Consumer insights:
FANFINDERS
Welcome to FanFinders
CEO Alec Dobbie shares more about the inspiration behind the business, how they support brand partners and plans for expansion.
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anFinders is a performance marketing and consumer insight company that connects brands with parents who want what they have to offer via Your Baby Club, the fastest growing mums network in the UK. Back in 2012, we were looking at ways of taking the traditional in-person baby club sign-up online, with the core aims to arbitrage the cost of finding a member, reduce data list-selling and the subsequent spamming. Having experienced the impact of more traditional marketing methods after starting our own families, we wanted to put the power of controlling where data goes in the hands of parents. The objective was always permission based marketing to parents through 1st party consent and consumer choice – and that led to us launching Your Baby Club in 2013 on the FanFinders platform.
Doing things differently
From the start, our ambition was to bring something different to the marketplace. A familiar concept, but with a modern, digital execution. There is no doubt that we operate in an important yet niche sector. However, traditional baby marketing had relied on big brand sponsorship through sampling and couponing, not to mention rate cards that came with set costs and, yes, no promises. The theme running through all of these processes is the same: no way to measure or track results. We wanted to ensure our brand partners could actually see the results they were getting, so from the start we have been a pay-on-results marketing business and have stuck with that model. We’ve even built our own custom
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nursery today
analytics platform, Unite, which lets companies monitor their campaign metrics and insights in real time. Of course, no discussion about using data is complete without bringing up privacy, which still holds some element of fear for brands big and small. As performance marketing and intelligence has experienced growth, alongside the strategic importance of apps and social channels, our transparent approach and being able to prioritise that value exchange between brand and consumer has been one of our biggest strengths. While GDPR and the shift online has seen a lot of traditional data programmes fall by the wayside, we’ve worked from the beginning on making compliance central to our offering. It’s why we’re the number one supplier of 1st party opt-in data in this market.
Your Baby Club
Our network is our baby. It has grown to over 2.5 million members in the UK, covering over 80% of the market, and makes over 25,000 connections every day. We designed Your Baby Club from day one to be personalised, globally scalable and innovative. What that means is that, as we keep learning more about what both mums and our clients need, we can work out how to add extra value for both. One of the biggest misconceptions around is that having your data work for you and building complex content hubs or sophisticated ecommerce infrastructure is only for the big boys. Sure, we work with some of the leading players in the industry, but acquiring new customers, developing your own marketing lists and gaining crucial insights from those interactions is something every company in the nursery market should be doing; we can help you do this.
Finding out why someone is interested in or purchased your products is just the first step on developing a roadmap of digital engagement, with multiple contact points and building the knowledge to weather situations like the recent pandemic. Let’s not forget about great content either, as data is only one small piece of the puzzle. Our new platform is about helping and inspiring new parents, which is why we’re continually working with bloggers and experts. With over 2 million families opted-in from 1st trimester through to nursery age and a reach of 14 million across our social channels, we help our partners speak to parents at different life-stages, whether it’s email marketing at scale, sharing resources or tailored offers. Making our technology hyperpersonalised and responsive in the same way represents the next part of our journey.
SNext steps
Back in 2018, we launched Your Baby Club in the US. It covered 33% of the market within a year and now has over 2 million members. In addition to building the best version of our software yet, we hope to see our platform in more places around the world soon. We fully expect that there will be a number of hurdles with our plans for international expansion, whether it’s managing remote workforces or interconnecting with the right brands globally, but everything we do will be based on the same vision: creating a better experience for our users and more bespoke marketing opportunities for our partners. FanFinders will be sharing consumer insights and analysis from its Your Baby Club network in upcoming issues.
For more information on FanFinders and the consumer insight they can offer, call: 0203 808 3011 or visit www.fanfinders.com