Social media has become a core part of a successful business marketing strategy. According to Smart Insights research, a mind-boggling 4.62 billion users across the globe engage with people and brands on social media channels, which accounts for 58.4% of the world’s population. This should give you a fair hint of the overwhelming amount of content being published and interacted with on these platforms.
The increasing number of social users, new platforms, and content distribution modes will continue to demand the most marketing efforts from businesses. With every business now making social media the forefront of their marketing plans, it becomes crucial for you to get a bit scientific. To stay ahead of the curve, you need to understand how your social strategy is performing and get insights that help you derive maximum value.
Today’s challenge is to manage the incoming data from your social channels and derive meaningful insights from them. It might seem like a rabbit hole, but a systematic approach can ensure that you translate all your social data into valuable learning.
In this article, we talk about how an efficient social data management approach can help you provide accurate market insights for improved ROI.
Many businesses face one major challenge when beginning their social data journey the insurmountable data that flows from different directions and channels. This is the first thing that social data management solves by collating all the social data from different platforms, campaigns, and strategies into one place for you to sift through, prepare, and process for a detailed analysis. Such an approach will help you deliver consistent messaging across channels and execute a unified marketing plan.
Through social data management, you get a holistic and structured view of all the KPIs, conversations, and engagement to easily understand and generate reports. You get a clear understanding of what content is working for you, which channels are generating more traction, and what types of posts are compelling users to take action.
For example, you might’ve published a video promoting one of your offerings, and it’s getting a near-viral response. However, if that is not being converted into your website traffic, you can look at the click-through rate and understand what needs to be fixed.
Any successful marketing strategy starts with an appropriate understanding of the target group, their interests, and their pain points. You can easily build a customer persona and profile by looking at a channel metric. However, this becomes a tedious task if your audience is spread across multiple channels. Social data management enables you to get an updated and collated customer profile in real-time. It also keeps track of changing customer behavior and trends so that you can adjust your strategy.
You can further enhance your marketing campaigns by analyzing metrics to understand which channels to promote offerings on for a specific audience group, the ideal content format for the chosen demographic, etc.
Customers like to engage with you directly on social channels by either interacting with your content or messaging you with their queries. This information can be mined to understand customer preferences for various things like channels, devices, interests, social awareness, and even, in some cases, payment methods. These insights can then be used to personalize your offerings, content strategy, and SEO plan, among other things. You can optimize your entire approach to suit the preferences of your target audience.
You can also use this information to produce content that primarily helps your customers while subtly promoting your product. For example, many coffee brands actively share interesting and easy recipes that users can try at home. You might have also come across fashion brands sharing grooming tutorials.
Social data isn’t just about numbers. An effective social media strategy goes beyond that and establishes mechanisms that track non-quantifiable factors like the customer perspective of the brand. Social listening is an effective strategy for assessing how mentions and conversations about you are perceiving your brand image.
Quite a few brands lose many customers to bad customer experiences. You can significantly improve your brand image and refine your product positioning by factoring in user-generated content and your response time to customer queries.
Having a ready set of data in easy-to-understand and attractive visualizations accelerates decision-making. Your resources will spend less time gathering data and analyzing it every time they need to make a decision and just generate the report they need in minutes and expedite the process.
With an efficient social data management approach, you can improve the quality of your data analysis and secure the data sets. You can implement proper governance policies to make sure your trade secrets remain confidential.
Businesses are willing to spend money on marketing, but the challenge is to understand how to go about it. With social data management, you can make ideal budget allocations with full knowledge of where your customers are, what type of content they like, etc.
Although a marketing team comprises resources with different skills, the onus of executing a successful social media strategy often falls on one social media professional. But with in-depth information about how users interact with the content and what is appealing to them, you can take a collaborative approach when devising a marketing plan.
Social data is full of information and metrics, some of which might seem irrelevant to you. However, once you collate the data and analyze it, you will realize how vital the metrics you are currently measuring are and what you should be focusing on.