No one can tell the story of your brand better than your customers – and that’s true for us as well.
At our recent NetBase LIVE LA conference, Jessica Williams, Global Innovation Marketing & Analytics Leader for Visa shared how NetBase supports their storytelling efforts in reaching various audiences.
Social Intelligence for Audience Segmentation
As a global payments provider, Visa has a number of audiences to speak to – each with varying wants and needs. To be sure their content tells the right story, they use social listening to understand the pain points of each audience.
For example, how do SMB’s want to hear from Visa? And what specific concerns to they want addressed?
To understand how to speak to this audience segment, Visa uses social analytics and sentiment analysis to discover the topics that matter most to SMBs.
They identified 10,000 SMB owners in 15 different industries, segmenting them by age, location, business industry, age of business, and size of business. From there they took conversations these SMB owners were having on Twitter and forums – a total of 1 million conversations – and uploaded them into a searchable database.
They analyzed these conversations for surface trends and key themes, and to identify the content influencing these SMB owners. Then they looked at how SMB owners share their expertise in areas like Company Operations, Political and Regulatory Issues, and more on Twitter.
This research showed Visa how SMB owners see themselves, and what speaks to them as business owners, entrepreneurs, and peer leaders. That led to a new approach to content speaking to these affinities.
Sentiment-Driven Storytelling Always Wins
There’s a reason storytelling is such a big trend right now – it’s because social brings out the storyteller in all of us. SMB owners are just one example of an audience segment using social media to share their own stories of struggles and success.
And Visa is a great example of a brand smartly using that trend to connect.
What were the results of their adjusted SMB owner campaign? Here are a few:
- 50-60% improvement in positive sentiment
- Consistent engagement rate of over 1.00% – 2x higher than LinkedIn benchmarks
- 50X the number of shares/post on LinkedIn – increasing reach exponentially
- 20X the number of qualified clicks to Visa.com – increasing conversion
- 20K new SMBs requesting information and joining our email lists
That’s pretty remarkable – and that’s just one audience segment.
An Indirect Humble Brag
We know we offer a great product that has brought numerous brands unparalleled results – but it’s so gratifying when we hear others talk about their experiences.
Visa is one brand that doesn’t take chances with their brand. They regularly evaluate their tools to be sure they’re getting everything they need, and, to quote Jessica:
“We’ve been with NetBase about four years now. Whenever we re-choose NetBase it’s always because you guys have progressed the most since the last time we did an RFP. The machine learning has gotten better, the user interface is always light years ahead of some of the competitors in the marketplace, things like sentiment analysis and ID tagging have gotten better. Over time we have reevaluated pretty frequently and NetBase continues to come out at the top of the list.”
You can hear more from Jessica directly, but we just had to share such lovely words – because we do make it a point to stay ahead of the curve as analytics technology and trends advance, so it’s nice to know it’s noticed and appreciated.
That’s a story we never get tired of telling.
You can hear more stories from our customers here – or you can reach out to get starting telling yours today!
