience, and determine the best way to monitor your campaign’s success.
Social listening insights can provide exactly what you need. This might seem complicated, but we’re experts in the field. We’ll break it down into a multi-step process. We’ve even built a free template that can help you with your first social listening report. Here are five steps to building insightful, client-driven social listening reports that aid your business’s marketing and advertising decisions.
The first step to developing an effective social listening report is to identify and understand the type of customers who purchase and interact with your brand, in this example, Warby Parker. Understanding your audience is crucial to making the correct strategic decisions. There are three main reasons why understanding your target audience is essential.
1. It allows you to develop tailored messaging. Different audiences respond differently to various types of marketing and advertising messages. By taking time to identify and understand the audience that typically engages with Warby Parker, you can create targeted campaigns or make strategic brand positioning decisions that better resonate with your target audience’s specific needs and interests.
2. It allows you to deploy resources more efficiently. Instead of casting a wide net and hoping you catch a few fish, isolating your target audience allows you to better focus your resources on those potential customers who will actually purchase. Not only can this improve your campaign’s outcomes, but it can also help boost return on investment (ROI) and minimize wasted advertising expenditures.
3. It allows your message to resonate on a more personal level. When you take time to understand your target audience(s), you can better speak to that group’s specific motivations, pain points, and behaviors. Understanding why people choose their eyewear, whether for style, affordability, social responsibility, etc., can help you craft messages that resonate with Warby Parker’s potential customers on a more personal level.
Social listening platforms offer many tools to help identify and isolate target consumers. For example, Infegy Starscape has a new artificial intelligence (AI) persona tool. This allows Infegy to quickly build audience personas, which previously was an exhausting, challenging, and time-consuming endeavor.
To learn more about how we build personas, read our recent blog post.
For our example, let’s start by running a simple query for Warby Parker.
Figure 1: General Warby Parker query; October 2021 through October 2024, Infegy Social Data Set.
Figure 1 shows a general query for mentions of Warby Parker over the last three years. We chose to use three years’ worth of data because we want to pull enough information to help us understand how Warby Parker brand conversations have evolved over time.
Next, we’ll turn to Infegy’s new Generative AI Personas widget.
This tool allows you to quickly identify key persona groups and offers detailed insights into audience behaviors, preferences, and sentiment. Unlike traditional research methods that rely on surface-level demographics, the AI Personas tool offers deeper insights to help you better understand nuanced audience characteristics. This allows you to better tailor your marketing strategies to a specific client base. It can also save you countless hours of manual analysis while allowing you to develop more personalized, data-driven campaigns, ultimately remaining ahead of the competition in an ever-evolving digital marketing landscape.
Our analysis into Warby Parker uncovered seven distinct client personas which are important to this brand’s positioning in the marketplace..
Let’s dig deeper into the “fashion-forward urban professional” persona. (To learn more about the other client personas, check out the full summary on an Infegy Starscape dashboard.)
Members of this persona group represented approximately 25% of the profiles we analyzed and were the primary supporters of Warby Parker, with a positivity rate of approximately 92%.
Figure 2: Insight into Warby Parker’s fashion-forward urban professional persona; Infegy’s AI Personas widget, October 2021 through October 2024, Infegy Social Data Set.
As noted in Figure 2, the fashion-forward urban professional demographic is made up primarily of young to middle-aged professionals living in large urban areas, particularly New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. These are style-conscious consumers who view eyewear as an essential fashion accessory. Many work in creative industries, such as design, marketing, and media.
Key persona characteristics:
· Bios frequently include references to major cities, such as “NYC,” “Chicago,” and “LA”
· Often refer to themselves as “designer,” “creative,” or “stylist”
· Use fashion-related emojis, such as 👓, 🕶️, and 💃
· Mention other brands and designers in their online profiles
· Likely to follow and engage with fashion influencers and trends
These consumers appreciate Warby Parker for its stylish designs, affordable prices, and convenient try-on services. They often share photos of themselves wearing Warby Parker frames and are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and followers.
Infegy’s insights into social personas can also help you better understand important attributes, including sentiment and distribution.
· Sentiment refers to how positive or negative the client persona is regarding your particular research topic. Insights into client sentiment allow you to better predict whether your target audience will be receptive to a particular brand message.
· Distribution provides valuable insights to help you identify potential growth opportunities. For example, if you discover that a key audience makes up only a small portion of your brand’s conversation, there may be an opportunity for growth among this client demographic. On the other hand, if you discover an audience that makes up 90% of your brand conversation, you may determine that particular persona is already saturated and decide to focus your marketing efforts elsewhere.
Getting back to our fashion-forward urban professionals, let’s consider how factors such as age, gender, source interests, and job titles may impact our marketing campaign decisions.
Figure 3: Age histogram for Warby Parker’s fashion-forward urban professional persona;, October 2021 through October 2024, Infegy Social Dataset.
Figure 3 offers an insight into the typical age of those who fall within the fashion-forward urban professional persona. Note that these individuals are most likely to be in their 30s to 40s. There is a massive drop-off between age 40 and 50, which suggests a significant generational divide. This could represent growth opportunities among older generations.
Figure 4: Gender distribution for Warby Parker’s fashion-forward urban professional persona; October 2021 through October 2024, Infegy Social Dataset.
The gender demographics insights provided by Infegy’s social listening platform allow us to better understand how the two genders interact with Warby Parker’s brand. Notice that men are three times more likely to post about Warby Parker than women. This could represent a growth opportunity among female consumers.
Figure 5: Source interests for Warby Parker’s fashion-forward urban professional persona; October 2021 through October 2024, Infegy Social Dataset.
Infegy’s social listening platform collects data at the author level, which allows us to examine other topics and share interests among users who post about the brand. This provides us with additional insight and contextual awareness that we can then use to build relevant content to connect with this particular audience.
Notice in Figure 5 that many of Warby Parker’s fashion-forward urban professionals are also interested in technology and computing, fashion, pop culture, and art/design.
Figure 6: Source bio analysis of Warby Parker’s fashion-forward urban professional persona: October 2021 through October 2024, Infegy Social Dataset.
Additional insight into our target persona can be gained by looking at individuals’ job titles, as listed in their online biographies. Our source bio analysis reveals the most frequently occurring job titles among the fashion-forward urban professional persona.
Figure 6 shows a word cloud of common job descriptions among our target audience. The larger the job description, the more frequently it was mentioned in source bios. Notice that job descriptions such as “director,” “artist,” “photographer,” “model,” “actor,” “graphic,” and “writer” all align with our previous research that indicated this persona is composed of creative professionals.
When you’re building your report, make sure you take note of characteristics like age, gender, source interests, and job titles, as they’ll be key for your decision-maker or executive to understand the underlying persona that your business is trying to interact with.
Now that we’ve gained a better understanding of the fashion-forward urban professional let’s take a look at how they’re discussing Warby Parker glasses. While understanding who's talking about a particular topic is important, it’s also crucial to understand how they’re talking about a product - in this case, eyeglasses.
In order to do this, we’ll use another arm of Infegy’s award-winning AI, our AI Summary Widget. Instead of looking at the people, we’ll look at the actual substance of their conversation.
Figure 7: Insight into Warby Parker’s digital innovation conversational cluster; October 2021 through October 2024, Infegy’s AI Personas widget.
We found that those urban professionals highly valued the enormous convenience factor associated with Warby Parker’s digital innovation. Warby Parker has upended the traditional model of buying eyeglasses, which requires customers to spend a lot of time picking out eyeglasses. Instead, the company offers home try-ons, AI-assisted try-ons, and digital customer service, giving time back to urban professionals.
When we write our social listening report, we’ll make sure to incorporate that ease-of-use factor along with the very high sentiment score.
Additionally, with each of these narratives, we can drill down into emotions. Figure 8 shows a radar chart highlighting the most important emotions that appear inside the digital innovation conversation. We show that trust, joy, and anticipation make up a large portion of the emotional content - something you’d want to see if you’re a brand researcher for Warby Parker.
Figure 8: Top emotions shown within this digital innovation conversational cluster (October 2021 through October 2024); Infegy Social Dataset.
Once you’ve gained insight into your key customer persona and understand a bit better what they’ve mentioned about your brand, you’re ready to start building a campaign or developing a business strategy specifically tailored to catch the attention of your target audience and, ultimately, convert those prospects to customers.
Armed with all the social listening data you’ve gathered about the fashion-forward urban professional, such as this audience’s affinity for stylish eyewear and tendency to work in creative professions, you can craft messaging and images that resonate with these consumers. You may also choose to highlight how the brand solves specific challenges faced by your target audience, such as Warby Parker’s at-home try-on services.
You should also consider using social listening to identify the platforms, influencers, and types of content your target consumers most frequently interact with. For example, if you determine that the fashion-forward urban professional is likely to interact with Instagram influencers and read blogs about new technology and men’s fashion, it may be wise to focus your marketing efforts on these particular channels.
All of the information gained through social listening can help you build an effective campaign or messaging strategy that speaks directly to the interests and values of this key audience persona, allowing you to maximize consumer engagement and brand loyalty.
Figure 9: An example of a Warby Parker advertisement that incorporates social listening insights to target fashion-forward urban professionals. This ad showcases Emma Chamberlain, a Los Angeles-based Youtuber who focuses on urban lifestyle content.
Figure 9 provides an example of how Warby Parker can use social listening insights to develop advertising that resonates with fashion-forward urban professionals. This ad features Emma Chamberlain, a well-known YouTuber among young urban professionals.
This is the fun part! Once you’ve put in the time to research your target audience and develop a campaign that resonates with potential customers, it’s time to launch that campaign on the platform(s) of your choice. Celebrate the launch with your client and other strategic partners! 🥂
Once your campaign is up and running, it’s time to monitor its progress. Social listening can help with this, too!
Infegy’s social listening capabilities allow you to:
· Access real-time insights into customer reactions and behaviors. With social listening, you can track audience reactions across multiple channels as you build and monitor your campaign. Key performance indicators (KPIs) include:
- Sentiment analysis – This helps you understand whether your target audience’s perception of your campaign and brand is positive, negative, or neutral. These sentiment insights allow you to quickly adjust your brand messaging if it is not resonating with consumers.
- Post volume – Provides insight into how much conversation your campaign is generating.
- Engagement levels – Allows you to track likes, shares, comments, and other forms of brand interaction.
· Understand campaign impact. Social listening can help you determine if your messaging resonates with your target audience because it offers data-driven insights that allow you to adjust your marketing strategy in real-time. The ability to quickly identify areas for improvement based on real-time audience feedback is key to ensuring the ongoing success of your campaign.
· Access competitive insights and trends. Social listening allows you to track brand mentions and compare your brand’s performance with competitors. It also allows you to monitor emerging trends and key themes that relate to your campaign.
· Make proactive adjustments. With social listening insights, you can quickly identify and address any concerning issues, such as negative sentiment or low engagement. This allows you to proactively adjust your strategy to maintain a positive brand perception and optimize your campaign’s effectiveness.
· Inform future campaigns. You can use the insights gained from existing campaigns to improve the effectiveness of future marketing initiatives.
To learn more about how to effectively monitor a marketing campaign using social listening insights, read our recent blog post.
Infegy Starscape, a social listening platform, offers unique capabilities to help you better identify, target, and successfully engage with your target audience.
Our Generative AI Personas widget offers valuable insight to help you identify key client persona groups and better understand their behaviors, preferences, and sentiment. When combined with other social listening data, such as demographics, post volume, sentiment, topics, etc., these insights play a key role in helping you develop, implement, and monitor successful marketing campaigns that resonate with your target audience.
To learn more about how Infegy’s social listening platform can help you build brilliant marketing campaigns, request a custom demo.