What is resonance in marketing and science? For marketers, a message resonates when it leverages your market's natural qualities. This kind of resonance can boost your message's reach, foster greater engagement, and reverberate longer in the collective mind of your target audience. It can even bring a new audience your way. 

Science tells us that resonance happens when an amplified information's frequency matches another natural frequency of vibration. You'll find resonance in a variety of weird and wild places. You can hear it when you notice how two musical notes sound more beautiful together than apart. You can see it when rings of water ripple across a pond. As a force, resonance can do all sorts of things, like moving fire, sand, and even water.

Consider those two notes that sound better together and your marketing message. The market plays a note. Your first step is to hear that note clearly. Next, your goal is to play your messaging note that resonates with the market. Play the wrong note — a dissonant one — and you risk putting your audience in a bad mood, even alienating it. Play the right note, and you’ll produce music that sounds beautiful to your audience and leaves them receptive to more. Think of it as an encore. You can find that note with CulturePulse.

Resonate with CulturePulse

CulturePulse's listening algorithms measure 85 different social and psychological dimensions of your market. It gets its data from publicly available social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter or from data you provide, like CRM info, emails, chatbot transcripts, or text files.

The algorithm’s measurements and learnings create digital twin A/B testing audiences on which you can test content. With each tested message on your twinned audience, your message gets a Resonance Score. Your Resonance Score forecasts how well your audience — say a subreddit — will receive, react to, and resonate with your content based on their beliefs and personalities. You can think of it this way, too: your Resonance Score = Community + Content.

CulturePulse’s audience forecasting allows you to measure twice (or thrice) and publish once to make sure your intended content — an ad headline, a script, you name it — reverberates within your targeted community. And, yes, you can see how it works.

Is a script a better fit for TV or Netflix? Your Resonance Score can tell you

For this use case, we have an input text, a greenlighted script that may or may not cast Famous Actor 1 or Famous Actor 2 (you’ve heard of them both) in the starring role, and two potential entertainment marketplaces for release with active subreddit communities: Netflix and TV. We can use CulturePulse to see which marketplace is best and how much interest there is in the script by leveraging subreddit interests and communities across Scripts, Netflix, and TV with the taxonomy below.

In this case, we chose Social Focus, Family, and Friends to gauge resonance in our digital twin A/B subreddit audiences. You can see that Social Focus drove the highest interest, but interest in the script itself was higher than in Netflix or TV. Even though Family and Friends generated less interest, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of these dimensions because they’re critical components of human social life. With Friends, we can see that audience interest is low. However, the Netflix market would resonate with a script that emphasized friendship.

Next, with a general psychological profile, we see the script compares more closely with the TV market, with the Netflix market emphasizing higher emotional aspects. Many negative emotions, like anxiety, anger, and sadness, appear to be well-matched across all three platforms.

Now, who’s a better fit for the lead role?

When considering who could potentially star in the movie — Famous Actor 1 and Famous Actor 2 — we distill the three interactions into two, which we call resonance. In the resonance graphs, we don’t need to see individual texts, instead, we only see the resonance on each dimension.

We can also look at the followers of the potential leading actors and see how each actor resonates with the script via their followers on social media. 

In the graph below, we can see the actors' market presence aligns with the script on some dimensions, like overall emotion, positivity, and uncertainty. But with anger, Famous Actor 1 resonates far more than Famous Actor 2.

We can also use the Resonance Score to see how well-tuned the script is regarding social concerns. For general sociability, both actors are highly resonant. However, Famous Actor 1, who recently starred in some Marvel Avengers series movies, resonates more with the script, which has some fight scenes.

Regarding the actors' personal interests, work, leisure, and achievements are highly resonant for Famous Actor 1 and Famous Actor 2. Famous Actor 1 resonates more with the script when it comes to morality. Surprisingly, Famous Actor 2 outperforms Famous Actor 1 when it comes to religion. You see, Famous Actor 1’s social media persona is that of a proud Christian, but the script doesn't emphasize religion. Resonance isn't about necessarily adding more to a script. It's about adding balance, which can mean toning down key themes to help create resonance.

How is the Resonance Score actionable regarding the marketplace and leading actor?

When looking at the first use case and the Social Focus and the Psychological Profile charts for the script and its best entertainment marketplace fit, you’d be right to wonder what’s actionable from what you’ve seen. The same can be said for the second use case and Famous Actor 1 or Famous Actor 2, especially when Famous Actor 1 was the digital twin audience favorite.

What’s actionable about the Resonance Score here is this: the human factor (not Graham Greene’s kind), and, subsequently, in the case of the leading actor, the budget. The writer can adapt the screenplay across any of the categories to make thematic elements of the storyline resonate more with the desired entertainment marketplace and audience. He or she can even do the same to make the script resonate even more with either actor’s audience.

Interestingly enough, the client decided to pursue Famous Actor 2 because of budgetary reasons, giving the writer reason to rewrite accordingly with newly gained insights — certainly the first of many content measurements before “publication,” that is to say, casting, filming, and release.

There’s a new paradigm in social media marketing

At the dawn of social media marketing, the old paradigm was to get as much data about individual users as possible so you could micro-target accordingly with specific ads and messaging. But you didn’t create your product for just one person. You created your product for a community of people, your market. With micro-targeting, you sacrifice product integrity and the hard work that went into developing it for a wider audience.

Now, CulturePulse puts your digitally twinned audience right in front of you. You don’t need to segment, micro-target, retarget, and all the rest. Most importantly, you no longer need to sacrifice conversions after A/B testing. You get to optimize scripts, ads, headers, and subject lines before they ever reach your real audience.

Let’s try an analogy: imagine your market is a bowl of water, and you want your campaign to reach every drop of water possible. One way you could do this is to reach into the bowl and target each drop of water, one at a time. Or, you could use resonance to move the water without even getting your fingers wet.

With CulturePulse, you can harness the power of your whole market and create messages that resonate with the entire audience, affecting each person just as sounds can affect every drop of water in a bowl.