Top Tips For Using Social Media Analysis To Plan Better Marketing Campaigns

Having the data to back up a marketing campaign plan from the beginning takes away the nervousness for the client, so the agency team can move forward with the best version of the campaign without worrying about the client changing their mind regarding the strategy.

The key is to ask the right questions and let the tools do the work. Social data insights can be surprising, and revealing there may be a perception of the brand that hasn’t been addressed but has grown organically from viral success or audience commentary over social media. It’s important to track these unique trends surrounding a brand in order to design a strategy that will resonate across all audiences. With all the data in place, creative teams can feel empowered that their strategies will show continued success for a brand.

Understanding the meaning behind consumer behaviour, such as purchase consideration and lifecycle or emotional drivers of conversation, (information that has traditionally been limited to market research from expensive and time-consuming focus groups or surveys), is available and easy to create with social analytics data. Knowing what drives consumers to express positive or negative comments is much more actionable than simply knowing sentiment alone. The value of these insights for agencies in the research phase is to pre-empt any issues with current or historical brand sentiment — agencies are able to see any previous crisis issues or pain points and know how to avoid them while building strategy.

Social media is the single largest source of unsolicited consumer opinion in the world. With a social media analytics platform, agencies can research any question through all the data that is available without restriction for easy and fast results.

Understanding customer purchase behaviour

Similarly, mapping the purchase lifecycle, from consideration to post-purchase advocacy, gives great insights into consumer behaviour, as well as potential segmentation and targeting options.

For example, in the below insights on H&M, we can see a detailed consumer opinion analysis breakdown, from what they think about the brand’s clothes and stores, their marketing and ads and whether they’re talking about becoming customers.

Identifying brand influencers and advocates

Gaining insights about the audience’s most influential and most prolific authors, daily posts per unique author, and total impressions can make the difference between building an inventive, mindful idea or a boring concept. All analyses can be filtered by author influence (so, for example, to look at the conversation themes among highly influential people).

By understanding the key influencers surrounding a certain brand, agencies can better define their engagement and promotional strategies for their clients.

As well as identifying influencers within an interest group, it is possible to analyse a specific group of social media users. All of these insights help paint a picture beyond owned conversation and get into the earned, frequently unmeasured conversations that populate social media. These insights are usually harder to quantify without a social analytics platform.

You can see what common interests’ consumers have and how they behave when using a particular social platform. These insights can directly relate to the type of campaign your agency can start laying out. With quantifiable understanding about your campaign’s target audience and the influencers they care about, the pieces of an excellent campaign start to build into a strategy your client might support.

Product development research

Don’t stop with a brand or a promotional campaign. Look at the product or service itself, and establish what consumers like or don’t like about it. By understanding what was successful, down to the product responses during launch or after a redesign, agencies can see how audiences react to subtle or significant changes of their brand favourites.

For example, within the consumer electronics industry, agencies can monitor changes in product appreciation, focusing campaign efforts on more positive aspects of social conversation regarding top products and steering clear of buyer frustrations.

Social analytics allow for the audience perspective to be gathered without the bias of a focus group or industry expert. The social discussion supports popular opinion and can be refined to audiences with particular sets of interests.

These insights make the research phase agile and productive, by offering the ability to go in incredible depth into what consumers think and want at any given time.

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