eCommerce brands know how to use social networks. They seem to be especially good at it when it comes to Instagram — reports show that 80% of Instagram users follow at least one eCommerce brand. Their YouTube and Facebook memberships also saw increases, although not as much as Instagram
On their own, social networks can do wonders for a brand. They can increase a brand’s recognizability and reach, and provide a platform for direct communication with customers. It’s even possible to use them to sell products directly to followers. But every brand, and especially those that are social-savvy, should look for a way to extract more value from their social presence.
How to do it? By using social data, of course. “The information you get from social media has incredible value for marketers,” says Marketing Specialist Pearl Langley. “And it’s useful for the parts of the campaign that don’t involve social media, too.” Let’s see how social data helps your marketing campaign every step of the way.
Every Campaign Needs a Goal
A marketing campaign for every brand isn’t necessarily glamorous. Sure, they’ll be a product launch now and again. But there will also be “get more targeted visitors to the website” types of campaigns. And marketers probably see more of the latter type.
Social data doesn’t have to provide or inspire ideas for campaign goals. But marketers cannot think about campaign goals without knowing who their audience is and what their audience likes, and how it behaves. That’s where social data becomes very handy.
Creation of customer personas is the time-honored way to target an audience, and social data surely provides plenty of information for customer-persona creation. But social data can also be very useful for finding out trends, popular interests, or burning questions the campaign could answer.
Analyzing the Competitors
A platform where brands would come, look for new customers, or maintain relationships with existing customers is every marketer’s dream. And it’s not only because of the freedom and convenience to run their own campaigns — social media and networks are also great because they’re great for competitor analysis.
Marketers can find out many interesting things when analyzing their competitor’s social data. At the very least, marketers can find what kind of content works best for their competitors, how frequently do they post new content, which segments of their audience show the most engagement. Being able to perform good competitor analysis is almost as valuable as running a trial campaign.
Creating Campaign Materials and Assets
It’s a common saying that there’s no way to have an online marketing campaign without a brand-new landing page. Most marketers would agree, but few would hang the success of a whole marketing campaign on a single landing page. There’s probably going to be a whole host of content, optimized websites, and paid ads.
Social data can help marketers make all the choices that matter to the creation and performance of marketing materials and assets. With something as simple as an Instagram photo, social data can determine the theme, the setting, the filter, the time of day when the content is released, and probably the piece of content that gets a release before that photo, and the one after. Social data can also tell whether Instagram is the best place for the brand to market itself in the first place.
Performance Testing Analysis
The post-launch utility of social data is mostly limited to the things that happen on the social channel. The data won’t be as useful in determining the performance of a website or a landing page, even though those will have data of their own.
Social data will tell everything a marketer needs to know about their campaign’s social media performance. However, before rolling out the campaign, marketers might want to use social media to test at least a couple of versions of paid ads. What can be tested should be tested, and testing ads before rolling the campaign out will give marketers some data that will help them improve their targeting.
Social data can do a lot to ensure a successful launch of a marketing campaign. However, it’s only useful if the marketer knows how and where to look for data, which data is useful, and how to analyze it. In today’s landscape, every marketer that’s thinking about running a campaign should have those skills, even if they believed they’d only be doing ‘traditional’ marketing. Digital is the new traditional.
Author: Kate Khom
Kate is a writer and passionate blogger. She likes sharing her thoughts and tricks with the readers. Currently, she works as the real estate agent at hu.flatfy.com. Feel free to contact her!
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