Customer Story: Understanding the Habits and Attitudes of New Mothers

Mavens is an insights and strategy consultancy with years of experience in providing innovative research, measurement, analytics, SEO and digital strategy to some of the world’s largest brands.  

With a client list that includes global companies Unilever, Philips, the Asahi Group, Essity, Pfizer and Diageo its efforts and data sources span all countries and languages.  

Mavens combines custom development with enterprise-grade data tools, conducting bespoke qualitative and quantitative research to deliver actionable insights that help make businesses better.

Mavens has been working with Brandwatch Analytics for a number of years, and more recently, with Brandwatch Audiences.

Great marketing starts with understanding your audience. Whoever you’re looking for, Brandwatch Audiences makes it simple to find groups of people based on what matters to you – their demographics, passions, professions, where they’re based, and who they engage with.

In this article we speak with Taylor Behmke, Senior Consultant at Mavens of London about how his team in New York City uses Brandwatch Audiences to better understand specific audiences.

Hi Taylor, it’s great to talk to you! Can we start by asking what challenges were you looking to overcome by using social listening?

We wanted to understand how a specific, target audience of new mothers discussed motherhood, where they got parenting information, and who was influential for this target audience. New mums were classified as women who are pregnant with first child or any/all children three or younger (i.e. mothers who are new to the experience of child-rearing).

We were working on a research project for a client who was preparing the launch of a new skincare product line for infants, a segment they had not catered to in the past.

The goal of the research was to understand the habits and attitudes of new mothers and prepare actionable insights to brief creative and media agencies more effectively.

What KPIs you were looking to achieve?

We needed to build a large enough sample of new mothers to analyze on Twitter to feel confident in the significance of our insights.

When we first approached this task we used a regular Brandwatch Query to look for language being used that indicated the person was a new mother (e.g. hashtags like #newmom, #firstpregancy, #mothertobe, etc.)

Through this method, we did not get a large enough sample, so we decided to build on this sample using Brandwatch Audiences to find similar terms in people’s Twitter bios.

What specific types of information were you looking to gather?

It was important to identifying language patterns to be able to better communicate with new mothers.

Understanding where they turned to for parenting information, and identifying a psychographic profile through influencer identification.

Can you share some of the insights you uncovered?

We identified that new mothers’ most used hashtags were #newmom and #momtobe.

Brandwatch Audiences also helped us identify that the top three sources of parenting information were blogs BabyCenter, thebump, and ModernMom. This helped correct a previous assumption that new mothers were not aware of these parenting blogs vs. mothers that had already raised at least one child.

We identified a unique segment of accounts that were particularly influential for this target audience was entrepreneurial moms (e.g. Jessica Alba).

How did you put these insights into action?

The top used hashtags were recommended as targeting criteria for paid social.

The team conducted some additional research on the language used in the top parenting blogs frequented by our target segment and found that they had their own vernacular of acronyms (DH – Dear Husband, TTC – Trying to Conceive, FTM – First Time Mom, etc.) and that there were a lot of controversial parenting issues being discussed.

All of this information fed into the communication strategy and creative asset ideation for the brand.

How did did the client react when you showed them the results of your work with Brandwatch Audiences?

They were quite impressed that we were able to isolate a significant sample of new mothers vs. all mothers on Twitter and that we were able to find new information about how they communicate and where they go for parenting advice.

How has working with Audiences fitted in with your usage of Analytics, and your social intelligence strategy in general?

Using Brandwatch Audiences we are now able to isolate age, gender, and ethnic segments on Twitter.

It has allowed us to go into greater detail in answering certain market research questions and be more sure that our findings are valid.

The advantage of using Audiences was the ability to isolate this very specific audience on social and then understand what language they use/passion points/etc.

Other methods of getting at these findings would have been more expensive and time-consuming (survey, panel) and likely harder to get as broad a set of insights.

How does using Brandwatch Audiences compare to similar tools?

Audiences is very easy to use and provides flexible options for defining an audience. It’s also great that we can build an audience list and then pull it to a particular Query to see how much of that audience discusses a particular topic.

Finally Taylor, what are your future plans for using Brandwatch?

In the future would like to build up a list of interesting audience segments and the Query language to use in Brandwatch Audiences so that we can quickly check if conversation about a particular topic has a particular demographic skew.

Thanks for talking to us Taylor. If you have a Brandwatch story you’d like to share, please get in touch.