Use of SNA analysis as an effective tool in your marketing strategy

CURRENT SITUATION

We cannot stress enough how much the financial crisis affected small and medium businesses. This is particularly true in Southern Europe were most countries are still struggling to get back on their feet. Being Italian I had the chance to witness this struggle myself, it affected people that I know, friends and family. That is why, given my studies in business, I decided to get involved with a small athletic center that supported me during my sports career. I joined the company as a consultant and from the beginning of my experience one of the biggest challenge has been running the business with very limited resources and till now a lot of improvements have been made but SNA could help achieve even better results.

PROBLEM

In order to run a great marketing campaign with almost no funds, you need to have an outstanding marketing strategy and here is when social network analysis could be very helpful. Let's simplify the whole situation and let's focus on one initiative: leveraging the young athletes that are currently training at the center as brand ambassadors in order to increase brand awareness of the center.

SOLUTION

Using data, that we will collect through a survey, we will be able to identify the athletes that will the best to promote the brand. To do so we will analyze the data, using mainly centrality measures, focusing on some of them in particular:

• In-degree, it identifies the number of people who talk with our athlete
• Out-degree, it identifies the number of people that our athlete talk to
• Betweenness, it identifies the athlete on the path between the most influential people within the group that we are targeting, the higher the more path our athlete is on
• Eigenvector, it identifies the athlete connected to the most influential people within the group that we are targeting
• Closeness, it identifies the athlete that has the shortest path to all others

With these measure we will be able to understand who will be the best athlete to use to sponsor our center. Using him as our brand ambassador will enable us to have a very effective marketing campaign especially given the niche market in which we operate. Small schools with less than a thousand students usually have some key individuals that are very popular, the purpose of using social network analysis is identify those individuals and leverage them to deliver our messages.

SURVEY

The questions in the survey will be:

• What is your gender?
• What is your age group?
• Which sports are you practicing?
• Which is your sports idol?
• Please define your school interaction (never, once, sometimes, always) with the list of our athlete.
• Please define your social interaction (never, once, sometimes, always) with the list of our athlete.

IMPLEMENTATION

Considering the importance that young athletes have within the athletic center, their presence is key in order to foster the right environment. Once we have the results of our analysis we will pick those athletes, who are already part of our roaster, that present the best centrality measures. We can even move our initiative one step further, supported by the right questions within our survey, and propose a sponsorships to those individuals that are key in the community and in fact are athletes but they don't train at our center yet. Furthermore, using subgroups, we could target even more precisely our customers and following the same guidelines that we applied since the beginning identify those key individuals within the subgroups.

POSSIBLE RESULTS

Considering that so far the center has roughly 500 active users and assuming that we will bring our survey to the biggest schools in the area (together they have more than 2,000 students), with whom we already have a good relationship, we will be able to promote our center to the target audience that we are looking for using few key individuals at a very low cost, everything thanks to a good social network analysis.

Alessandro Pregel

MIB