Use case
How audience profiling can help you evaluate the personas conquered and to be conquered?
Find out exactly what interests and affinities your target audience and segments have. Their favorite topics, their favorite brands, and their digital behaviors. Explore all the insights that allow you to identify the segments of a target audience and the different personas that make up that specific segment for data-driven marketing and communication initiatives.
Gaming industry
Call of Duty
Call of Duty is a first-person shooter video game franchise published by Activision. It is certainly one of the most famous war games in the world. To give a mind-blowing statistic: in April 2021, the series has sold over 400 million copies. With different worlds, the game developers have created variants of the game whose most famous are: Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011), Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013), or Call of Duty: WWII (2017).
But Call of Duty is not just a video game. There is a whole community that has grown around comic books, collectible figurines, children’s toys and movies. On the e-sport side, the game series is also well established as the games are played in leagues like Major League Gaming.
How is the target audience defined for profiling?
Through this case study, SOPRISM wants to have a global understanding of the audience interested in Call of Duty around the world in order to know the personas acquired and to be acquired. Profiling audiences requires two essential ingredients: a target audience and a benchmark audience. SOPRISM defines an audience as the percentage of the active Meta users in the target/benchmark audience matching with a socio-demographic criterion AND interested in a thematic universe/brand. In this case, the target audience consists of all digitally active people over 18-year-old who are interested in Call of Duty, regardless of gender, language or geolocation.
In order to highlight the characteristics of this target group, we consider a reference audience that corresponds to the digitally active population without restrictions of interest and socio-demography. Therefore, we can say that there are nearly 335,200,000 digitally active people in the world, who have an interest in the Call of Duty video game series. This figure represents 12.3% of the benchmark audience, over 2,732,700,000 people.
The first step in identifying personas for an audience segment is to define the socio-demographic and geolocation characteristics of the target audience.
“Tom is a 27-year-old man who is still single. Besides video games, Tom enjoys sports, especially basketball. He is also interested in motorsports like Moto GP and Formula One. Headphones in his ears, Tom likes to listen to rap music and goes to music festivals. He is not especially drawn to Facebook and Instagram in general, however his preference is for Instagram. With his sportswear style, riding his skateboard in the streets of his city, Tom feels comfortable in his sneakers!”
What are the socio-demographic characteristics of the target audience?
From a socio-demographic point of view, we can identify that the overall segment consists of young men between 18 and 34 years old, single. He has a rather urban profile and has not particularly attended university. On the world map, we can notice that Call of Duty lovers are located more in the 🇺🇸 USA (45,007,692 people), 🇮🇳 India (35,640,888 people) and 🇧🇷 Brazil (20,930,460 people). In the top 10 countries, we also find two European countries: 🇩🇪 Germany and 🇪🇸 Spain. Check out the Top10 countries in the complete case study.
What are the psychographic characteristics of the target audience?
Now, if we focus more on psychographic insights, what really interests the audience, SOPRISM identifies 12 important thematic universes:
- Mangas
- Basketball
- Motor sports, especially MotoGP and F1
- Rap music
- Sport clothing
- Discover more
Several brands also stand out as those that generate the most affinity for the target audience. On the automotive side, we detected strong interest in Ford Motor Company and BMW. There are also Adidas, Gucci and Louis Vuitton for the fashion side and RedBull for the lifestyle side.
The audience profiling performed by SOPRISM also allows to understand which other video games generate interest for Call of Duty lovers. Are they more attracted by the Assassin’s Creed series or The Witcher? The generation of insights via interest profiling allows to establish a ranking of the favorite games of people who are already interested in Call of Duty.
👉 Discover the TOP 15 video games directly in the complete case study.
What is the level of interest of Call of Duty lovers for streaming players?
Which player has never dreamed of knowing which other competitor(s) his target audience is also interested in? Audience profiling is the perfect answer to this challenge. Here we can identify that 53% of people with an interest in Call of Duty, also have an interest in Spotify. It’s a gold mine. We identify that more than 40% of the audience also has an interest in Netflix and Youtube. On the opposite, there is less than 10% of the target audience that has an interest in Deezer, Roky, Tidal, Orackle and Tunecore. Concerning Twitch, we notice that the penetration percentage is only 11%, so the affinity score will give an indication on the relevance of mobilizing this media for the target audience.
What is the level of affinity of Call of Duty lovers for social networks?
If knowing the percentage of interest in streaming players is useful, SOPRISM goes beyond by identifying the level of sensitivity to social networks. And this is extremely valuable data. Social networks give the opportunity to build a real community around video games. Whether they are groups, pages or discussion channels, knowing the relevance of the networks is an undeniable advantage. Through audience profiling, we can tell that people who already have an interest in Call of Duty, are more sensitive to Steam, Flickr, Viber, Telegram, WeChat, and Wattpad. Conversely, Call of Duty lovers are significantly less sensitive to Pinterest, WhatsApp, Messenger, Linkedin, …
How to identify the dominant segments that constitute the global audience?
Understanding your target audience often leads to overly global insights because reaching a level of granularity is complex. Either by questioning the veracity of the methods used, or by the extremely long execution time or with a very high cost. To refine the understanding of the target audience, SOPRISM has developed the identification of nearly 60 segments that can be likened to the personality traits of the target audience.
For the audience profiling of call of duty lovers, SOPRISM has identified 16 dominant segments and these segments represent all the personality facets that make up the global audience. This understanding makes it possible to confirm or refute intuitions, validate or ignore previously acquired knowledge and/or the results of other studies performed with other market research methods. In this case, we have personas that confirm the intuitions about the audience: the gamer, the geek, the music lover, the cinephile, …
But we also have the possibility of discovering personas that allow us to understand more in-depth the specific characteristics of the audience like the dandy, the parent, the collector, … All 16 segments detailed are available in the full case study.
Among these dominant segments, we have defined 3 key segments that allow us to reach the most relevant Call of Duty lovers. One of the 3 is The internet celebrity lover. The next step is to “dissect” this segment into multiple personas that can be easily triggered through targeting.
How to evaluate the conquest of the previously identified key personas?
Let’s take the example of one of the 3 key segments that make up the target audience of call of duty lovers : The Internet Celebrity Lover. We know that 33.8% of the global audience is in this particular segment. But what to do with this data? The combination of the opportunity score (in brown) and the measurement of the worldwide potential reach of the personas that constitute the segment will define the strategy to follow.
In this case, this segment consists of 4 personas:
- Men sensitive to influencers → 18-25 years old
- Men sensitive to influencers → 26-44 years old
- Women sensitive to influencers → 18-25 years old
- Women sensitive to influencers → 26-44 years old.
Therefore, we can say that 24.1% (25,317,050 people) of young men are already acquired and that the acquisition potential at the world level reaches 3.8% (103,842,600 people).
For women between 26 and 44 years old the acquisition potential within the segment is 33% (46,480,500 people) and reaches 5.2% (142,100,400 people) worldwide.
To conclude, in order to evaluate the personas that have already been conquered and the personas that have a significant potential for acquisition, you need to go through 3 steps to better understand your target audience.
- First, it is necessary to identify the socio-demographic and psychographic characteristics of the global audience, as well as the geolocation. These insights are essential to mark out the considerations and avoid getting lost in the data-driven field.
- Second, it is important to know how to segment your audience in order to capture all the facets that make it unique. It is at this point that a more precise idea takes shape and it is frequently at this step that most investigations stop.
- And finally, by combining an opportunity score with the measure of this score on the global population, taking into account socio-demographic characteristics, you can identify the acquisition potential in the segment itself as well as in the global population.
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