Why passion points are key for audience intelligence

No one should know your target audience better than you do. In fact, you should know them better than they know themselves. And people are more than just their interactions with and attitudes around your brand or sector.

Enter passion points.

What are passion points?

Passion points map out the entire character of your target audiences, focusing on what they are  – you guessed it – passionate about. 

Passion points are different from any other audience research metric because they don’t necessarily have anything to do with you.

Here’s an example.

Take a cider company looking to bump up sales by identifying new points of interaction with its target audience.

Using a dedicated, full-service market research platform (like GWI, hint hint), the team uncovers an interesting fact about their audience: Over a third of cider drinkers are interested in theater – they’re 39% more likely to say this than the average consumer.

With this nugget of knowledge in hand, the brand can do a few things:

1. Focus its marketing efforts on channels in theaters.
2. Mold its messaging to spark interest in theater fans.
3. Strike up a collab with theaters to offer their products.
4. Take this information and go even deeper into the research.

Easy as pie. But how do you actually go about finding passion points?

How to identify passion points in your target audience

Odds are you’re already well-versed in the power of audience research, so we won’t keep going on about it.

Once you have your audience neatly segmented and built out, you can start searching for those crucial interests that bring many of your consumers together – with or without your brand.

Here’s what a fantastic passion point looks like.

1. It either indexes high, involves a large percentage of your audience, or both.
2. It’s derived from a usable question (e.g. time spent on media, interests and hobbies, media preferences).
3. You can use it as a jumping off point to delve even deeper into the topic.
4. It opens up new possibilities for your messaging, placements, and content.

In many cases, you’ll end up with 1-3 strong passion points, which you can then combine and use to take your audience knowledge to the next level.

Get deeper into your audience’s mindset

Once you have a nice bundle of passion points, don’t stop there.

With an all-in-one data platform like GWI, you can take the extra step to find out what exactly makes your audience special – and why this passion point is so important to them.

Using that depth of data, you can get to the very bottom of the passion points, either with the main dataset or one of the dedicated add-ons that focus on the likes of sports, kids, gaming, and the US market.

Here’s how your business can use passion points to its advantage

Ultimately, passion points tell you what your consumers are into. Researching the passion points themselves (and matching your audience to the data) tells you why.  

This supercharges your strategies, fine-tuning them to the nuances of your consumers. The result: personalized and accurate campaigns, enhanced product development, and much more. In a nutshell, passion points help you and your business: 

1. Inform your campaign strategy and planning.
2. Identify and open up partnership opportunities.
3. Tweak comms and tone of voice.
4. Improve your products.
5. Create brand campaigns that resonate.

There is so much you can do once you’ve discovered your audience’s passion points that can help rocket your business into the stratosphere.

Take it even further with custom research

Sometimes, even a wealth of data isn’t quite enough to get the level of detail you’re after. That’s when custom research can be the ticket.

Working closely with data analysts, you’ll create a bespoke survey to recontact your audience and get an even clearer picture of their passions, and the reasons behind them.

By bringing custom data into play, you can rest assured you’ve harnessed all the information you could possibly need to flesh out your passion points.