Successful social media campaigns are about much more than engaging content. The highest performing brands on social media pair exceptional content strategies with unparalleled audience knowledge. Land Rover achieves both, exuding cool, quality, and luxury while simultaneously appealing to broad segments. By segmenting their audience into luxury buyers and luxury aspirers, Land Rover finds message and content that resonates with the widest audience while maintaining their brand standards.

For this analysis, we start by combing multiple years of history based on personal narratives. This technique uses customers using language specific to their ownership or purchase of luxury vehicles (Land Rover, Audi, Lexus, and others.). That audience is then further refined to focus on consumer conversation (removing dealerships, news, etc.). Each audience provides a very robust segment—over 10K Luxury Buyers and nearly 20K Aspirers. Finally, we turn that analysis on its head by saving all of those authors as an audience. For a comparison set, we take the same type of analysis for luxury vehicles, but only those mentioning the cars and excluding authors who own luxury cars themselves.

To help plan the content strategy for the Velar launch, we can look at how these audiences compare to each other—and to the general population.

Using this comparison, we can see that both luxury car buyers and aspirers over-index in consumption of technology and business news—making both segments a solid target to broaden reach.

Diving into each area deeper we can start to identify specific outlets that would make the most sense for Land Rover to partner on ad placement. Starting with business news, we can clearly see that Bloomberg is a preferred channel for Luxury Car Buyers—more than 3X likely to be mentioned amongst this audience versus the General Population.

Moving on to technology, both audiences are more likely to follow and share tech news than the general population—with Luxury Car Aspirers particularly over-indexing in this area.

Looking at the list of most over-indexed technology news, several well-known brands rise to the top. However, there are two interesting technology alternatives—in-home assistants (both Alexa and Google Home) and VR. To grow overall awareness, both platforms would make inroads with the aspiring luxury buyer.

Finally, we can take a look at the Crossover/ SUV category specifically. Between the two audiences, we are able to identify over 25K posts about the category. An interesting way to analyze the category is to look at the most talked about brands juxtaposed to the brands that over-index.

Interestingly, Hyundai makes the top brands in both groups—mostly due to innovative fuel cell technology and electronic vehicle range. How could Range Rover use this data? Hyundai’s results with both audiences shows the impact of vehicle technology and is “social proof” for consumer demand; additionally, the over-indexed brands within the buyer set helps to solidify and learn from the competitive set, with Mercedes is clearly the most talked about social SUV crossover in this audience. The top attributes for Mercedes include “beautiful” and “comfort.” Land Rover has the similar usage of beautiful.

Fast forward a few months—at the end of 2017, Land Rover launched the Velar in the US. The campaign coordinated a laundry list of touchpoints including online, mobile, and even augmented reality.4 The campaign and launch has been a success—and many of the elements were reflected in social listening.

• Identify your target audience and set campaign strategy—the best social listening content is informed with clear research direction
• Use social listening to understand where your target audience consumes content. This approach can drive both ad placement and content strategy.
• Update messaging by analyzing how your target and aspiring audiences talk about your category and competitors.