These days, if someone were to voice a complaint about a brand on social media, there’s a pretty good chance its social media team will spring into action, offering help to solve whatever problem the customer has.
Social media is a powerful tool, enabling brands to take the initiative and reach out to customers directly. But this technology can be used for much more than just communication. In fact, it can be even more valuable to brands as a reservoir of real-time business intelligence.
By diving into social media posts and trends, brands can dig up all kinds of insights, such as identifying how their products and services need to be improved, how specific news events are impacting their sales, and the latest trends in their industry.
The challenge for businesses is to be able to tap into this vast and constantly-evolving source of information, and in response, an entirely new category of social media business intelligence (or “SMBI”) strategies has emerged. Let’s dive in and see what they are all about.
Understand and Influence Your Target Audience
Understanding customer sentiment is critical to business success. Brands need to know how their customers perceive them, and also how those perceptions are shifting over time. Social media is an extremely accurate source for these insights.
What are people saying about your brand and its competitors, and which of these social posts are seeing the most engagement? What are the main categories of their pain points that your product can help alleviate? Who are the influencers and professional content creators who actually prompt people to take action? How do these engagement outcomes correlate to other parameters like geo-location, post timing, use of hashtags, posts with videos versus text-only?
To arrive at insights like these, you’ll need a scalable way to source data from the social platforms, pulling metrics and data types for others’ social posts that aren’t offered in a structured manner from the platforms themselves. By using the APIs, data sets and residential proxy IP network of Bright Data, marketing teams can easily, ethically and scalably source the information needed to perform these types of data analysis.
The same data can also be used to discover new sales prospects in adjacent categories and markets. By integrating these structured, unstructured, qualitative and quantitative signals into automated workflows, marketing teams can identify superior opportunities.
Perform Deeper Market Research
Brands can’t just launch new products and services or enter adjacent markets blind. While a new flavor of ice cream might have gone down well with Asian consumers, there’s no guarantee that Europeans will feel the same way.
When it comes to new product launches and geographic expansion, brands need to be well prepared, and social media-based market research can be invaluable in telling them what people in a certain demographic or region are looking for.
With a dedicated keyword-based social listening tool like Talkwalker, it’s also possible to keep tabs on what people are saying about the broader market or industry in order to gauge the demand for new solutions. Talkwalker picks up mentions across some 30 different social network platforms, allowing you to create a robust feed of all the chatter that’s relevant to your space.
Social media is a goldmine for market researchers, as it can help brands to determine the best markets for a specific product, create strategies on how to launch and advertise those new offerings and even price them competitively, considering both the local purchasing power of consumers and rival offerings.
Measure Marketing Campaign Performance
Did that new influencer marketing campaign create lots of buzz, or did it fall flat on its face? Does it make sense to continue, or should an alternative strategy be implemented?
These are key questions for marketing professionals and they’re best answered by social media intelligence platforms like Sotrender, which are ideal for tracking how consumers respond to different kinds of hooks. This enables marketers to dig into what aspects of a campaign did and didn’t go down well, and figure out just how many sales they led to.
For instance, they can help users to determine which specific elements of a campaign might need improvement, such as the call to action, the timing and frequency of ads, or the choice of social media influencers they collaborate with. By identifying which aspects of a campaign succeeded and which didn’t, marketers can come up with more impactful strategies in future.
Sotrender’s tools can also help users to create a more efficient product mix, so they can pair strong performers with slow sellers to see how this improves overall sales.
Optimize Your Sales Funnels
Social media-based sales funnels have become vitally important as a strategic framework for guiding new customers through each step of the purchasing journey. They begin with initial awareness, before morphing into brand advocacy, and they play a crucial role in attracting and engaging with new leads until they transition to become customers.
Mobilizing your sales team to engage with prospects via social selling and employee advocacy is one thing, but the real challenge lies in determining how effective it is. Clearview Social provides a simple way for businesses to keep tabs on these funnels, so users can see which ones are bringing in more customers.
By assessing the level of engagement and how many clicks and conversions those efforts lead to, companies will obtain a full picture of their effectiveness. The platform also offers insights into who is clicking on the links that each team member shares, as a way to optimize social media activity for reaching qualified leads over time.
These data-driven insights can then be used to guide improvements to sales funnels and account-based marketing efforts. For instance, marketers can experiment with different content at each step of the journey, identifying which is more effective, ensuring they see the maximum value from their marketing approach.
Study the Competition
Every brand faces competitors, and dealing with that competition requires knowing how they stack up against others in terms of brand perception, the value they offer, and their overall market share.
Kompyte’s competitive intelligence tools allow companies to get a picture of how they compare with the other major players in their industry in the eyes of consumers. Not only can they keep tabs on what people are saying about themselves, but also the chit chat and discussions about their competitors. This tool can even be configured to send users daily AI-generated summaries of what competitors have been up to.
These insights enable a wider exploration of consumer sentiment across the entire industry, and can help to identify pain points with competing products and services and assess broader market trends.
This intelligence is vital for informing a company’s overall marketing strategy, helping teams to target and exploit any perceived weaknesses among their competitors and position themselves as the superior choice.
Social Media Data Is a Goldmine for Business Intelligence
Social media is a swarming mass of evolving insights running from brand perception to product feedback, corporate failures and hot new trends. Tapping into this goldmine is no easy task. The global scale of social media means marketers need an armory of sophisticated and highly automated tools at their fingertips.
Yet the value provided by social media intelligence is just too good to be ignored. By listening to what people in the real world are saying and the actions that others take as a result of that chatter, brands can design more effective products and services and formulate smarter strategies to get them into the hands of the people who need them.
In addition, social media provides unrivaled insights into existing and potential customers and how they perceive different brands. Using this data, businesses can make more accurate and informed decisions about new products, services and their sales efforts in order to become more competitive in the markets that matter.
