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Audience Exercise #5: How Do Your Audiences Stack Up?

Here’s a quick exercise to help you focus on your relative proprietary audience size compared to the competition:

1. Grab a pen and paper. (Yes—those old-fashioned tools).

2. Write down your three most fearsome competitors.

3. Look up their number of Facebook FANS, Twitter FOLLOWERS, and YouTube SUBSCRIBERS.

4. Next, do the same thing for your own company.

5. Finally, tape the paper where you’ll see it every day at work.



Where do you stand? Are your audiences bigger or smaller than your dear competitors? Who has the competitive advantage out of the gate when promoting a new product, service, piece of content, or event?



Whether you like it or not, your audience size relative to your direct competition does matter. What doesn’t matter—unless you’re Pepsi (@Pepsi) or RedBull (@RedBull)—is that Coke (@CocaCola) has over 72 million FANS on Facebook. Be inspired by brands outside of your industry, but make sure the yardstick by which you measure success contains data from direct competitors.

Another important point—don’t forget the email audience! Email SUBSCRIBERS are the hidden, bigger part of the audience iceberg, adding buoyancy to both sales and social media via messages that only SUBSCRIBERS see. As a result, it’s a good idea to at least get some idea of the size of your key competitors’ email SUBSCRIBER audiences. If you’re looking for a very rough approximation (and I do mean very rough), you can do the following:

Add up a selected competitor’s number of Facebook FANS and Twitter FOLLOWERS; let’s say the total is 36,000.

Divide that number by your company’s total number of Facebook FANS and Twitter FOLLOWERS (with your total at 25,000).

Multiply the result (1.44, with our figures) by the number of active email SUBSCRIBERS in your company’s database (let’s say 80,000).

The resulting—again, very rough—estimate is that your competitor has 115,200 email SUBSCRIBERS to your 80,000.



This guesstimate makes a huge leap of faith; namely, that the gap between your social media audiences will be of a similar percentage to your email SUBSCRIBERS. Admittedly, you could be killing it in email while your competitor is putting all their eggs into social media channels. Still, in cases where you need a quick, cost-free visual to explain to leadership why your company needs to focus on email acquisition, this method may help get their competitive juices flowing in your favor.

If you have both the need and budget for something more precise, a number of companies have email competition tools that may be of use. Inbox Insight from Return Path (@ReturnPath) is particularly helpful, as it tracks a panel of users to help approximate the size of your competitor’s email SUBSCRIBERS database as well as what percentage of your email SUBSCRIBERS may overlap.

Take, for instance, the real-life example from two competitors in the Financial Services industry, shown in Figure 6.1.

FIGURE 6.1 Email Subscriber Group

Source: Return Path Inbox Insight. Used with permission.



Wouldn’t you rather be Bank B? And if you’re in charge of Bank A, wouldn’t you hate to explain why your audience is so small compared to the competition’s? I know, I know . . . these are obvious answers. So why, then, are so many companies failing to emphasize proprietary audience growth as a key marketing objective? It boggles the mind.





Database Size


We hear a lot these days about the importance of “Big Data” and the revolution it will bring to all aspects of our lives. After paging through the awe-inspiring book The Human Face of Big Data from author and photographer Rick Smolan (@RickSmolan), I have no doubt that Big Data will transform much of our knowledge of the world and our own hidden behaviors. I also know three simple facts:

1. There’s no Big Data if you don’t collect it.

2. Big Data isn’t big if it’s wrong.

3. There’s nothing big about data if you don’t use it.



For marketers, this means that both the quality and quantity of data you collect about JOINERS (SUBSCRIBERS, FANS, and FOLLOWERS) matter. Size isn’t just a factor of how many people you can communicate with; it’s also a factor of how well you can communicate with them—and that all ties back to data such as:

Demographics (gender, age, ethnicity, language, employment, etc.)

Location (past and present)

Mobile behaviors (app usage, interactions, channel preferences, etc.)

Online behaviors (content interaction, clicks, abandoned carts, etc.)

Offline behaviors (favorite stores, waking hours, etc.)

Psychographics (personality, values, lifestyle, etc.)

Purchase behaviors (online, offline, history, brands, etc.)



Today’s marketing organizations may have access to some of this information about your JOINERS thanks to your CRM, e-commerce, email marketing, marketing automation, mobile, and website teams. If you’re active in social media, the channels themselves—such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter—also maintain a lot of data about your FANS and FOLLOWERS. Your company can’t usually access such data directly, but you can use it to increase the relevance and targeting of your ads through each of those channels.a This can be a frustrating scenario, to help Facebook and others acquire data about your consumers that you can only access by advertising with Facebook; however, social media’s Big Data is dictated by the channels, not marketers. The only way to combat this is to grow the quality of data you acquire directly from your JOINERS and use it through channels that you control—like email, mobile apps, SMS, and your website.