Brands across the globe, large and small, utilize social media to attract and engage their customers while generating a dialog surrounding their products and services. But if companies aren’t employing social media intelligence to decipher those interactions, what benefit are they receiving?
Social media intelligence takes a deeper dive into the conversations that exist online, going beyond ‘likes’ for a real glimpse into how consumers perceive a company or brand. So, how exactly can marketers utilize social intelligence to accelerate their marketing strategy and ultimately drive success?
Audience Segmentation
Part of social intelligence means that text can be scanned and interpreted by emotion, sentiment and levels of passion, whether positive or negative. This allows social users to be broken down by more than just surface value demographics like age or gender, into focus groups for the ability to tap into exactly the right audience. For marketers, this can help to create highly targeted marketing, advertising and social media campaigns, pushing them out to the right people.
Competitive Intelligence
Sure, there are ways of keeping tabs on competitors. Marketing pros can run a simple Google news search every morning, see what they’re up to on Twitter, etc. Or they could employ a social intelligence platform that provides real-time comparisons of things like consumer awareness, perception and overall sentiment across multiple organizations, brands and even product lines, making it easier than ever to know how they stack up against the competition.
Trend Analysis
Keeping an eye out for developing trends in the industry is key to creating products that people will be interested in, and marketing those products to drive sales. Social intelligence enables users to stay up-to-date on what’s happening today to develop a better understanding of changing perceptions and how trends come and go – and more importantly, why.
Customer Retention
One of the downsides associated with social marketing, is the consistently changing nature of most common and popular social media platforms. Just because a brand composes and posts a great tweet, doesn’t always ensure that their followers are able to retain the information they’ve made an effort to put out there. That’s where social intelligence can help, by providing insight into customer pain-points surrounding specific brands and products, in order to create effective retention strategies.
Identifying Influencers
The beauty of social media is that it brings users into direct contact with whomever they’re trying to impact, and offers a unique marketing opportunity for brands to reach out to and interact with their most influential followers. But how do businesses go about finding these individuals? Social intelligence platforms can help brands to determine who the loudest and most influential voices are in the online conversations surrounding their industry in order to reach out directly to those social advocates.
Brand Analysis
Marketing teams are always doing what they can to understand their place in the industry, develop new strategies for standing out in the crowd, and discern where they stand among current and potential customers alike. Brand analysis through social intelligence offers marketing teams real-time information and their brand health, while monitoring the share-of-voice within the global sphere of conversation. Social intelligence has the ability to bring marketing to the next level. Through in-depth analytics, a true understanding of emotions conveyed online, and the ability to monitor trends, both past and present, marketing professionals are able to tailor messages and understand results like never before.
Justin Graves