Specifications
Insightpool allows clients to identify and engage existing and potential key influencers based on their social behaviors.
Cost
Monthly subscriptions range from $1,000 to $5,000.
User
Nick Ayres, manager of social marketing at InterContinental Hotels Group, started using Insightpool for a few brands in the fall of 2012 and for all IHG brands in March 2013.
How do you use it?
We log into a dashboard that has a handful of aggregate reports. You can analyze different metrics and what Insightpool calls “bundles” of Twitter handles. The bundles give you a way to look at overlaps of certain handles to try and identify potential influencer segments.
If there’s a problem you can submit a help ticket inside the platform. We also email or call our account representative directly.
How does it serve your business needs?
We’re always looking for new and better ways to connect with our guests and leverage innovation as we continue to evolve to meet the needs of today’s travelers. Insightpool helps us understand and better target customers, specifically in social.
You can take the broadcast approach of sending a message to all your fans and followers, which works for certain messages, but we also want to get more specific about other messages and better target them. Insightpool helps us get to customer segmentation, particularly in social, and to be more timely and engaging for certain consumer population segments.
In the winter of 2012, our Holiday Inn Resort brand launched the promotion “Winter Break, Free Night to Take” for US travelers. Guests who stayed two consecutive nights in the winter would receive a free night at a Holiday Inn Resort property to use anytime during 2013. From a social media perspective, and together with integrated marketing and PR initiatives, we wanted to target and get the attention of new audiences who would be interested in this promotion.
Our goal was not only to generate revenue through hotel bookings, but also to drive awareness of the Holiday Inn Resort brand and, in turn, cultivate relationships with new travelers and influencers who are interested in our resort locations but might not be able to take advantage of this particular promotion.
Using Insightpool, we were able to target very specific sub-segments of consumers, far beyond what we had traditionally been able to do. For instance, we were able to identify potential customers who might travel to Walt Disney World in Orlando frequently, customers who were likely to golf, customers who were family oriented, or those who might be headed to the Daytona 500. All of those destinations have Holiday Inn Resort locations.
Not only were we able to drive revenue as a result of our outreach, we also drove incremental Twitter followers to @HolidayInn who had a high average conversion rate of return due to their fit with our target demographic.
We were also able to develop a highly relevant influencer list of travel bloggers who expressed interest in working with the brand in the future.
How does it integrate with your existing infrastructure from an IT standpoint?
It’s Web-based.
What are the main benefits?
It helps us quickly identify and go after potential fans or followers who may already be interested in travel and hospitality, but haven’t yet connected with one of our brands for whatever reason.
It provides robust data points around individual users that give us the ability to target influencers.
It pulls information from a lot of different sources — not just Klout scores.
What are the main drawbacks?
There aren’t many drawbacks for us.
What would you like to see improved / added?
We’d love to find a way to better integrate the tool into some other tools we use so it’s more seamless from a backend perspective. Lack of integration doesn’t hinder us in using the product, but we would be able to use it better if it did integrate with other tools.
I’d like to have the ability to tag or segment people who we know are already getting information from IHG — either via our emails or other channels — as well as the ability to know what content or offers they’ve engaged with so we can start to learn more about their interests holistically.
Right now we’re only using Insightpool for Twitter, and we’d love to see additional capability around other social channels.
Competitors
Adobe Campaign: (formerly Neolane, which was acquired by Adobe in July 2013 and integrated into Adobe Marketing Cloud as of September 2013)
Provides conversational marketing technology and cross-channel campaign management tools.
BloomReach: Offers a “Web Relevance Engine” that analyzes consumer interactions and semantically interprets products and services on more than one billion web pages daily and dynamically adapts websites to capture existing consumer demand across search, social, and ad channels.
Attensity: Provides social analytics and engagement applications.
