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CUSTOMER CASE STUDY

How Volterra finds audiences
and conducts competitor
research with Awario

By Andrew Jenkins, Principal at Volterra
About Volterra

Volterra provides social media related services to B2B or B2C companies, trade associations, charities, and non-profit organizations. With the skills and experience acquired over ten years of servicing clients, big and small, with diverse social media needs, Volterra can provide social media management expertise for varied budgets and requirements.

Introduction

We've been using Awario for over six months now. We use different tools for social media management and competitor research working with clients, so the primary focus for Awario is social media monitoring.

The Goals

We are using Awario data working with several clients. We measure the share of voice monitoring regularly and ongoing brand monitoring for several companies. We also extrapolate audience insights based on the conversations we capture and through further examination of the participants and influencers within those conversations.

The Process

Awario helps us to focus on the competitor analysis from the Share of Voice point of view.

We have a client who is a software company in the health and wellness space. They've given us five competitors that we monitor. We use an application called Rival IQ that does the competitive analysis for us. It's more engaged with reposts and performance across social channels. And then we've been using Awario to track online conversations about those competitors as well as our client. But two of the competitors they've given us have common names. And the hashtags they have are commonly used by others. It took us a bit of time to refine the alerts to make sure we find only relevant mentions. But with time, we've introduced some tweaks to the alert settings and managed to eliminate most of the noise. We only started towards the end of August, and we've shared reports with them at set intervals throughout our engagement.

Another thing we've been doing on an ongoing basis is brand monitoring. We're involved with a financial services firm. They help take different resource companies to market. They provide a marketing support program and embedded within this program is our social media management for those resource companies every month. Some of them have a person in-house already doing it. So what we do to support them is brand monitoring and performance analytics. For example, we use Awario to monitor how they are being talked about when they send a press release and how far it traveled. We eliminate them talking about themselves to see how much conversation is occurring about them. And then we share those reports with their investor relations people monthly. They do appreciate that we're doing the monitoring for them.

The Results

What I like about social mention monitoring is some of the interesting and noteworthy insights that surface as a result. From the ongoing Share of Voice monitoring we do for the software company, we noticed that two of their competitors have released branded research. Our competitor research used to focus on how often the competitors get mentioned by name. But we started to see how much volume of conversation specific to those competitors was about their research. It was creating the additional augmented amount of discussion around them because they had distributed branded content.

"If it were not for Awario, we'd be unable to show our client how much additional lift their competitors were getting because they were distributing branded research."

There was already some planning underway by our client to conduct some research. Now they're all the more encouraged to see it through because they recognized they were not spoken about at the same volume as their competitors.

Another example is where the insights from Awario have tied into a campaign. We've set up an alert for Social Capital. It's a conference happening in California. We have a client who is trying to bring together a community of leaders to change the world (in very simplistic terms). So they're going to this conference in an attempt to raise money for their organization. Because it's social entrepreneurship, Social Capital would be the place for them to go. So we've set up an Awario alert to track social conversations around the conference in hopes that we capture an audience for several purposes. One, for us to target, to grow the community for our client, raise awareness for them. When it comes to it, we're in the midst of a Facebook campaign and potentially a Twitter campaign.

"So we'll be able to take the audience that we capture, export it from Awario and import it to one of our other tools that can build an audience target and get all the associated parameters for Facebook. This is where the use of Awario is primary and most valuable for us."

It means when we're looking at a blank page to say: "How do we target people who are the appropriate audience for our client?" And then tap in an event that's gathering a large group of our audience in one place.

"So we can cast a net over this audience with Awario and then be able to extract value."