If you don’t digitize yourself, you’ll get lost. Most people research brands before getting involved with them. Without it, you are minimizing your chances of reaching new customers.
Before jumping straight into digital marketing, understand that it has many facets to it. These include everything from simple captions to tell people about new stock, to email and mobile advertisement. Above all, social media marketing will be your main avenue into successful digital marketing.
Social media marketing and social media analytics are all about one thing: strategy. Developing the ability to utilize social data will put your brand at the forefront with all the other successful brands you can think of. It doesn’t matter whether you develop this through time and dedication or online tools such as Kissmetrics and Google Analytics.
When done properly, social data analysis will allow you to pin down consumer insights so that you can recognize trends and develop better promotion strategies. This will inevitably let your brand’s authority, sales and clientele rise.
Company Goals
First, know your company’s goals. If you have a clear vision of where your company is headed to, then honing in on your promotion strategies will be easier. This will make social data easier to analyze, too, as you will be looking for patterns and trends that are in line with your company’s vision. A key buzzword here is KPIs – key performance indicators – which help you measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns.
Consumer Insights
Social media is growing by the million. Data that you can use include: types of communication, language use, location of consumers, what links people share, the feedback consumers have on content and the personal data people share online. Personal data will come in a lot of handy later.
Social media is a platform where everyone is opinionated. Listening to these opinions will guide you towards interests. And so, listening will guide you to the strategies to incorporate into your next digital marketing campaign. Opinions extend to what people share, what people like, what people do and so on.
Benefits of identifying customer insights, you can optimize the refinement of your product, adapt your marketing strategies alongside customer feedback and preserve your brand’s presence on social media platforms.
There are several steps to successful consumer insight analysis. There are several methods, too. A successful method to involve in your digital marketing campaigns is:
Real time analysis of social media platforms
Influence, relevance and social out-reach of different platforms – how can these best aid your own digital marketing campaign?
Analysing what information becomes viral on multiple platforms – this will be the most important data to incorporate into successive campaigns
Social Trend Data
This is critical to analyze when aiming to gather more attention and focus directed towards your brand. Essentially, this is self-reflection on a large scale, ensuring that your future digital marketing campaigns become better each time.
“Hashtags are simple and extremely effective tools to use for brand exposure. They’re completely free and can really get the ball rolling for having a higher brand influence,” Says Phyllis C. Phillips, marketing manager from BritStudent and WriteMyx.
Hashtags offer critical insight into what your brand’s followers are more attracted to: what do they like and share the most? Use this information to promote your most popular hashtags. Hashtag analysis also allows you to stay on top of topics of interest. Add these to your SEO list when creating blogs and articles. Google can also aid you with its algorithms: adding these topics of public interest will mean Google can notify you about updates.
Aside from hashtags, analyzing general likes and shares during digital marketing campaigns will allow you to see what content grabs the most attention. Note this for the next time and emphasize the most popular content. Your audience, timing and location will all vary from post to post. Analyze whether videos perform better than photos, whether posting in the morning is better than in the evening and so on.
Social media trends show you the graduation of what people like over time. Through analysis, you can see how to utilize this shift in preferences for your own brand promotion. Pinpoint which online topics you’re focused on in your marketing campaigns, and which of those connect with current streams of public discussion and interest. By identifying what people like right now, you can filter your content, watch trends grow and anticipate new ones arising before other brands catch on first.
Benefits Of Social Data Collection
It is worth your time: though it may seem to be a time and energy consuming process, the effort you invest will allow you to focus exactly who you are targeting. Sure, you can focus on general demographics such as age, gender and location, you can also target audience needs and routines etc. This presents a higher quality of niche audience identification. Essentially, this leads to accurate customer profiling and personalization.
Boosting popularity: getting a strong foot-hold in social media is key to becoming known and shared. Popularity increases reach and sales.
Maintaining an up-to-date brand profile: though social data is highly important and influential, individual data points such as posts and likes are short-lived and singular in nature. This means social data should be routinely collected and monitored. Use online tools such as Google Analytics and FoxMetrics to keep social data mining a constant process.
Identify Your Audience
“Of course, your audience is who you are trying to reach with your content on social media. Therefore, understanding them will be the most important part of social data analysis.” Says Kevin A. Coon, business and marketing blogger at 1Day2write and NextCourseWork.
Demographic factors such as age, gender, sexual orientation and race are all pointers that you could collect through market research. Who uses the social media platform you’re using? Does your content cater to that audience? Your target market will show you a widened version of who generally your target audience is. Your niche market will allow you, through deeper social data analysis, to see the exact characteristics of your target audience.
Other demographic information includes income level and social status, education level, occupation and family status. More in-depth criteria to analyze is psychographic in nature. These criteria include information such as hobbies and interests, personal values and lifestyle patterns.
According to general data, both Facebook and Instagram have a majority of females, and Twitter is predominantly used by males. It is easy to conduct general statistics about target audience characteristics. Market research is also always a tool that you can use if you know how. Google forms, Facebook surveys and Survey Monkey are all tools that you can use without unnecessary expense. They create powerful and short surveys to help you gather the information you need.
Next, customer profiles can be created for your most recurring audience characteristics. Doing this facilitates understanding your customers on a personal level – their likes and dislikes, their routines and habits... With this information, content personalization can take place, which will target customers as individuals rather than as a general target population.
After identifying these three aspects of digital marketing:
Company Goals
Social Data Trends
Your Audience
You will have a running campaign. This does not mean you should put your social media updates on hold. Always maintain control.
The Take-Away
Social media offers valuable exposure. Living in the age of information and technology means that social media is slowly taking up a bigger and more significant proportion of communicative reality. People are talking less, looking up from their phones less. People are taking more pictures and looking at more articles than ever before. If your brand doesn’t jump in now, it may not secure a firm footing in markets, both online and in-store.
The four major platforms are Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. Over five billion use these collectively, daily. According to data from eMarketer published in 2018, Google searches and Facebook continue to be the platforms that offer the highest digital advertising spending. This can be read in two ways: Google searches and Facebook are the most influential platforms to get involved on, or, other platforms are less utilized by other brands and will allow your brand to be more influential comparatively.
Increase your social media presence and increase the vitality of your brand. Utilize all platforms, or a few very well. When launching your first campaign, be as broad as possible and treat it as experimental. Gradually become more refined with each successive campaign.
Michael Dehoyos is a digital media marketing manager and social media analyst at PhD Kingdom and Academic Brits. His roles span assisting start-up companies with their marketing strategies and offering guidance on promotion. Michael also contributes weekly to blogging on Origin Writings.
