How to find and convert every fan

Mark Oliver identifies the holy trinity of fan analytics

Whether you are a football team, a magazine publisher, a TV content owner, a games publisher or a sports league, you need to know how many fans or potentially interested consumers you might have and, even more importantly, what they might be specifically interested in and be prepared to pay for. There are three established methods for doing this, but only by using all three together are you likely to come out with the most useful answers.

Method 1 – Traditional Consumer Surveys

The first tried and tested, but often most expensive method, is consumer surveying. The internet brought the cost of conducting consumer surveys on a global scale right down, and if you can find a provider that does the proper level of panel quality control, the results can be reliable. The task of finding out how many fans or interested consumers one might have globally can be manageable through the use of simple questions placed on omnibus surveys, but more detailed understanding gained through more bespoke surveys can quickly become very expensive as the number of countries surveyed increases. For very niche brands and products these more detailed surveys can have limited usefulness, as finding an adequate and accurate sample size of fans or consumers to interrogate in more detail can become almost impossible.

Traditional consumer surveys tend to be best for brands and services that have reasonably large potential fan and customer bases, and a select group of countries where most of the potential value is located.

Method 2 – Consolidated Contact Databases

The second method is to gather all contact/registration data you might have from existing direct touchpoints or data that might be in the hands of third parties but that can be purchased. For instance, many sports for instance are busy consolidating and de-duplicating the email contact details for all those who have purchased a ticket to see a match/game, bought a shirt or other merchandise, or registered on their own website. They can use this database to get a feel for what their current actively purchasing fan base is and also use it to survey them on their interests in other services and touchpoints.

This bottom-up approach can be very useful in targeting the most avid fans and loyal consumers, or highlighting fans and consumers who through a single touchpoint might represent a potentially untapped source of demand for other products and services. You might be able to increase this method’s reach by paying third-party retailers to reach out to those who have purchased your items – or ones for similar products and services- through them and either adding the number to the total or using the third party to send out a more a targeted survey on interests.

This method has the added benefit that the database can be used to actively sell products and services as it allows for a targeted marketing or a promotional campaign that general consumer surveys don’t. But it is in essence preaching to the already partially converted and it doesn’t allow you to assess the size and interests of dormant or passive fan bases/customer groups that a consumer survey could tease out.

This method is best used to find out more about your active fan/consumer base to help monetize them better.

Method 3 – Effectively Distributed Free Content

The third method is to avoid seeking out a wider fan base or interested consumer group but instead encourage them to reveal themselves, and their interests to you. The starting point in this area is usually social media traffic, which can at least give an indication of the overall size of interest and engagement, but little on specific interests. Additionally, given the low levels of effort needed to indicate interest on social media platforms, it can often give an inflated view of potential fan or customer base size. Such stats may be good for PR purposes but not for insight and targeting purposes. In many ways they are similar to the total TV audience numbers used to gauge the total market for a sport or a TV brand – they are indicative only.

But if you also create free and engaging content specifically designed to test out levels and types of interest and then distribute this effectively on social media, content aggregation platforms and optimise them through search engines, you can quickly build up a view of levels and types of interest. If you then build in extra levels of free content access (but only with registration) not only can you target future offerings, but also survey them further on their interests with this first party data.

While this method might not be great for gaining a representative sample of the total potential market – you only get those who come to you after all – it can yield deeper understanding of interests and help move to deeper direct engagement with a wider market than either  traditional consumer surveys or consolidated existing contact databases. It’s a method pioneered by more niche activities that may have quite a large global market once aggregated, but which remain quite small in each national market – so called “passion verticals”.

A Multi-Method Approach

Traditional consumer surveys are the best for getting an accurate view of the total size of the potential customer or fan base and their overall levels of interest. Consolidated contact databases can be best for better engagement with core fan and customer bases. Effectively distributed free content can be best for deep understanding of fan or customer segments and their interests beyond the core fan base, and for moving quickly to engage with them, but it may not allow for the deep relationship with the core fan or customer base or gain a sense of the total size of each customer or fan segment.

O&O has found combining the three methods in different ways is the best way forward with the exact mix of methods dependent on the likely shape of the fan/customer base across the globe. A sensible mix of survey responses, existing customer databases and touchpoints, and free content engagement preferences and patterns can be used to size and understand even the most widely spread and diverse global fan/customer base.

O&O has been involved in sizing and understanding the fan/customer bases for global sports – large and small, as well as TV brands and content, music and news services. We continue to test the best mix of methodologies on a case by case basis – having no direct interest in promoting one over the other given our role as a commercial and strategic adviser not as a research supplier.

If you’d like to learn more about our approach, contact mark.oliver@oando.co.uk