At Smoking Gun, we don’t do PR. We do intelligent, disruptive, ingenious communications campaigns – that solve real business problems.
Supporting brand marketers not to ‘make noise’ but to achieve their organisational goals takes more than great ideas. To really mfove the dial on improving reputation, growing awareness, changing perceptions or increasing sales, ‘Inspired Insights’ is where it must begin.
Before strategy, before ideation, mining for bang up-to-date audience and sector insights is an essential investment to prevent your marcomms plan falling down like a pack of cards when it comes to impact.
Steph Bridgeman, independent media analyst and AMEC board member, comments:
“It never fails to surprise me how few marketing and comms professionals invest in auditing social and wider media before planning their strategy and creative approach. By neglecting this vital step, we operate on assumptions or past data, which has often long moved on. We miss the opportunity to uncover new angles and surprising opportunities to connect with our audiences – and to drive meaningful results.”
To mark AMEC Measurement Month, a celebration and sharing of best practice and emerging trends in the measurement and evaluation of communication, we’re delving into some of our best techniques to uncover the actionable insights that matter for your 2024 marcomms planning.
DEEP SOCIAL LISTENING
Deep algorithmic social listening allows us to gather data from across the digital landscape, pulling insights from posts and conversations on social media platforms, forums and within reviews.
This enables us to define your audience by discovering who is talking about your brand or product and its competitors, what topics they care about, and who and what is influencing them. We cluster people based on their shared behaviour – looking at the customer journey and how they interact.
Armed with these killer insights on who and where your target audience are and what is resonating, we can build a solid channel strategy and develop content pillars to feed the creative ideation stage. You’ll have the ability to own themes, lead trends, engage influencers and address barriers you may not otherwise have known existed.
MEDIA AUDITS
Understanding how your brand, product or sector is being discussed in the media is central to any PR strategy. As the shape of newsrooms and editorial teams continues to evolve, and AI replaces editors with algorithms, comms pros are having to work even harder to make sure their stories cut through.
Our thorough media audits uncover the most influential writers to engage, the perception of your product or sector, what topics are newsworthy, and where the digital PR opportunities lie to achieve powerful backlinks to drive sales, sign-ups or donations.
These insights then enable us to precision-engineer brand stories which drive debate and engagement, from expert advice to purpose-led narratives that help readers through challenging times.
QUALITATIVE TECHNIQUES
Traditional workshops, focus groups and surveys have long had their place when it comes to uncovering insights around views, attitudes and motivations, but as today’s consumers demand personalisation at every level and turn their backs on any brand which treats them as a homogenous mass, these techniques are more important than ever.
Smoking Gun’s new report ‘The Rise of the Shrewd Shopper’ discusses the power of qualitative insights to segment audiences by attitude – going way beyond traditional targeting demographics.
This technique, using cluster analysis, captures how people feel about life, how they shop your category and how they use your product – sharpening segmentation at every stage by testing different hypotheses.
Discover more in our report here.
GOOGLE SEARCH DATA
There’s no greater barometer of consumer intent than search. Dig into insights and trends revealed by Google Search and uncover how to get the most out of your search engine marketing efforts.
As part of your SEO focus, investing in search insights will help you craft a killer content strategy for owned and earned channels, understanding the questions you must answer, the problems you must solve, and the desires you can meet.
Your own Google Analytics data too is essential to understanding what’s working and what isn’t in real-time.
MEASUREMENT & EVALUATION
Just as off-the-cuff hunches will not lead to impactful PR outcomes, we cannot hope to demonstrate our results with a measurement framework based on vanity metrics.
Decide on exactly how you will measure the success of your campaign at the up-front planning stages. If you want to build trust or change behaviour, how will this be measured? Thinking about this before you embark on the creative execution is likely to influence the approach.
At Smoking Gun, we follow AMEC’s Integrated Evaluation Framework and have won SEVEN global AMEC Awards for delivering campaigns that truly have impacted business goals.
All great stories begin with a killer insight. Using actionable insights is intrinsic to Smoking Gun’s approach. It helps us to lead and strategically advise clients, using facts garnered from rounded and robust research, tailored to individual objectives.
We are your eyes and eyes, understanding the cultural zeitgeist and helping you gain the competitive advantage.
Looking to uncover the insights that matter and turbocharge marketing communications strategy? Talk to us today.