Frequently asked questions
The common questions our customers ask us about Herdify.
Tell me more about communities and behavioural science
Our communities are the single biggest influence on consumer buying behaviour. We’re influenced via social learning from people we know or trust – only 8% of the population buys without recommendation.
Communities are so much more than gifting, referrals, giveaways, loyalty programs and social media management.
Communities are streets, towns and cities where word-of-mouth is the biggest driver in revenue and customer acquisition – more so than any marketing efforts. They are the real-world locations where you have brand awareness that is driving growth.
Often when we receive a recommendation from someone in our real-world community, we’re motivated to purchase, but life is busy and we easily forget. Harnessing your communities through Herdify’s technology means that your marketing is amplified. It helps to nudge consumers who are familiar with your brand, so that your marketing campaigns serve as the final path to purchase.
In a nutshell, ad and brand recall rates are notoriously poor – when consumers are not familiar with your product or brand, they unconsciously ignore the ad. Once they’ve received a positive recommendation from someone they trust, they are much more likely to “unfilter” your marketing activation.
How it works
The Herdify team use the type of modelling used in pandemic science to predict where communities are forming in the real world.
Pandemic modelling is about predicting where a virus will transmit between people. The same models can be used to predict how brand messages will transmit between people.
We take your sales data and look for patterns to see the location and frequency of how these messages are being transmitted.
Today there are no options to identify offline word-of-mouth; 60% of conversation happens offline so social listening misses this. Digital retailers have random sales that cover entire countries, so when you plot their sales locations it typically just shows the locations that are highly populated, not where you have community hotspots.
We normalise for population and then baseline the time between sales. We then analyse at the lowest level geography to see if there is a relationship, and then increase the distance to see how tight the community is. Finally, we compare all adjacent communities to see if a weak narrow one is actually part of a larger one.
You could but this is selling yourself short. Firstly, one good customer does not make a community, and perhaps 10 average ones are better. Secondly, a few good customers don’t tell you how wide the community is.
We need customer ID, billing postcode, date of purchase and value (optional).
Demographic data shows the attributes of individuals and the communities they live in, NOT the communities where your brand is being talked about.
Let’s take an example that you sell a product to 30–40-year-old professionals who read the news.
Demographic data can find these people for you, but it will be the same for your competition, meaning you are in a head-to-head an expensive fight.
By finding your communities, you’re finding the spots where people are leaning towards your brand and just need a gentle nudge to purchase.
Profiling existing customers’ locations isn’t new, but community isn’t just about volumes in a location. Communities can be high in influence, but low in volume of sales as much as they can be high volume and high influence. If you just focus on volume, you end up with a high correlation to densely populated spaces.
This is where the time component comes in. There isn’t an “average time between sales” that is a silver bullet, but more an ever-increasing speed. If you think about how a pandemic spreads – 2 people, 4 people, 8 people, 16 people (you get it) – it has a quickening effect. With product sales, the pattern isn’t as obvious, but it’s a similar trend.
How can I work with you?
We can easily connect with most data platforms, including Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce, Stripe and Hubspot. If you don’t see your platform on our connectors page, please contact us here to request a connection.
We’re here to help! Please see our product page or email us at hello@herdify.com and our team of data scientists will jump right in.
Targeting communities can make your marketing more effective. To target them you can export a list of postcodes where your communities are strong. For your digital campaigns you can export optimised and formatted location targets specific to your platform of choice.
You definitely do not need to be a data scientist or even an analyst!
It’s a straightforward process to connect your data to our portal – simply have the login details for your data platform (Shopify, WooCommerce etc.) to hand.
We’ll then quickly generate our insights and recommendations, and hand them back to you in an easy-to-digest format every month.
We partner with a number of agencies who we can recommend that you work with, and who are fully briefed on how to maximise our recommendations in all areas of marketing. If you’re an agency who’s interested in being part of this network, please do get in touch.
We’re happy to work directly with your agency to easily setup the data connections and optimise our recommendations. We’ll work with you and your agency in whatever way works best for you.
We’re here to make agencies’ (and your) lives easier and to complement the tools that you already have in place.
Step inside our black box.
We analyse your first-party sales data to spot those transactions that have been triggered by your communities and then make recommendations to amplify that impact in the future.
Word-of-mouth leaves a very different footprint compared to sales driven by other factors, such as advertising campaigns, press coverage or Google ad spend.
Our algorithm is trained to pick up the patterns that are unique to your brand. It’s an approach we spent 15 years developing with some of the UK’s best data scientists.
Think of it like a wildlife tracker… Yes, we love an animal analogy at Herdify. Wildlife trackers are trained to spot tiny changes – patterns – in the wilderness, such as track marks, broken twigs, changes in the grass direction. That’s exactly what our data scientists do with your data.
Once we’ve identified where word-of-mouth conversations are happening, we’ll provide you with recommendations about where your campaigns will have the biggest impact – now and in the future.
It’s an approach that leads to an immediate uplift in ad performance and sales conversion time, all thanks to the power of word-of-mouth.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is the UK’s independent authority setup to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals. Our registered number is C1103520.
Yes, they do. It varies though – they may change 15-20% or sometimes as much as 60%. The targeting is all about where and when. It’s not always the right time to target, and our recommendations allow for monthly change to capture intent and influence at the right time.
It also depends on the medium, and we can be flexible with this. For example, Out Of Home activations are longer term so we would look for more stable areas, whereas digital can be every month. In every case, we’ll help you activate the recommendations and find the best way to use the data.
We can slow down the frequency if required. Monthly is as fast as we go, but if this is too fast then we can adapt accordingly.
There’s no fixed rule, it depends on audience size. We look at what you’re looking to spend and we prioritise the audience accordingly.
We do not model individual behaviour – we model group behaviour and network effects.
One person in a group buys something, others become aware and start to consider it – by the time a few more have purchased the rest of the group will likely purchase without much thought. This is the pattern we look for, the complication being the time and distance between each sale is different for each brand. This is essentially our USP.
Google has announced it will delay the removal of third-party cookies in Chrome until 2024. It’s the world’s most popular browser so the change will lead to a marked shift in the way that brands allocate their ad spend.
When Apple moved to allow iPhone users to decide whether or not they were tracked by apps in 2021, it made targeting new customers that much harder. Platforms such as Facebook have lost billions in advertising revenue and small businesses have had to deal with rising prices and diminishing reach.
With less access to third-party data, digital ads just aren’t as effective as they used to be.
Marketers are understandably concerned about Google’s planned changes. One survey found that 41% believe they’ll struggle to track the right data, and many predict they’ll need to increase advertising budgets by as much as 25%.
There is another way.
Herdify helps businesses optimise their first-party data to become much more targeted in their ad spend. Using an approach developed from 15 years of behavioural science modelling, our data team take a brand’s historical sales and identify where word-of-mouth is generating activity, to predict where those audiences are who are most primed to be targeted next.
Real actionable insights to turbo-charge your marketing strategy – now and in the future.