How To Exploit Social Data For The Benefit Of Your Digital Marketing Campaign

As a marketer, social media is capable of providing you with the kinds of information that marketers of a time recently passed would have given their right arm to have access to. That’s because there is a multitude of data just waiting to be mined and enacted upon to provide the ROI that your business is crying out for. It’s just a case of knowing what to look for, knowing how to get it, and then knowing what to do with it.

Understand
your audience

This
has always been the number one objective of marketing professionals, and it
hasn’t changed. What has evolved, however, is the ease by which this
information can be collected, and the level of detail that we can collate.

You
want to build the profile of your average customer, or even the profile of the
average person who engages with your brand. No problem. The type of analytical
tools that are available now can lavish you with everything from age profile
and geographical location to the style of content they usually interact with to
the other brands they are interested in. Most of the social media platforms
have native tools which can utilize to this end: Facebook Insights, Google
Analytics and Twitter Analytics, for example.

“Knowledge is power, and this particular knowledge is powerful. Use it to form the basis of your entire marketing campaign,” recommends Tia Somerset, a marketer at Academized and Paper Fellows.

Set
your KPIs

You
need to set your key performance indicators before you even establish your
marketing campaign, because it is those KPIs which your campaign should be
centered around, not the other way around. If you know what it is that you
exactly want to measure, then you can design a marketing approach that will
actually gather that key data. Doing it the other way around will mean you are
only collecting the data that is possible from your strategy, and that’s not
the way to do it.

Take
advantage of trends

There
are tools which can actually bring you the metrics on what is trending, where
and when. For example, bottlenose can
intuitively present data on what people are interested in at this very moment
based on what they are engaging with on social media. By utilizing this
information you can then inform your campaign with the type of content that is
really valuable now.

Don’t
forget customer insights

Customer insights are all the rage, and it’s not surprising. Your average trend and piece of data will show you what customers like and where that customer is based, for example. What a customer insight will tell you is why they interact with your brand, based on more of a psychological analysis. For example, what do your customers share, and with whom? Customer surveys, market research tools and intelligent analytics can all assist in painting this picture.

With
this type of information available, you can configure your brand to sit
perfectly within the scope of your desired audience.

Let
data help you pick your content

Engagement data will not only be able to tell you where your traffic is coming from, but what content is directing that traffic. “We are not just talking about the platform either,” states Mickey Saunders, a social media manager Big Assignments and OX Essays. “We are also talking about the style and nature of the content that has driven them your way. Think what you can do with that information. “All this effectively means that you can target content by its nature (video/infographic/podcast etc.) and the platform that you use it on, which means you have a successfully-tailored marketing approach.”

Continuously
manage your brand

Brand
matters as much as it ever did, so use the data you are collecting to inform
you how to best manage that brand, and never stop evolving. Staying still in
this day and age is akin to a brand death, so make sure you are very much alive
by interacting with current trends and even current affairs – see the way Nike
has used its advertising campaigns with Colin Kaepernick to reveal its social
conscience as an example.

It’s
never finished

Once
your marketing campaign is up and running, that’s not the time to take your
foot of the gas. In fact, that’s the time to really start delving deep into the
data that is coming your way, to discover how people are engaging with your
brand, what is working, and what isn’t.

And
there it is. With this type of data at your fingerprints, your marketing
approach is based on  science, not
intuition.

Ellie Coverdale is a social media writer at UK Writings and Essay Roo services. She also teaches content writing and contributes to Boom Essays service blog.