Clear Air Methodology

Proving your worth

Data-driven insights are a great way to help justify budget, strategy, pitches and decision making for PR. It doesn’t have to be a full-on proof of ROI exercise, but offer guidance at the campaign planning or account review stage. Sapio Research’s Clear Air Methodology does this by giving a snapshot of message ideas and resonance testing.

The problem with existing approaches

How often have you come out of a creative brainstorming feeling that you’ve paid little attention to what’ll interest your audience? Or the strongest personality has won? Or you don’t have enough evidence to challenge a client brief?  Or even felt that you’ve lacked inspiration in the first instance?

You’re not alone! Creative flair is great for coming up with an original narrative and unique angle, but it relies on gut instinct (and sometimes it needs a little assistance). Social media analysis can go some way to inform these ideas, but it’s based on historical information, doesn’t predict what’s likely to be of interest in the future and doesn’t take into account the views for those who prefer to keep their digital opinions to themselves. Neither does it test how interesting the target audience will find the topics in question.

Spotting the opportunity with our Clear Air Methodology 

Sapio Research’s Clear Air Methodology marries together the context that social media listening offers with the validation of people you actually want to influence as they test and building upon it further.

It enables you to:

• Make plans confidently
• Forecast trending topics
• Identify the ‘noisy’ places and messages to avoid
• Identify where you can steal a march on the competition
• Overcome the problem of echo chambers
• Develop thought leadership content on the most engaging topics

Our blended methodology process has three steps:

1. Using online tools to identify and track “noise” around a topic – digital analytics (listening).
2. Ask the audience what they want to hear about now and in the future (asking).
3. Mapping conversation noise against the audience’s interest to find the ‘Clear Air’ or Hot Zone/Topics to focus future efforts on (blending and modelling).

Here’s an example of how it’s looked in the IT space in the past.

• The vertical axis shows the volume of topic coverage based on media monitoring listening. 
• The horizontal axis shows the importance of issues identified through asking research (in this case interviews with IT decision makers).
• By combining listening with asking  we can identify which topics are important but not being covered e.g. “cloud acceleration” so messaging can be focused on HOT ZONE topics.

It’s best done in preparation for a review or planning meeting or even a pitch but can also help prioritise ideas once you’ve got them.

We can do all three steps, or work with the outputs of your own social media or sentiment analysis tools.

Call us now to begin your more effective planning process.