We’ve been hearing for years now that consumers are overwhelmed with advertisements. There are some reports that suggest individuals can see up to 5,000 advertisements a day. While I’m not sure of the accuracy of this figure, we can all agree that the bombardment of marketing messages is a real thing. The “Ad Blocking Crisis of 2015” didn’t come out of thin air.

Because of this outcry from consumers, brands have realized they need to take a different approach to reaching and connecting with their consumers. We have seen the rise and craze of different tactics over the last few years including a strong concentration on Content Marketing, User Generated Content, Personalization, and the hottest thing in 2016, Influencer Marketing. All of these tactics (and more) are meant to reach consumers in different ways, build trust, and make meaningful connections.

With a consumer’s need to feel trust in their buying decisions (either from the brand directly or through recommendations from a trusted source), it’s ideal to have informative, educational, entertaining content delivered through a trusted source. You would think that these latest channels are solving the “Consumer Attention Crisis” issue. The problem is that marketers are approaching these “new” channels in the same way they have everything else.

Marketers Ruin Everything

Gary Vaynerchuk has been saying this for years. I’m a marketer; so the first time I heard this, I was a little off put, but I now see it. The second a new channel, platform, or strategy hits mainstream, marketers are already thinking about how they will exploit and monetize it. I’m not excluding myself from that thinking, ‘How can we use that to reach our customer?’ It’s all about how you approach it.

It is the norm to hear brands looking to target “millennials” or “moms” or some other generic demographic. To avoid ‘ruining everything’, brands need to take a different approach. When it comes to breaking through the noise and reaching consumers, demographics are irrelevant. As Netflix’s VP of Product Innovation, Todd Yellin, said “There’s a mountain of data that we have at our disposal. That mountain is composed of two things. Garbage is 99 percent of that mountain. Gold is one percent…Geography, age, and gender? We put that in the garbage heap. Where you live is not that important.”

Taking an Audience-First Approach

Brands are missing a key piece of the puzzle that is really quite simple: an understanding of who their customer is. While demographic descriptors may be considered, the foundation of understanding your customers needs to start with knowing what they are interested in, what they are passionate about, what they care about most. Moving away from a brand-centric approach, marketers need to shift to an audience-first approach to reach and resonate with consumers.

For example, one person interested in paddle boarding does not look like or share the same interests as the next person interested in the same enjoyable water sport. One may be a male Olympic athlete looking to diversify his training. The next may be a female gamer putting the controller down for a little exercise. Breaking through the noise and reaching your consumer has never been a bigger challenge. Understanding the culture of your audience has never been more important.

Leveraging the interest graph to gain cultural insights

Understanding people at a deeper, richer level than ever before changes how we relate to each other. Adding dimension to ‘personas’ with enriched interest and affinity data builds an in-depth picture of a brand’s audience.

Analyzing what people choose to follow, engage with, and share, allows you to gain a much deeper understanding of who your consumer is. To effectively activate an audience-first approach, we need to identify and understand the overarching patterns that exist within an audience. By segmenting an audience based on interests and the content they engage with, we are able to understand the cultural fingerprint of the interest-based communities within an audience.

As an example, I analyzed the audience of Social Media Week LA using Affinio. Below is the audience visualization of @SMWLA. This shows us the overarching interest-based patterns that exist within this audience.

Based on this graph, we can tell that while the people attending the June 6-10 event in LA all have an interest in social media, outside of this event, they all work in different industries. The way you would market to each of these segments in an audience-first approach would be tailored to each segment’s interests and affinities.

Affinio’s CEO, Tim Burke will be on stage with UM’s SVP Managing Partner, Natalie Monbiot, discussing how UM leverages the interest graph to understand their client’s consumers on June 9, 2016. Check it out here.

Based on this graph, we can tell that while the people attending the June 6-10 event in LA all have an interest in social media, outside of this event, they all work in different industries. The way you would market to each of these segments in an audience-first approach would be tailored to each segment’s interests and affinities.

Article Written By: SMW Staff of Social Media Week