No matter what industry your business may be in this day and age, your customer base is likely on social media. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and many other social media platforms are laden with potential customers. Using the many social media platforms is necessary and essential to connect with your target audience.
Just posting promotional material and ads on your company platform(s) may seem ideal and straightforward. However, it will not be enough. You want to make the absolute best possible advantage of the many ways that Social Media Marketing can expand your network and customer base. The goal is to grow your social media presence and turn your potential leads into loyal customers.
Discovery is the First Step to Successful Marketing
Marketing is an involved process if your company is going to succeed. With that said, “discovery” is a vital part of that process. It means doing your market research. What is there to discover? Tangible, factual, and reliable metrics about your market, competition, and customers can ensure that your plans for your business are based on hard data.
Finding your Target Audience
One of the biggest mistakes some businesses make, both large and small, is targeting everyone as their audience. A broad strategy, the scattershot approach is not an effective means of marketing. A more straightforward and effective strategy would be determining your target audience and potential customer base by a few factors, such as demographics and needs. It is also crucial to determine what your customers know about your business. Assuming they are mobile, utilize all social media outlets by publishing beneficial information to your business’s specific target audience.
The Importance of Social Listening
Social listening is essential to the success of any business. Social listening means paying close attention to and analyzing the conversations and trends happening around your brand. You also should listen to what is going on around your industry as a whole. Using this insight will assist in making the best possible marketing decisions for your business
Social listening helps you understand what people think and what they are saying about your industry and business. It will help you understand how, where, and why these conversations are taking place. You will be able to gain this knowledge when actively social listening, not just depending on tags or mentions of your business or industry on social media. This helps you improve content strategy and messaging, outpace your competition, create effective future campaigns, and even build more impactful brand partnerships.
Social monitoring is a responsive measure to what is being said on social media; social listening is about getting to the root of how your brand is perceived. There are five key types of key information that provide valuable insight to businesses. They are listed below.
5 Types of Information obtained through Social Listening
This is the negative or positive feelings people associate with your brand. Brand health also includes specific traits and features that trigger their attention.
- Industry Insight
This information is obtained through social listening. It will help you discover
industry trends before they even become actual trends. Closely observing hashtags and communications within your industry will give you a better idea of where your market is headed.
- Competitive Analysis
This data looks at emoticons, keywords, and so much more and looks deeply into any specific leading phrase. It helps determine why it may be as popular as it is, and how it can be leveraged to influence your own business’s campaigns.
- Campaign Analysis
This strategy involves analyzing past campaigns for effectiveness and success and using that data to plan future campaigns.
- Event Monitoring
This kind of monitoring collects and analyzes data surrounding your event’s mentions by just the title or associated key terms, speakers, and critical themes. Having listening queries around your events ensures you will be informed of the full picture, including negative and positive feedback. It will help to maximize your business efforts and identify prospective leads.
When you successfully and actively “listen” and respond to social media “chatter” events and happenings, you will gain invaluable insight into your industry, customers, and competitors. The more knowledge and insight gained and utilized effectively. The more your business and network will continue to grow.