Leveraging Social Media analytics to optimize marketing strategy
What started as a platform for people to share personal updates and pictures with their friends, social media has today turned into a full-fledged marketplace with businesses using social media analytics to reach out to their clients. With over 3.5 billion users around the world, social media, that includes Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and several others; has become a place for people and brands to connect. It plays a huge role in making the first and last impression about any product. Needless to say, it is vital for businesses to make both those impressions count.
The core of social media analytics lies in gathering and analyzing marketing and audience data upon which business decisions are based. The power of social media analytics is such that the marketing strategy of an organization can be created/modified based on the insights derived from the data.
Data gathered from social media analytics reveal how users engage with, view and share content. Tracking and analyzing such data can give useful insights for businesses in terms of effective content, trends on various other platforms, competition and the overall marketing strategy adopted by the organization.
Importance of Social Media Analytics
Social intelligence tools enable businesses to understand the user’s preferences, needs, expectations and purchasing behavior. The analytics help to capture insights from conversations taking place across social media platforms and thereby facilitating consumer profiling, trend analysis and consumer behavior analysis. From these insights the business house can develop targeted customer centric marketing strategies. The following points elucidate the need and growing importance of social media analytics.
1.Predict Trends
Insights derived from the results of the social media analytics coupled with opinions from media experts help to predict emerging trends. This in turn can help to make informed decisions for the business as a whole.
2.Measuring Return on Investment (ROI)
The analytics provide insight into the ROI for marketing campaigns. Social media analytics help to optimize the marketing strategy and make it more impactful. For example, likes, comments, shares can be used to gauge the overall health of social presence, measuring up against competitors and identify what content is resonating with the audience. Only if the audience relate with the content will there be likes, comments, sharing with friends, conversions and so on. As all roads lead to Rome, conversion and engagement translate into improved ROI.
3.Develop Better Content
The way customers feel about a brand and what the brand delivers to them is called brand sentiment. It involves keeping a track of the conversations on the organization’s social media platforms. This helps to create content that resonates with the customer and stays ahead of the competition. Monitoring customer sentiments allows the organization to gauge the following:
- Decipher what customers want from a brand
- Understand challenges faced by customers with respect to a particular product
- Anticipate and stay prepared for any challenges that might surface
4.Making Better Strategic Marketing Decisions
Data driven marketing decisions fare far better than mere gut feelings. Social media analytics can improve a marketing team’s ability to ascertain what strategies are doing well, those that need improvement and those that need redesigning. Analytics can provide demographic information about the audience. This in turn can help in enhancing marketing strategies by concentrating on the right target audience and thereby create better brand awareness.
Metrics To Be Tracked with Social Media Analytics
Understanding how your organization’s marketing strategy is playing out in reality is vital. Here are 6 social media metrics that help to determine an organization’s ROI from marketing efforts. It is important to consider these factors while employing social media analytics in order to arrive at the rate of success of a marketing strategy.
1.Performance Metrics
Measuring the performance of the marketing strategy is absolutely important to understanding the success of the strategy or areas for improvement. Key performance metrics which need to be tracked will include
- Post interactions: Interactions across platforms to gauge if the content is engaging with the customers optimally.
- Count of followers: Keeping track of the number of followers and whether the number is increasing over time.
- Click rate: To ascertain whether traffic is being directed correctly from the social media site to the business one.
2.Audience Analytics
The best way to optimize the marketing strategy would begin with first identifying the target audience. Targeted content has a far greater rate of success than random marketing. Social media analytics can provide information on demographics, customer interests, buying patterns and so on; all of which help in channelizing a market strategy to the correct audience.
3.Sentiment Analysis
This kind of analysis is necessary to understand whether the marketing strategy is making an impact or not. If the strategy is not successful it can bring forth inherent issues with an existing product or service. To ensure that the interest of the target audience stays, their engagement, rate of conversion needs to be tracked over time. A spike in negative sentiment is a sure sign of loss of interest in customers.
4.Competitor Analytics
While it is absolutely necessary to arrive at a marketing strategy that suits one’s business, it also makes sense to keep track of the competitors in the market. Keeping an eye on how competitors are faring is a good way to make improvements in one’s own marketing strategy. Most of the latest social media analytics employ artificial intelligence (AI). Therefore, the analytics can be programmed to map competitor performance in order to gauge relative effectiveness.
5.Paid Social Analytics
When it comes to advertising it is not just a large budget that does the trick, it is also about targeting the right content towards the correct audience. Advanced analytics can predict the success or failure of a particular strategy based on available facts. This makes financial sense, since to a large extent it ensures that the strategy is not an unsuitable one. Some of the parameters to be borne in mind while tracking performance include:
- Total number of active ads
- Total ad spends
- Total clicks
- Cost per click
- Cost per engagement
- Cost per action
- Cost per purchase
Influencer Analytics
Several social media marketers collaborate with social influencers as part of the marketing strategy to stay ahead of competition. Social media analytics can provide insights into the right metrics to ensure that such campaigns are successful. Some of the metrics that should be tracked with such strategies include
audience size, frequently used hashtags in order to ensure maximum reach,
the number of posts influencers create on a regular basis to determine how active and influential they are.
Winning the social media marketing game is by no means an easy feat. It takes time, research, trial and error and patience to get the desired results. Social media analytics help to understand customers and trends and provide tailored content and services. Additionally social media data can be utilized to streamline internal operations and has the potential to generate savings and improve ROI.
While many organizations have some form of social media analytics tool, many do not provide in-depth metrics and data points that are essential for the organization. An effective analytics tool can provide deeper levels of insight and help to streamline the marketing strategy.
To understand how you can harness the power of Social Media analytics for your organization, call our experts today!