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Use of Social Analytics for Marketing

What is it?

Social media marketing optimisation is key to success of your marketing campaign. One of the main tools used for optimisation is social analytics which is a form of business intelligence used to identify, predict, and respond to consumer behaviour.

Social analytics is the collection and analysis of statistical and digital data on how users interact with a business online. This help businesses: have a clearer view of the prevailing market conditions, which assist in proper market research; understand the target consumers’ mind-set; get a deeper understanding of the preferences of their core audience; and gather feedback from their audience which lead to informed decision making.

Feedback can be measured in various ways, which include finding out: How fast is your response to customers reaching out through social media channels? How satisfied are your consumers with the products you provide? Would your customers recommend your product to their social network? What percentage of your customers prefer to contact you through social media?

 How it works

Social analytics can be classified into social monitoring, text analytics, sentiment analysis, image analysis, and many others. Captured data from the web includes: sites and unique sites visits; most and least viewed site; terms used to search for sites; physical location of site visitors and time of day when site is visited; last webpage visited before termination of session; and web browsers and operating system used by visitors.

The above data is combined with data collected and analysed from social media sites about a particular business, containing answers to the questions such as: Do people tweet favourably about my company? Do they tweet about it at all? What are the major trends in my field that we can see over social media? How can I capitalize on them?

Social analytics tools

Social analytics tools are web based software that collect and analyse data using methods such as data mining, transformation, natural language processing, data pre-processing, data visualization, hidden pattern evaluation, and traffic analysis. Some of the most widely used social analytics tools include Google Analytics, Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insight, and Hootsuite.

Types of social analytics

·         Descriptive analytics

This is the data that describes what happened in the past and what is currently happening. This data include comments on social media platform where your audience describe their feelings about your business or products, which may help identify an existing problem or what opportunities for improvement are available.

·         Diagnostic analytics

This is the data used to find out why certain business trends are happening, whether positive or negative. This helps the business know why certain marketing campaigns worked and why others did not and take steps to improve on it. This data may also be found in social media comments in combination with sales data at a point in time.

·         Predictive analytics

As the title suggests this is where you use analytics tools with a wide variety of social media data to forecast on the expected results of a business strategy. This uses a vast amount of past data to come up with likely scenarios that will assist the marketing team make the necessary adjustments to ensure attainment of social media marketing objectives.

·         Prescriptive analytics

Adding on predictive analytics which provide possible future outcomes, prescriptive analytics will analyse the diverse audience available to a business on social media and come up with specific marketing solutions to the predicted problems.

Benefits

Social analytics helps you understand your social media audience, come up with social media marketing programs that specifically cater for their needs, and eventually increase return on investment by optimising on marketing resources.

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How to Monetise Your Social Media Platforms

While making money from social media has mainly been the preserve of celebrities, with planning and the right strategy, anyone on social media can earn an income from it. Many people think you need to have millions of followers, however there are several ways you can make a living without necessarily depending on the number of followers.

Direct sell of goods through your platform

The simplest way to make money through your social media platforms is to sell your own products. Displaying your products on social media does not require a lot of investment, but you need to build trust so those you are targeting to sell to, are assured quality and delivery.

Products such as furniture, clothing, and interior design can be displayed on one’s social media page with the relevant descriptions and pricing. This can also save you from operating costs such as rent on business premises, by operating from home and selling online through your social media platforms.

Many people use Facebook in this way and there is no need to open a business page, with the added advantage of increasing your customer base through word of mouth, spread by customers who are happy with your products.

Selling online courses

Most people today use social media to get information including learning material, therefore for those with expertise in certain fields, they can create online learning content that they can advertise through social media.

The material could be in text, audio or video format, and with the help of hashtags and with billions of users, your product is likely to attract attention. The better the quality the greater the chance of success.

Influencer marketing

You do not need to be a celebrity to be an influencer, however you will need to do some work to create a large enough audience that will attract businesses to your brand. Brand building require time and effort, and creativity is the one quality that can get your there.

You need to create quality and creative videos and graphics that will pull a larger audience, and eventually catch the attention of businesses willing to advertise their products through you for a price.

Lead generation

If you have an already existing business, you can lead consumers to your business website by creating interest on your pages and providing information about your business. This will create enough interest leading to your audience seeking further information from the website.

Lead generation also require quality content that generate enough interest which may lead to eventual purchase.

Social media consulting

If you are adept at social media content development, you can become a consultant and use your skills to develop professional content for other users. Social media has become a crucial tool for self-marketing especially for celebrities who have limited skills for developing content that will complement their image.

If you have skills in video production, photographing and photo editing, by displaying this skills in your social media platforms, it will attract those who want professionally produced content, such as celebrities, to pay for your services.

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Why Businesses are Increasingly Turning to Social Media Advertising

Studies done on marketing have shown that many businesses are increasingly moving away from traditional marketing and increasing their spending on advertising their products on social media. While the reasons for this are numerous, there are a few major ones that have driven these decisions.

Large Audience                                                    

Most people today are active users of social media and because of mobile technology they are used everywhere and anywhere, and therefore as a marketer, social media provide an opportunity to reach a larger audience.

Social media provides the ability for marketers to target a particular audience especially when used in conjunction with social media analytics. Different cultures, ages, professions and other social groupings, use specific social media with different frequency and purpose, therefore knowing this, a marketer can craft a strategy that will focus on the intended consumer, reducing resource use.

Improved SEO

E-commerce has seen tremendous grow in the past few years with many consumers resorting to online shopping for convenience. To drive traffic to these web pages that facilitate these transactions, businesses improve their search engine ranking through search engine optimization (SEO).

One way of drive traffic is sharing your content through social media by including links to your website in your social media platforms. Those who would not ordinarily visit your website are likely to be enticed to visit it when browsing your social media platforms, increasing traffic that automatically lead to SEO.

These will improve the ranking of your website on search engines, increasing the probability of your site being found and visited, and therefore increase the possibility of more consumers purchasing your products.

Improve customer relations

Marketing is the business function that require a close relationship with the customer and therefore marketers look for ways to improve these relationship using such strategies as sales promotions and loyalty points.

Social media offers a better tool to improve on these relationships by allowing businesses to communicate directly with their customers and deal with their concerns. It also help marketers gauge the performance of their products by tracking the conversation about these products.

Having regular chats with consumers help create a sense of closeness between them and the business, and hence improving on customer loyalty.

Cheaper Advertising

Businesses with large social media presence can utilize their platforms to advertise on products and events, hence cutting on the cost needed to commercially promote the same.

These businesses use their platforms to inform their audience of new developments and get it to spread through word of mouth or hashtags that are passed from one social network to another, with little expense to the business.

Deal with competition

Almost all businesses have a presence in social media and therefore as a business you will be at a disadvantage if your consumers are not able to connect with you through your social media platforms.

Many businesses take to social media to deal with misinformation or respond faster to narratives that may come from their competitors.

It also provide a level playing field, where even if a competitor has a large marketing budget does not necessarily mean they will have a larger social media presence, and therefore smaller businesses can still compete.

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Optimizing Social Media for Marketing

In order for your social media platforms to be successful in marketing, they need to be optimized. Social media optimization allows you to create and enhance your social media plan so that you are able to get measurable results, and involves several measures which some are enumerated below.

Optimize Your Social Strategy

The first thing a marketer should undertake is to plan on how he/she is going to utilise social media to market. The plan will define the strategy which should include clear goals and objectives, which should be measurable. In the strategy you should also include the social media platform of choice or rank them according to preference since this will help in optimizing on resources by focusing on platforms with higher return on investment (ROI).

Optimize on Keywords

Keywords play a crucial role in improving the ranking of web pages on search engines and when applied on social media, especially on platforms such as blogs, they improve the chance of your blog being found by potential customers. This gives your platforms a competitive advantage over your rivals in the same industry, and therefore ensure your marketing strategy succeeds by attracting more consumers.

The first thing a marketer should do is to do research on keywords in their respective industry so that you can know what your target audience search for, so that you can incorporate them in your blogs. In other platforms you can use hashtags in your posts to capture the attention of your target audience, or appear on their search list.

Profile Optimization

Social media profile provides the first glimpse of who you are and what you are selling to a new audience and therefore it should provide a strong image that captures the attention of potential customers. You should pay special attention to profile picture, username and bio of the platform, since they are the first port of call for those visiting your page.

In platforms such as Facebook which provide for a lot of field that comprehensively describe your organisation, ensure you fill all the information available on them, so that potential customers can have a good picture of your organisation before even visiting the pages. Having comprehensive information also ensure your pages are found when users of these platforms perform searches on specific words.

Content Optimization

In any social media platform content is the key to success. The content should be relevant to the target audience by having information which they were looking for and not try to introduce secondary topics.

They should be precise by avoiding long articles that are unclear or do not get to the point. They should include various formats such as videos, texts and photos, which are attractive especially to a younger audience.

The content should also be regularly updated to ensure platforms are active, and at the same time optimize on the time of posting to ensure maximum visibility.

Include links to curated content to provide crucial information to your audience. Cross-linking of your various platforms and web pages provide a convenient way for attracting traffic to your lesser visited media.

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Blogging as a Marketing Strategy

Blogging is one of the most effective form of social media marketing with high returns on investment. As a marketer, publishing blogs with relevant content will build your brand and at the same time increase the brand awareness.

To create a blog that will be valuable to your brand, the first thing is to come up with a relevant topic that is closely related to your brand, but also broad enough to cover every aspect of your brand. This will create room for you to publish as many blogs as possible that adequately inform about your brand, and also explore diverse topics related to your brand; for example if you are a car manufacturer you can blog on topics such as environment, and how your products are built to contribute to its conservation.

The next thing to do is choose the host of your blog, and the most effective way is to host it within your website for convenience to your audience. You can also have links of your blogs on your other social media platforms to increase accessibility to diverse audiences. You can also simultaneously host your blogs on other hosting platforms such as Tumblr to increase their accessibility to a larger audience.

It is very important to choose the right person or people to write your blogs. The writers should not only be well versed about the subject matter of the blogs, but also able to write with clear and easily understood language. There should also be someone to manage the blogs to ensure it’s as active as possible, by regularly publish blogs, and engaging the audience in productive conversation in the comments section.

The content of the blogs should be relevant to your brand and the design should be attractive to the audience so that they are enticed to read further. Whichever content that you choose to publish should not deviate from the subject matter, that is, all content should inevitably point back to your brand. The content should also have in mind the target audience, who are the potential buyers. You should first identify the target audience and this will determine the content and how to present it.

Make use of search engine optimisation to increase chances of your blog being found by your target audience. This can be done by first researching about keywords that your target audience search using search engines and incorporating them in your blogs. The more your blogs are visited the higher the chance they are to be ranked higher in the search engine results page.

Blogs are important as a marketing tool because they drive traffic to your website. Whenever your blogs are updated, they show up in search engines, increasing traffic to your website and eventually increase brand visibility. Blogs also can provide an in-depth analysis of your product, which provide the needed and relevant information that a potential consumer may be seeking. Lastly, blogs provide you the marketer the opportunity to set and drive the agenda that will help you to be a step ahead of your competitors and detractors.

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Does Social Media Marketing Affect Consumer Purchasing Decision

According to SIMElab Africa (Social Media Lab Africa) of USIU-Africa, in their 2019 report Social Media Consumption in Kenya: Trends and Practices, 88.6% of Kenyans use WhatsApp followed by Facebook at 88.5%) and YouTube at 51.2%, with the other social media platforms being less than 50%. In this report, majority of Kenyans use social media for entertainment, education and business blogs. Several researches have been conducted to find out if, why, when and how the social media impacts consumer decision process, and explains how individuals are attending, processing, and selecting the information on social media before a purchase.

In consumer decision process a consumer will first identify the need, search for information on it, evaluation of alternatives available, make the decision to purchase, and finally the post-purchase evaluation. In this process the consumer has both internal and external influences and social media being majorly used for socializing, plays a big part in exerting external social influence on users.

For starters, advertisements on social media may lead users to recognize a need and therefore arousing interest that may lead to a purchase.

Social media can also act as a source of information when a consumer is searching for external sources of information, with the intent of effecting a purchase. Social media users usually seek information and opinions about products from their social media friends, by asking about these products or looking for comments about previous users of the said products. Users may also seek more comprehensive information from product review forums which may have product expert reviews, for example there are many YouTube channels that review new cars. This may affect the choice of a consumer depending on the information gathered about a particular product.

During evaluation of alternatives, a consumer is usually faced with several products that satisfy the same need, and social media can be used to find out the pros and cons of the identified products. Using the example above, these YouTube car reviews in some cases pit against each other different car brands with similar use, for example passenger cars from Toyota and Mazda. They are put through certain trials with the intention of coming up with a winner, which is in turn considered the best option among the available alternatives. Consumers seeking such reviews, are likely to be influenced to buy products that the reviewers consider to be superior since it is in human nature to trust those we consider as authority figures in certain fields.

One of the strongest influences when making a decision to purchase a product is convenience. Most basic products that a consumer needs are usually purchased where it is most convenient, for example a consumer will prefer to purchase milk and bread from the local grocery. Similarly, social media platforms with links to online stores will provide a convenient way of effecting a purchase since one can get information on it from the same social media platform, offering an all-in-one platform that a consumer can use to effect a purchase.

After a consumer has used a product to quench a need, social media is usually the platform of choice to either vent the user’s frustration with the product or praise the utility value of the product. Either way this again start a cycle that influences other users’ consumer purchasing decisions, be it positive or negative.

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How to Optimise Spending on Social Media Marketing

On average it is estimated that businesses spend around 10 percent of their total marketing budget on social media marketing. However, your overall marketing strategy will determine what percentage is allocated to social media marketing. To get value for money in your social media campaign, you need to come up with ways to optimise on spending, because spending more money does not necessarily lead to better results for your campaign. Here are some of the ways that ensure prudent budgetary spending and eventual marketing success:

Plan on social media marketing

The most important part of the plan is of course the budget, which is how much you are willing to spend on social media marketing. If your marketing strategy favours social media marketing therefore a larger percentage of your budget should be on social media marketing efforts. Knowing how much you are to spend on social media marketing will determine what platform to use, who or how many to employ for your campaign and what format should your marketing take, be it social media advertisement or partnering with influencers.

During planning you should also come up with ways of measuring success of your social media marketing. Although it is always hard to measure success on social media, it is important to come up with parameters of success since in any business, every investment must have some returns for it to be justifiable. While effect on sales or number of customer gained by social media marketing may not be apparent, the number of potential customers that can be easily reached through social media is worth the effort.

Determine your target audience

The best way to guarantee maximum return on your social media marketing investment is to define the kind of audience you intend to target in your campaign. This will ensure that you only spend resources on an audience that can potentially be attracted to your products and eventually buy what you are selling.

First, you need to find out which audience that are potential customers and this can be done through demographic characteristics that your product best suits. You then have to research on what social media platform offers the best way to connect with this audience. The aim of connecting with this audience should be to build trust and your brand reputation, but not necessarily to sell your products.

Be creative

While creativity costs money, the more creative you are the more attractive your campaign will be to diverse audience. This will eventually pay off since the more people you attract, the more your brand visibility and reputation grows, and the more likely it may lead to sales growth.

Creativity is the best way to differentiate your business and products from the competition. You may need to hire experts such as graphic designers, photographers or even visual artists, to create content that separate you from the rest. Of course these content should be relevant to your campaign to the extent that the core message you are trying to pass to the consumer is not lost.

In any social media marketing strategy, cost should not be the issue, but how much does it translate to returns for your business, so the above elements go a long way in ensuring this.

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Social Media Marketing Strategies

Create an intimate experience with consumers

The reason people are drawn to social media to the extent of being addicted, is because it provides a way for people to interact and socialize despite the fact that they cannot be physically together. To ensure success of your social media marketing, your social media therefore needs to ensure it creates a semblance of closeness between the business and customers by engaging in activities such regularly chatting with them, which create this closeness. To save on cost and time, new technologies such as chatbots could be employed to automatically respond to customers and the responses could be customized to specific consumers.

Posting of relevant marketing content

In any form of marketing, the content of the promotion is key to its success. Social media users will snub adverts that they view as vague or takes too long to get to the point, and therefore as a strategy you need to ensure that the potential customers are able to get the message as clearly as possible and as fast as possible before they lose interest. The marketing content needs to be precise and interesting in order to be attractive enough for the consumer to be tempted to try it.

Create a loyal following

A loyal following in social media is the foundation of social media marketing, since they provide the primary audience for your marketing content and will spread the information about your product to others in their social network. To create a loyal following, one has to regularly post content that exhibit humor and emotion so that followers can relate to your brand. You can ask your followers questions and seek their opinion on certain issues such as how they view your product or clarification in cases where they have complaints. You can also like and share your audience posts, and this will help further cement relationships with your followers.

Diversify your content

The content in your social media platforms should include text, video, images, graphics and so on, in order to make it attractive to the audience even before they could read or listen to the content. Regularly posting text will lead to disinterest among your audience, since people are drawn towards eye capturing posts such as photos and images. You can employ or contract photo, video or graphics editors that will create not only interesting, but also informative posts that will serve to capture an audience and pass a message at the same time.

Make use of influencers as brand advocate

Social media influencers have large followings which they leverage by monetizing their social media platforms. Instead of trying to create a large enough following for a brand, a business can partner with influencers and use their large social media network to promote brands. The key is to find an influencer with the right audience to target while at the same time considering the cost versus the benefit of using the influencer. While it may be hard to measure how much the publicity may translate to actual sales, any publicity is good for a brand and in combination with other elements of the marketing mix, may yield favourable results.

Here are further tips that will improve chances of success in social media marketing

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Benefits of Social Media Influencer Marketing Vis-à-vis the Cost

Who is a social media influencer?

A Social Media Influencer is a user on social media who has established credibility in a specific industry. A social media influencer has access to a large audience and can persuade others by virtue of their authenticity and reach (https://www.pixlee.com/definitions/definition-social-media-influencer). They are usually celebrities who have gained fame from various industries such as film, music, comedy, for example Eric Omondi or they are famous for being famous, for example Kim Kardashian. Their followers are typically very loyal, and that’s why influencers have changed the game for marketing teams. Influencers serve as trusted voices for consumers and have built lifestyles online that many people want to mimic. Brands can tap into that.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer Marketing is a hybrid of old and new marketing tools, taking the idea of the celebrity endorsement and placing it into a modern day content-driven marketing campaign. The main differentiator in the case of influencer marketing is that the results of the campaign are collaborations between brands and influencers (https://influencermarketinghub.com/what-is-influencer-marketing/). Many celebrities today have partnered with corporate entities to promote their products to their audience on social media with the example of Kim Kardashian promoting fashion brands and Eric Omondi promoting products such as DSTV and Lato milk. The celebrities are of course paid handsomely, with the likes of Kim Kardashian paid up to millions of dollars for just one Instagram post.

How it works

Social media influencers leverage their following to attract brands that seek to reach niche markets or the general public, and Instagram seems to be influencers’ medium of choice. Most influencers monetise their social media platforms by partnering with brands they are associated with or products they are interested in.

Kim Kardashian uses her platform on Instagram to promote her own beauty lines and also is paid to promote healthy eating products such as diet shakes. With more than 149 million followers, if just ten percent of her followers were to purchase any of these products, it will be a massive revenue gain and therefore the fee paid to promote them seems like a worthy investment.

Eric Omondi uses his Instagram Posts to promote various products, whereby he comes up with creative comedic sketches that both entertain and advertise the products. For example Lato milk which he has been making short music parody videos, that has seen some of his followers mimic the videos with their own versions. Judging from the popularity of the posts, from the number of likes and comments, the promotion seems to be successful although it is usually hard to judge how much of it will translate to sales.

Drawbacks

Many of these influencers may not even be using the products they are promoting and in some cases they do not have sufficient information on them. A case in point are the Kardashians who promoted Fit Teas on Instagram, as a product that facilitates weight loss. This created a social media backlash since many considered it being dishonest, because no research exists to back up such claim, and that it promoted negative body imagery for women as it seemed to suggest that certain body types for women are not good enough. These criticisms may lead to negative imagery for both the products and the influencers, since negative information travels fast on social media.

The influencer therefore needs to choose which products best represent their brand and image, and also take time to learn as much as possible about what they are promoting. Similarly, businesses need to choose the right influencer with the target audience to promote their products.

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Building your social media brand

Social media has become part and parcel of our everyday life including business transactions. For small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), the owners need to invest in building their personal brands. This may need some significant investment in both time and money in order to attain the desired personal brand visibility that will ultimately translate to a significant benefit to one’s marketing strategy.

According to Armand Peri (https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/339681), there are three tips on how to build a strong personal brand on social media:

Know that you're only limited by your imagination.

Before social media, for one to build ones brand, he/she had to rely on advertisement on traditional media, be it radio, TV or newsprint, which used to limit the amount of information one can provide and also restricted the content. With social me one can post about personal issues, such as photos and videos on ones activities, which creates a feeling of a personal connection between one and one’s social media audience. The amount of information or self-advertising one can post is unlimited and unrestricted, hence one can be as creative as possible, through use of words, images, graphics and videos, to enhance ones social media image. This will subsequently make ones audience pay closer attention to whatever business one is associated with or one may be advertising.

Remember that your personal brand can transcend your industry.

Social media allows for exploration and eventual exploitation of opportunities available to entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur is always looking to take advantage of situations that one may make a profit and therefore having a social media brand that present these various interests one is exploring allows for transformation when opportunity arises. For example one can be a musician but also a food enthusiast, which when one wants to become a restaurant owner, they already have an audience that is aware of ones interest in food and an impression that one has some needed knowledge in this new industry one is venturing into. This may attract potential investors and customers to the venture because there is some trust build through social media.

Communicate with followers one-on-one to drive meaningful engagement.

One-on-one engagement, such as chatting or commenting on posts, allows for a more intimate relationship and create a human face with one’s social media audience. This creates the impression that one cares about what one’s audience thinks or feels and one is willing to spend a moment to address their issues when they arise especially if it involves a business and their customers. Customers who complain usually expect for the issues they raise to be addressed and social media provides an easier way to ventilate these issues, which if addresses will provide some form of satisfaction that will go a long way in ensuring customer retention.

There are other ways of strengthening one’s personal social media brand, which include: identifying the audience one wants to target when marketing and in which platform they may be easily reached; be consistent in posting in one’s social platforms to avoid cases of where people lose interest in one’s social media pages; and finally try to post what ones audience is interested in in order to capture their attention and maintain it.