Once upon a time, you could create content, share it, and the needle would move, but not anymore…
The internet is flooded with media, quotes, baby photos, cat videos, and all of this is happening on social platforms that change and evolve daily. In fact, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and on Instagram, over 100 million photos and videos are posted every day.
It’s easy for conservationists to get lost in all this noise, but if we harness data, we can gain audience insights, find new opportunities, and get a glimpse of what’s coming next.
So if you really want to break through the noise online, here are 4 ways data analytics can help you create the best conservation videos:
1. Get a Pulse of Your Cause Online
As a conservationist, you understand your cause, the politics, and science behind your work. However, it’s important to recognize that there’s often a gap between you and even your supportive audiences. Successful campaigns bridge that gap to meet supporters where they are intellectually, emotionally, and physically.
To do this, most organizations turn to polling, the tried and true tool for audience understanding. Polling is an incredible asset for campaign insights, but it is expensive, the data can be limited, and the results only represent a single moment in time.
Now imagine if you could synthesize over a trillion posts from over 100 million sources and in real-time. This is the future of audience insights and social data is a tool we must harness if we want to thrive as conservationist in the digital age.
At Wild Agency we use social data to pinpoint:
- What audiences are saying about your cause
- Influential media related to your cause
- Potential partners/influencers for your cause
- Opposition messaging
- Popular keywords and phrases related to your cause
- Sentiment regarding your brand and cause
- Your current supporter demographics
For Example:
Imagine you work in ocean conservation and are embarking on an ocean plastics campaign. You discover that plastic bags pose the highest threat to sea life. You assume most people know this, but by harnessing social data you realize that most of the online conversation is actually around straws and in non-coastal communities. This realization can help shape your campaign to ensure that you reach the right people, where they are on the issue, and in a way that can move them to act on the real challenge.
2. Find New Audiences
Understanding current supporters is one thing, but reaching new ones is the true challenge for conservation moving forward. We need to find ways to mobilize audiences to action across race, religion, political status, and sexual orientation. To do that we need to understand people we would never interact with…and that’s not easy.
Thankfully, data can play a huge role here as well.
At Wild Agency we use social data to answer the following questions about new audiences:
- Where are new audiences engaging online?
- What’s the most popular media they consume?
- What are their interests, likes, dislikes?
- Do they have any knowledge of your cause and if so what?
- What partners and influencers do they trust?
- What style of content do they prefer?
The idea is to get to know new audiences before ever meeting them online. This data will help inform your digital impact strategy and will allow you to craft targeted stories that audiences can relate to when delivered.
3. Stay Relevant and Agile
In the old days, you might do a big market research project, then embark on a yearlong campaign, only to realize that the world has changed half way through.
COVID-19 has taught us this lesson in a very real way. Our lives can change at a moment’s notice and messaging/stories that were relevant a week before are long gone.
Content creation is constant in our world and modern social data allow us to always keep a pulse on our cause and ensure we are always creating with context.
Whether it’s big news that makes a splash or slight shifts in audience sentiments, tracking these updates can help you take advantage of earned media opportunities and pivot at a moment’s notice.
We want our media to go far because it is a big investment, so wait for the right moment, listen, and then push hard to promote when the time is right.
For example:
By monitoring social feeds online, you notice that another conservation organization just launched a new campaign that starts to gain a lot of traction. So, instead of trying to compete with your resources, learn by watching the campaign live and seeing how audiences react to it. Help promote it and ideally, they will return the favor for your launch. By doing so, you can dial in your own messaging and delivery for maximum impact.
A campaign isn’t over when you hit upload. Once something goes live and remains online, your next move is to adapt to what the results are telling you. Try a few different messages. You can then A/B test your strategies to develop the most effective content with the right audiences. Then through trial and error, you can start to see what works and use that data to determine your final impact.
Don’t waste money promoting content that doesn’t work. Test, be creative, adapt, and change. Become good friends with analytics tools on Google, Facebook, Instagram to maximize how you deliver content, then adapt.
4. Understanding Impact
Even as recent as a few years ago, the only real measurements for “video impact” were views, likes, and reach.
These metrics are important, but if we want to understand if our media is really changing people’s lives, we need to dig into more complex structured data like consumer behavior, and even unstructured data like thoughts, opinions, and feelings.
At Wild Agency, we harness new data sets to answer questions like:
- What does the conversation online look like before and after the campaign?
- Is there a shift in online purchase behaviors or corporate mentions of the issue?
- Are their new audiences engaging with the cause and in what way?
This new approach to “Impact” is offering exciting new insights for conservation communicators. Data is the next frontier for communication and for the first time we can harness it for real results.
Break Through the Noise with Wild Agency
Harnessing data is extremely powerful for conservation video campaigns, but it can also be very overwhelming.
At Wild Agency we make it easy to understand audiences and reach them online with great content. We call this Data-Driven Storytelling and we believe it is the future for conservation.
Our audience data experts harnesses some of the most powerful social listening tools on earth so that you can understand audiences and reach them with compelling stories.
Click here to request an appointment and learn how your organization can achieve success with conservation storytelling.
