From understanding target audiences to setting up campaigns to fuel their business goals, research has always been a big part of everything we do for our clients. And we know that research is easier said than done – especially when the digital landscape is growing by the day!
So we got talking with our Insights Director, Kei Obusan, to deep dive into our process and explore how we put Radarr at work to do all the heavy lifting!
Using Radarr for market and competitive research as an Insights Director
What does your day-to-day as an Insights Director look like?
My main responsibility as an Insights Director at Radarr is to oversee our Insights projects, working together with our Insights Team members as we fulfill our project deliverables – which typically include brand and competitor monitoring reports, campaign analysis reports, and consumer insights research.
With our Insights Managers, I ensure that our research outputs are of the highest quality and that we always push the envelope in developing new methodologies to gain insights from online/social media data.
Aside from managing our research project clients, I also help our Sales and Client Success teams educate their clients about the power of social listening and digital research.
An example of this is for a pitch our Sales Team is working on for a client looking for crisis management solutions.
Aside from sharing sample use cases in the past, I also shared with them Radarr’s Crisis Monitoring Framework which involves social listening monitoring and analyzes procedures from crisis preparation, real-time alerts and reports during a crisis, and post-crisis evaluation.
How frequently do you use Radarr, and what do you use it for the most?
I use Radarr daily to ensure that the data we pull for our research projects are sufficient and of good quality.
Our research clients have various objectives ranging from understanding consumer behavior, brand & competitor monitoring, campaign analysis, and crisis management, among others. I use Radarr’s different features to gain insights from social media data, such as Top Topics, Word Cloud, Top Influencers, and Automated Sentiment Analysis.
For clients who are about to launch in a new market, Radarr’s Top Influencers widget is very useful in identifying social media accounts that are driving conversations about the brand or category. We usually give clients a deep-dive into these profiles for them to consider should they engage them as brand ambassadors.
What’s the one feature of Radarr that you absolutely love that you found hard to manage before?
Having been in this field for almost a decade now, I’ve experienced when social listening was quite new – when we had limited ways of gathering and looking at data.
Thankfully, technology has developed so significantly that we are no longer confined to only using keywords to capture and interpret data. That’s why one of my favorite Radarr features is Image Analytics, which gives insights about post images that post captions may not have conveyed.
For example, in one of our research, we explored people’s definition of self-care based on the photos they post on social media. Here’s what we found through image analytics:
Image analytics has helped us remove the guesswork and optimize those brainstorming sessions to understand what works, why, and when.
How do you recommend brands use social media for research?
There’s a lot of untapped audience data on social media. With social listening, there are key use cases that brands can enable:
1. Communication & Content Planning
To understand what types of content work best for a given audience, brands typically analyze posts that the audience engages with the most.
Aside from that, brands can also look at a random sample of their online audience’s social media profiles to investigate the types of content that they publish and engage with (outside of the brand’s category). The graph below shows the top content topics posted by the audience of a brand page. While some of these themes were already being posted by the brand, we recommended them to also post about the other themes that their audience care about.
2. Audience Targeting (in the different stages of the consumer purchase journey)
In doing consumer purchase journey analysis, we help brands analyze the conversation themes that people discuss in each stage identifying the sources of information, triggers, barriers, and gaps unaddressed by brands in the market.
Through this analysis, brands would know how and where they should reach out to people in different stages of the consumer journey.
3. Behavior Analysis
Clients would usually track online conversations about their brand and competitors, but there is value in analyzing generic conversations about the category that don’t mention any brand and even conversations about brands in the same category but are not direct competitors.
This enables brands to understand people’s consumption behavior and concerns they can leverage or address. One key example I usually share is about a men’s aftershave brand that women started using as a makeup primer. The client team wouldn’t have known this if they only focused on analyzing conversations about their primary product and target audience.
Can you give us an example of a successful campaign stemming from trend analysis?
One of our clients, Glico Asia Pacific, had a successful Ramadan/Raya campaign in Malaysia “Pocky Ceria Tetap On!”
Pocky previously struggled to connect with the Malay market, but they worked to improve brand relevance. Because of this, Glico launched this campaign to increase brand awareness, equity, and purchase among Muslims.
Radarr used social listening and search data to help the client uncover insights about the growing interest in snacking recipes during Hari Raya. We found that people started searching for Raya recipes two months in advance. We also helped identify the specific recipes gaining interest during this period.
The brand engaged with popular food & cooking influencers to share Raya recipes using Pocky as an ingredient. Pocky managed to increase engagement with Malay consumers and encouraged them to bond with family and friends, enhancing Pocky’s equity of “Share Happiness.”
The campaign generated 30,000 social media engagements and won a gold award for the Best Social Media Channel Campaign: Facebook in the Hashtag Asia Awards 2021.
What’s the one thing you use Radarr for that not many know?
I like using our “Trends Discovered over Time” chart to see how long top hashtags on Twitter/X have trended for a given period.
Various tools give information on hashtags, but only those currently trending or top hashtags for a given date.
This chart on the Radarr platform takes it a step further by allowing users to choose a particular duration and see how long exactly the top hashtags have trended.
When I want to investigate gossip, this makes it easier for me to see how long people have been discussing certain topics. Looking at the graph below which shows top X trends in the Philippines from Nov 2023 to present, it’s not surprising that Miss Universe and Nicaragua trend, being a country where the beauty pageant is a sport.
However, when it comes to longevity of trends, BTS still remains kings. Jungkook trended due to his collaboration with Usher, but Namjoon’s emotional letter related to their military enlistment had a greater impact.
Well, Kei definitely has us convinced that there is so much that one can uncover from social media, and the one way to hack your way into the consumer’s mind is to be able to read it all – and that’s where Radarr comes in.
If you’d like to know more about our research process and how we use Radarr for it, feel free to reach out to Kei at kei.obusan@radarr.com.
