This month In the Tank, we talk to Amir Zonozi, President and co-founder of Zoomph to discuss brands and social media, social metrics for measuring impact, and how audience intelligence helps tell great stories.
Tell us about Zoomph. What is social audience intelligence and what types of brands/companies do you work with? Zoomph is an AI partnerships analytics and media measurement platform. We leverage social media data to understand what fans care about most, to generate the best partnerships. Every fanbase has a story to tell, and we help organizations understand how to best monetize their audience and leverage our AI to value their digital assets. We do this for world class organizations like NASCAR, the NBA, Team Liquid, Wasserman, the Cowboys, and 100+ other sports and esports teams, leagues, agencies and brands.
The way brands use social media has evolved extensively in a short period of time. What types of insights and metrics should brands be paying attention to when measuring impact? The digital asset economy is maturing and evolving, so sports and esports digital teams are now working like in-house agencies to help introduce and engage their audience to their corporate partners. Metrics that help understand the value behind this are impressions, engagement and video views – as well affinity. By leveraging the performance of their campaigns against a CPM (cost per video impression), CPE (cost per engagement) and CPV (cost per video view) you can assess a media value to digital assets. Each platform requires a different strategy and tactics to generate the highest engagement, but at the end of the day great content always performs best. To create great content, you need to understand the affinities, demographics, and psychographics your audience has and connect to those through your content.
Most brands just ‘shout’ on social and not enough listen – why is social listening crucial to true engagement and ROI? The greatest brands tell great stories, and stories are great because they connect with you and they move you. The most important aspect of stories is the listener; the signal doesn’t matter if it is not received. So hearing this, we understand it’s not about you and it never was about you. Understand your audience. Understand what motivates them and how you fit it in. You can’t speak effectively to your audience without listening first. Listen, and segment your audiences to understand how they engage and interact differently. Once that is established, you can create content and in real-time see how your audience is engaging with it and pivot as needed from assessing your campaign, or benchmarking against other properties leveraging similar partners.
We see too often brands trying to be cool or hop on latest trends and memes, only to see it backfire and fail. Where do you try the line between trying to connect with your audience and authenticity? Great question. It’s important to understand that audiences are not homogeneous, they are audiences of audiences – so understanding why each group follows and engages with you is important, and understanding your target audience outside of you is important. Not everyone has the same audience that Wendy’s does on social media. Take a step back and focus on what this audience engages with, then how do you incorporate their methods of communication to yours. If every audience has their own secret high-five handshake to get into the club, watch them do the handshake with others before you try to do the handshake yourself.
What is your best tip for any brand looking to increase the impact of their social media platforms? Honestly the best tip I can give is bring diversity to your internal team that is creating the content. The more people on your team from diverse backgrounds provides more context into best understanding the audiences you are engaging with. Women are underrepresented in the front offices of sports and esports, despite nearly half of fans being women. If you’re in sports tech, there are organizations like Women In Sports Tech that have job boards to help position yourself in front of female applicants to help bring more diversity to your team.
To keep up with Amir, follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn, or check out what Zoomph is up to on Twitter.
Interested in sharing your insights in journalism, marketing, or communications in a future installment of In the Tank? Drop us a line.
