Social Media Analytics Is Shaping Marketing Strategy

It is needless to say that marketing managers are always in hunt for strategies that bring the best result. However, to guide a marketing strategy in the right direction, much fuel needs to be burnt. It is proper business flow analysis that can help in this regard. Knowing how customers are taking products or services is very important. It is all about understanding customer behaviors and loyalty that help in modifying a marketing campaign that demands expected results.

Where and how the buzz is

Almost everybody spends a lot of time in social media. They discuss their feelings about so many things in different social networks.

A Social Media Analytics is a tool that fetches and analyses huge social media data. It can guide the marketing strategy planners about the status (acceptance or rejection) of every product/service and of course, marketing campaign. Detailed customer sentiment analysis shows the right path to attract customers to grow business. In other words, the churn rate is improved and revenue growth possibility is bettered.

How Social Media Analytics tool benefits:

A Social Media Analytics has many important features to offer. If proper customer data analysis is taken into consideration, shaping marketing policy becomes easy with greater possibility to hit the right target.

Social Media Analytics can offer knowledge on how a product is performing in the market supported by marketing campaigns.It can also detail how a service is reaching to the customers through the effects of marketing campaigns or the pitch of the different campaigns.

It is all about understanding sentiments by keywords -

When people discuss about any product or service, they may be discussing how they like it or dislike. Analytics take the most discussed words or phrases about any product or service. It claims those as keywords.

Comprehending the nature of these keywords, policy makers can feed their strategy architecture. Marketers know:

• Point of discussion against a product/service
• Relevancy of keywords with particular product/service type
• Separating positive keywords that bring good results
• Identifying negative keywords that pull business down
• Missing points/trends in any discussion
• Keywords benefiting competitors most

Market location identification- Every business has some targeted markets. Some companies confine their business in a specific geographic location, while others target global markets.Consequently, it becomes important to know how products or services are consumed by the customers in different locations. A Social Media Analytics identifies locations from where customers are discussing about a product or service. It also shows how a marketing ploy is performing in typical locations. So this becomes easy to guide and take steps to improve policy by market location. Analytics shows:

• From which location business flow is better
• What locations business is low or nil
• Which locations competitors are getting business

Finding networks of importance - There are quite a good number of social channels through which people express their opinions. A Social Media Analytics collects data from different social networks and shows where people are discussing most or least about any product or service.

They try to know which networks people are crowding the most so that they can invest their time on to those networks. A marketing person can understand:

• Which social network is bringing traffic
• Which network is not having good flow
• What networks are giving benefits to competitors

Identifying nature of influences - When a business process is analyzed properly, marketers can understand what type of customers they have most. There are customers who are very much satisfied with a product or service. At the same time, there are people who are unsatisfied. There are reasons of accepting or denial of anything. A Social Media Analytics tool even identifies people who are having neutral attitude to a product or service. A social media tool can identify promoters (people who are promoting a product or service), detractors (people who are spreading negative feedback) and people who are neutral (customers who are using products or services but may be waiting for something better without venting any expression of interest or dissatisfaction). So it becomes easy to know:

• Which satisfied customers are against each product or service
• What points are creating detractor in a particular way
• How strong neutral response is and what those customers are waiting for

Measuring sentiment quantity and quality - A Social Media Analytics tool can count the number of activities against customers spread in different social channels. It can identify the quality (good or bad) of expressions vented through channels. Obviously, it turns easy for the marketing managers to point out which networks are having better marketing effects and how. They can plan to concentrate on networks that are not actively giving feedback from the customers. The analysis shows how the quality of feedback is. For this reason, marketing experts can work on turning negative to positive feedback. Analytics shows:

• How many posts or tweets, re-tweets, comments and shares are pouring in a channel
• How many positive attitude are and how intense those are in their nature
• How a negative feedback is and how deeply that is impacting campaigns
• What the proportion and average are against the positive and negative feedback

Knowing recent activity flow- Whenever a marketing campaign is implemented, knowing immediate impact is necessary. Without knowing fast hand impact, progress can be misguided.

A Social Media Analytics tool shows immediate performance of any marketing campaign. It can report:

• How recent discussions are (by time)
• What the type (positive, neutral or negative) of response is
• How frequently people are talking about a product/service

Customer activity at a glance - A Social Media Analytics works with a mountain of data. The original analysis report is in coding format. It is difficult and time-consuming to understand those analysis. This sometimes may lead to wrong apprehensions and misleading steps. So every Analytics come with easy to understand representation (graphical structure) of critical analysis report.

The effect is very strong. Marketing managers can work fast with right modifications or update in planning. A social media tool comes with:

• Graphical view of visitor activities in social media
• Visuals or graphs of influence rise and fall in channels
• Graphically viewing growth or decrease of customers in quantity
• Chart representation of customer data for different parameters

Well, these are some of the benefits that a marketing person can get from a Social Media Analytics. Almost every Analytics tool comes with some typical features to make things easy for the users.

I have got a trial version of Decicion, a social media analytics with some unique features that helped me to get a lot of idea about how customer activities are tracked against different social media

However, the ultimate goal for a tool is to satisfy customer needs in the best possible way. In this perspective, all the tools are 95 to 99% successful.

A buyer (marketing strategy maker) of a Social Media Analytics tool, needs to choose the best Analytics tool available in the market.

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Thanks for the images: redwhiteandgrew.com, socialmediaimpact.com, iconceptsmarketing.com, briansrunningadventures.com, smartinsights.com, socialeasemarketing.com, social-media-marketing-tools.blogspot.com, variety.com,