“Present me with the evidence.” A statement that marketing executives have repeated to their staff countless times. This is due to the fact that data is essential for obtaining backing and demonstrating the worth of your efforts.
However, in the realm of social media, gathering data can be a complicated process. Groups that find it difficult to provide significant analysis often lack a) sufficient data, b) a method to transform a large quantity of unprocessed data into practical business intelligence (BI), or c) knowledge of how their work fits into the overall strategy.
Have you ever experienced receiving a social team report that only included isolated metrics (such as the number of followers and impressions) without any connection to business objectives? Or when a report was so overloaded with data that it became overwhelming to interpret, leaving you feeling confused as you attempted to understand all the metrics and their significance?
Marketing based on data is not just about having each team provide frequent updates on key performance indicators through dashboards or spreadsheets. It involves giving your team the ability to uncover meaningful insights about performance and audience. This will necessitate investment in education, appropriate tools, and improving your data gathering methods. However, by utilizing the abundance of social data at your disposal, you will access a treasure trove of insights for every aspect of your company.
At Sprout, we are convinced that social data has the ability to revolutionize all aspects of a company, from altering customer service procedures to overhauling recruitment strategies and developing innovative products.
Alicia Johnston
Senior Director of Content and Campaigns, Sprout Social
In this article, we explain how you can find and use social data that enables you to outpace the competition, improve your content strategy, iterate on new product development and build more impactful, long-term campaigns. We also examine common data-driven social media marketing challenges and how you can overcome them.
How would you define marketing that is based on data analysis?
Data-driven marketing is when you inform your business strategy with marketing BI (examples: social content performance data, social listening insights, website analytics, email marketing metrics and more). The strategy can apply to functions within and outside of marketing, including customer care, product development and growth.
Social media intelligence is a critical input for building an effective data-driven marketing strategy. With it, you can predict future audience behavior, gain unfiltered insight into the success of your campaigns and product launches, drive revenue gains and make your team the linchpin for making key business decisions.
The advantages of data-driven marketing
Based on The Sprout Social Index™, numerous marketers are already linking the importance of social media to their business objectives. A significant portion of brands (60%) measure the impact of social media engagement in terms of its effect on revenue, 57% utilize it to monitor conversions and sales directly related to their social media initiatives, and 51% employ it to refine their product development or marketing approach.
Likewise, The 2023 State of Social Report found that virtually all business leaders believe social media data and insights have a profound positive impact on top business priorities—including building brand reputation and loyalty, improving competitive positioning and gaining more customer knowledge.
Here are ways you can use social media to fuel your data-driven marketing strategy, with expert recommendations from Sprout leaders and other brands.
An improved understanding of your target demographic
To build comprehensive buyer personas, you need to understand your audiences’ pain points and challenges. Your target audience is talking about your brand (or at least your industry) on social right now. By tapping into social media listening tools, you can understand what rising trends they care about, products they love, why a competitor is performing well or poorly, why a campaign is resonating and how an audience is responding to a conference or event.
Listening also tracks touchpoints on your customers’ digital customer journey, so you can better understand how consumers interact with you online. For example, many social teams underestimate how much of the social chatter surrounding their brand is pre-purchase (acquisition) and post-purchase (retention).
A business estimated that conversations regarding acquiring and retaining customers accounted for 0-5% of their online social discussions. However, when their marketing firm began utilizing labels to classify their social media interactions, they discovered that acquisition conversations alone constituted a minimum of 5%, and occasionally even 70% in a single month. By analyzing this information, your team can come up with innovative strategies to eliminate obstacles and encourage buying, as well as synchronize social media efforts with your sales process.
More targeted, relevant content
Trend cycles have never moved faster, making it difficult to tell what will resonate with audiences and what will flop. For example, Team Sprout uses our AI-powered Listening solution to vet topics before we develop content—both for one-off posts and long-term campaigns.
Johnston states, “Data from social listening enables us to confirm if the trends we observe on our feeds and from customer feedback are in line with a broader audience. It also reveals other discussion themes and subtopics for further exploration. As a result, we can produce content that is more pertinent and effective. It also allows us to quickly react to emerging trends.”
Social insights also help us create more compelling evergreen content. From our social profiles to our blog, we enrich our content with Listening data that supports our thought leadership, empowers our sales team and helps us relate to our audience more effectively.
To pressure test our insights, we use the Post Performance Report to analyze content down to the individual post level. The report provides a unified view of post performance across networks, so we can see which messages performed the best and on which platforms. This analysis reinforces us to test our strategy and pivot effectively if needed. Listening and analytics data work in tandem to help us iterate on our content.
Better competitive intelligence
Listening also makes it easy for Sprout to access all conversations about/around our brand and the social media industry as a whole. We use listening data to answer questions like:
- What is the comparison between our brand image and that of our competitors?
- What are our competitors’ sentiment trends?
- How much social volume does our PR efforts and thought leadership content generate? What about our competitors?
Our Competitive Analysis Topic Template collects and displays this information, allowing us to evaluate how our interactions, attitudes, and total activity measure up. With this information, we can adjust our approach to fill gaps in the industry and establish our distinct position in the marketplace.
Proactive crisis management
A single negative customer experience can turn into a full-blown crisis if not addressed appropriately. Social listening data enables our social team to keep a constant pulse on our brand health and sentiment. We track data trends related to our share of voice, conversation volume and positive sentiment ratio. This allows us to swiftly respond to customer care inquiries and manage would-be crises with grace.
Refined product development
At Sprout, we’re always making updates to our platform based on customer feedback. For example, we expedited the launch of Dark Mode after the social team noticed a lot of social conversations and inbound questions about it in our comments and messages. They were able to use Listening and qualitative data to inform the need for the new product feature.
Check out this Instagram post.
Remember: When people talk about your brand, your product or their pain points, they usually don’t tag you. Listening helps us stay vigilant and tuned into all the conversations that can help us improve our offerings.
More efficient spending
By taking a data-driven approach to social media strategy development, brands are able to invest where it counts—both in their organic and paid initiatives. As many marketing leaders are expected to do more with less budget, the pressure is on to deliver results.
Using data from social media platforms, it’s possible to show the connection between important measurements such as brand recognition, interactions, and website visits with a rise in sales figures. Take Figo Pet Insurance as an example, they utilized immediate data analysis to fine-tune their strategy for social media videos and decide which videos to promote with a paid budget. This led to an increase in their audience size, several videos going viral, and advertisements that generated revenue.
The challenges of data-driven marketing
Many brands don’t have a clear roadmap to developing a data-driven approach to social media—or marketing in general. If your team is still struggling to translate metrics to meaningful decisions and strategic plans, here are some of the things that could be holding you back.
Collecting data
Data collection in marketing is often criticized for failing to give top executives, such as CEOs, the specific information they need to meet key business objectives, such as increasing revenue and gaining customers. As Google moves away from cookies and third-party data, marketing departments are under increased pressure to discover alternative methods for obtaining important information. The manual collection of this data is a slow, monotonous, and inefficient process, limiting the ability of teams to assess their effectiveness.
Fragmented tech stacks
When data is siloed across multiple systems, this leads to data quality and integrity issues. Having team members switch between many different platforms for functions like social media management, customer care, content performance and sales data is not only inefficient, it also disrupts the customer journey and makes it difficult to have a cross-channel view of your audience.
Analysis
If the tools you use for data collection and analysis are cumbersome or complex, you might become over-reliant on an analytics team or person to pull relevant intel. When data isn’t accessible across teams, the result is opportunity cost. What creative work could your teams do if they had more time back? How could teams across the company use that data to iterate on customer outreach, product development, customer care and more?
Five strategies to create a marketing organization that is more focused on data analysis.
Here are five actionable ways you can overcome those challenges and build a data-driven marketing organization that fully harnesses the potential of social insights.
Identify and clarify the data you want to track
To establish a culture that is driven by data, the initial step is to identify the key metrics that are important to you, your team, and the entire company. These metrics may differ from one organization to another, so it’s important to review your company’s objectives, familiarize yourself with the financial terminology used by your CFO, and strike a balance between brand and performance marketing to properly define these metrics. Make sure to communicate the metrics you are tracking with your team and the company’s leadership.
Invest in team development
Once you know which metrics matter most, invest in training and resources to ensure everyone across your team is data literate, understands how to do basic analysis and prioritizes data collection with the highest impact. According to The State of the Social Media Industry report, 93% of brands say that social data is expected to become a major source of business intelligence for their company in the next three years. All teams—but especially social teams—need to be ready to analyze and contextualize data to extract meaningful insights.
Seek out ways to consolidate information within your technology infrastructure.
Nix point solutions in favor of platforms that integrate with your most critical systems, like your CRM, BI tools, marketing automation platforms and social media management solution. Find ways you can consolidate data, making it easier to measure key performance results and improve the customer experience.
For example, with Sprout’s Tableau integration, you can visualize data from multiple marketing channels in one place, giving you a more complete view of your customers and how they interact with your brand across the buyer’s journey.
Automate analysis wherever you can
To tackle the time-intensive aspect of data analysis, implement automation wherever possible. Employ artificial intelligence to quickly reveal social data throughout your entire company, enabling your teams to detect patterns or impending crises before they peak. This opportunity allows for a fresh start and a complete overhaul of data collection procedures or tasks that are not benefiting your staff.
Queries by AI Assist uses Sprout Social’s integration with OpenAI to generate keyword suggestions for Listening queries, expediting your social listening efforts. This helps your team fine tune Listening results, and deliver more insightful outputs—while making time for more creative work.
Establish reporting rituals
Create a regular cadence and format for sharing data across marketing, with other departments and with leadership. Data is only valuable when it’s consumed.
By using a social media management platform like Sprout, your team can view and share presentation-ready reports in our analytics suite. Reports like the Paid vs. Organic report visualize performance on individual platforms and reveal ways to improve future strategy and tactics.
Use social media insights to become a data-driven marketing leader
With a strategy that is based on data, you won’t need to request your team to provide you with the data anymore. Using data to drive your marketing efforts is essential for ensuring the longevity and expansion of your business.
Social media data is the missing link to understanding your audience and competitors, refining your content strategy and product development, and making better investments. But first you need powerful tools to capture it.
The right social media management platform drives revenue, boosts team efficiency and enables a data-driven focus that helps you outperform the competition. Use our social media management buyer’s guide to choose the right platform for maximum impact.
The post Data-driven marketing: What it is and strategies for using it appeared first on Sprout Social.
Marketing based on data analysis is becoming a popular approach for companies, regardless of size. It involves leveraging data to guide marketing choices and tactics, enabling businesses to gain a deeper understanding of their customer base and reach them more efficiently. The benefits of data-driven marketing include better customer interaction, higher sales, and improved return on investment. Additionally, it can give businesses a competitive edge by offering insights into consumer patterns and behaviors.
The initial step in effective data-driven marketing is to gather data through methods such as surveys, focus groups, and analytics from websites and social media platforms. After collecting the data, it must be examined to reveal valuable information that can influence marketing choices. This may involve segmenting customers, recognizing their needs and preferences, and monitoring their behavior over time.
With the collected and analyzed data, businesses can craft targeted marketing initiatives, such as personalized emails, tailored advertisements, and other content that caters to each customer segment’s specific requirements. By providing relevant content to customers, businesses can boost engagement and drive sales.
Data-driven marketing also enables businesses to track the success of their campaigns. By using analytics tools, companies can assess their campaign performance and fine-tune their strategies accordingly. This ensures that businesses are making the most of their marketing efforts and maximizing their ROI.
Lastly, data-driven marketing can help businesses stay ahead of competitors. By studying customer data, businesses can spot trends and gain insights into their competitors’ actions. This allows them to stay one step ahead and develop strategies that provide them with a competitive edge in the market.
Data-driven marketing is a valuable asset for businesses of all sizes. By collecting and analyzing customer data, businesses can create more impactful marketing campaigns, increase engagement, and enhance their ROI. Moreover, data-driven marketing can also help businesses stay ahead of competitors by providing insights into customer behavior and trends. With the proper strategies in place, businesses can leverage data-driven marketing to gain a competitive advantage and achieve greater success.
Source: sproutsocial.com
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