Crafting your social media marketing strategy can be tricky. It is easy to fall victim to following fads and chasing vanity metrics. This is especially true for consumer-facing businesses.
With millions of potential customers belonging to various demographics, B2C (business-to-consumer) brands can be overwhelmed with so much social media data. With the proper know-how, social media data can be your best friend in ensuring you are going down the right path with your campaigns.
Here are 3 ways that you can use your social media data to boost your business:
1. Use the Right Tools to Sift Through Your Social Media Data
There is a lot of information available on the internet regarding your customer base. Not taking this into consideration when you craft your social strategy is dangerous; would you drive your car on a busy street with your eyes closed? Definitely not.
Your business might have a couple of products that cut across various demographics, but without data analytics, you risk putting in a campaign with the wrong target audience. You may also serve your advertisements in the time slot when your target audience is not active. This can lead to an underwhelming performance that makes it harder for you to achieve your desired ROI.
You have to use the right set of tools to make sense of your social media data. For example, suppose that your primary customers belong to a particular demographic who is more active at night, between 8PM to 10PM, than in the daytime, it is best to work around this important factor. You can then make sure your advertisements and any marketing content you serve will be targeted on this time slot. This increases your chance of reaching more of your target audience.
2. Take Advantage of Machine Learning to Help You with Predictive Analysis
Predictive analysis has been gaining ground in social media marketing. This is because it can help you boost your sales, avoid shopping cart abandonment, ensure optimal inventory management, and many more.
You can make an educated guess on what your sales will be for this month based on last year’s data for the same month. However, without rigorous number-crunching, you might make a few assumptions which can turn out to be wrong. This is where predictive analysis through machine learning comes in handy.
Machine learning can help you make sense of your entire social media data. It can help pinpoint that a spike in sales during the holiday season typically results in a variety of secondary opportunities for upselling. This enables you to properly manage your inventory as well as make sure your customer service team will be all-hands-on-deck to respond to customer concerns after their initial purchase, thus delivering superb customer service that can provide repeat customers.
3. Put Data Science at the Center of Your Strategy
The treasure trove of social media data that your business generates will be put to waste unless you have a team of experts who can make sense of these data.
Consider the posts and comments of your customers. These are the things that they find interesting enough to make the effort to respond to. However, there are also posts and comments from them that are irrelevant to your business. You need to be able to discern which social media data have value to you.
Having a team of developers, data scientists, and marketing technologists can make things easier for you to execute your data science-focused strategy. They can help extract a big amount of data from various sources, clean it up, and present it as actionable items for your business.
“Data is the new oil” according to Chris Penn. In its basic form, data can be messy and not make much sense. It needs collection, aggregation, and refinement in order for your business to make the most out of it. Using data science will enable you to paint a clearer picture of what your social media data is saying. This can help you come up with better strategies for your campaign.
SOURCES:
Idigic, R. (January 23, 2018). Impact of Data and Analytics on Social Media 2018. Retrieved from
https://towardsdatascience.com/impact-of-data-and-analytics-on-social-media-in-2018-595a3bd4fb60
Stelzner, M. (April 13, 2018). Predictive Analysis: How Marketers Can Improve Future Activities. Retrieved from
https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/predictive-analytics-how-marketers-can-improve-future-activities-chris-penn/
Overholt, E. (November 16, 2017). Why predictive analytics matter for your 2018 marketing strategy. Retrieved from
https://www.sideqik.com/influencer-marketing/predictive-analytics-matter-2018-marketing-strategy
Jordano, L. (April 5, 2018). Drowning in Social Media Data? Three Ways AI Can Help. Retrieved from
https://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2018/33881/drowning-in-social-media-data-three-ways-ai-can-help
Sheetrit, G. (January 23, 2018). 4 Ways to Apply Data Science to Social Media Marketing in 2018. Retrieved from
https://www.adweek.com/digital/guy-sheetrit-over-the-top-seo-guest-post-4-ways-to-apply-data-science-to-social-media-marketing-in-2018/
