How Fanweave's transforming digital marketing

What if creating cross-platform marketing campaigns was quick and painless? Why isn’t it already? What even is cross-platform sharing? We’re here to give you the rundown, and to tell you why Fanweave might just solve all your digital marketing woes.

The explosion of digital technology has had a huge impact on marketing communications, particularly down to the fact that everybody is now almost constantly looking at their phones. Even ten years ago, companies were still printing expensive brochures and sending them out in envelopes, and most companies would communicate with their database via the post.

Naturally social media is the outcome of the last 20 years of the internet, and it’s a very powerful medium. The digital revolution and everything that followed created a huge shift in marketing plans to focus on these platforms. People are making their purchasing decisions via the use of their phones, so brands have had to adapt to this behaviour. However, this digital explosion presented its own problems – particularly in terms of each platform competing for attention, creating data that is proprietary to them.

Obstacles to marketing success

One of the main hindrances of digital marketing in its current form, is that when running a cross-platform campaign (for example an ad campaign across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) none of these platforms communicate with each other. As a result, consumers see repeated ads across the different social channels, making for a frustrating and unsatisfactory user experience.

As a client it’s even more irksome, as you aren’t able to get all audience data and insight in one place but instead must download leads separately from different platforms. Not to mention if you wanted to re-target an audience across different campaigns for conversions, you’d be missing out on that collective overview. In short, while cross-platform campaigns are currently possible, they’re painstaking – to run, to analyse, and to be on the receiving end of as a consumer.

In a perfect world, if you wanted to target a group of people on the platforms that they use regularly – and maximise sharing from those individuals to their communities – then Fanweave is the design you would end up with. By creating a time-saving solution which simplifies cross-platform sharing, and minimises consumers being targeted with the same ads repeatedly across multiple channels, Fanweave’s technology is putting the campaign itself back in the limelight.

One of the biggest obstacles that Fanweave’s Paul Fisher faced during his time with the Jockey Club, was not having the knowledge of who their customers actually were. He felt that often they were spending a lot of money to just “fire in the dark”, not really knowing where they were seeing the benefit of that spend. This can be another huge barrier in the current digital marketing landscape.

“We put in lots of innovation to capture who was actually coming onto the racecourses, but what we’d find is we’d have knowledge of the purchaser, but not the guests – and no knowledge of where their money went when they came racing.”

As a result of these observations, Paul got involved with developing an app for the Jockey Club – the aim was to gain knowledge of who people were sharing tickets with. While successful, it was still early days for this sort of technology. However it stimulated a passion for something like Fanweave; a platform where you can really start to capture that knowledge, and capture crucial data about who your engaged customers are and who they are sharing their offerings with. This is exactly why Paul believes Fanweave could be “a real game-changer” for thousands of individuals, brands, and artists, across the world.

How Fanweave is paving the way

Fanweave is a peer-to-peer communications marketing intelligence platform, meaning that anyone can engage with the tool directly, linking them to whoever the client is. As people engage with the tool and share, Fanweave tracks what happens – clickbacks, relative value of posts, sign-ups, purchasing etc. – and this gives a pattern of behaviour based on an individual and their networks, allowing Fanweave to attribute value back to them. This in turn allows clients to reward these networks for the activities that they’ve undertaken. Because this is engaging the person’s own social networks, it means interacting with fans in their own networks rather than the fans having to go through any one social platform.

By tracking across multiple social platforms, direct marketing and emails, this allows for an attributed pattern of somebody’s true “influence” within their peer group and their friends. Those networks of peers then get to enjoy the associated rewards and benefits; whether that’s tickets, discounts or upgraded experiences. This allows clients to understand who they should be talking to, those who are the most important to their businesses and their activity, and to reward them for their loyalty.

Fanweave founder Martin Heath feels that the key difference between Fanweave and its competitors is that Fanweave operates on a mutually beneficial basis. Clients get real-time, attributed data back, and for the fans it’s great to be rewarded for something they would already be doing anyway, while understanding their own influence.

It’s all about linking together these mutual benefits and the communication between clients and fan networks, and creating a pattern of attribution and demand that’s authentic. It’s impossible to fake it, since it’s based on people’s behaviour and not an algorithm. On why something like Fanweave really needs to exist, Fanweave investor Simon Bazalgette sums it up when he says;

“You can see how larger companies hold the knowledge of who’s doing what, with what messages, who is sending to whom. Whereas Fanweave can actually break that chain, break that control of some of those bigger platforms, and put that knowledge back with the fans, the brands, the clubs; once you’ve got that knowledge back, you can do incredible things with it.”