6 Ways Social Insights Inform Marketing Strategy

No longer are we confined to basic messaging on social media.

Social media is becoming a key component of your marketing functions, but how do you ascertain whether or not your messaging is as powerful as it could be?

Social media should be used to help inform your content strategy, as well as other strategic business functions.

Crimson Hexagon’s ForSight™ platform can help you do just that.

Marketing is evolving; it’s time to take your strategy to the next level, by harnessing the power of the single largest source of unsolicited consumer conversation: social media.

Guide Your Content Strategy
When a spike in conversation occurs, parse down to the time period where it is occurring and focus in on the audience speaking. By running an opinion monitor, you can collect insights deeper than positive, negative, and neutral sentiment, and see what consumers actually care about. You also have the ability to search for past content that resonated well with your audience, aiding your re-marketing strategies.

When winter storm Juno hit the northeast, Jim Beam took advantage of the trending hashtag #snowmageddon2015 and shared the creative post, pictured above, across its social platforms. The company went one step further by targeting specific cities with sponsored ads and edited copy for each city. This is a great example of real-time marketing and how following socially trending topics can benefit your content strategy.

Determine the Success of a Campaign
Go beyond viewing basic sentiments in your social analysis. With ForSight™, you are able to parse discussion into custom topics of conversation using our Opinion Monitors. Users are able to train the ForSight™ system to automatically route posts into user-built categories, thus allowing them to track results of multiple marketing campaigns over time.

An excellent example of campaign monitoring is the Call of Duty: Ghosts trailer release. After defining our custom categories and training the monitor, we see that 63% of overall conversation is positive, and that 54% of all users posting show an intent to purchase the game. We also see that 20% of the conversation is unimpressed by the trailer and don’t see any major changes from the previous versions.

With these gained insights, you can dive deeper into analysis of these audience segments to determine how best to target these users with your messaging.

Get To Know Your Customer
The Affinities™ section offers powerful insight into the interests of your customers. This is extremely valuable knowledge when targeting a specific segment of your audience, or a new audience altogether.

Create a Monitor based on a specific set of keywords to find out what those users’ affinities are, which will help your marketing efforts towards reaching that segment.

Alternatively, you can use Affinities to get to know the people who your brand has yet to associate itself with. Then, craft your messaging towards these people using insights gained from Affinities to target a potential new customer base.

Identify Brand Influencers
Identifying your brand influencers can sometimes prove tricky; luckily, with ForSight™, it’s made simple with the Authors tab. Our platform is tied in with Klout, which allows us to identify users with the most influence who are mentioning your brand on social media.

Not only are you able to identify the biggest influencers of your brand within this section, you can also find those who discuss your brand the most.

Social Insight-Driven Media Planning
Pair Affinities with the Geography and Demographics sections to help direct your media planning strategy. Locate where social media users are discussing your brand the most and then determine the interests of those users with the Affinities tab to help craft the type of messaging you will use in your campaign.

If you find that consumers have a strong affinity towards the NBA, for example, consider running television spots during a game or securing signage inside of the arena.

Learn How Your Customers Differ From Your Competitors’
Not only can you build a Monitor to follow your own brand, you can also run Monitors on your competitors. This can provide great insight to your brand by allowing you to view consumer discussion around your competitor, the affinities of those consumers, and other valuable insights. The benefit is that it can aid in differentiating your brand from your competitor through strategic content planning. Within the Affinities section you are able to compare the interests of those discussing your brand against those discussing your competitor’s.

As you can see in the Affinities comparison above, Twitter users mentioning Brand A have much stronger affinities towards the NFL, NBA, and MLB, as well as Country and Hip-Hop music, versus users mentioning Brand B. With these valuable insights, Brand A should work towards strategic partnerships with well-known figures related to those segments, as well as create content to target these audience segments in order to further build out its customer base and differentiate itself from its competitor.

With a robust set of tools, the ForSight™ platform allows users to gain actionable insights that are useful beyond the scope of ordinary social media messaging.

Related: The Social Side of Supply Chain Management