How to use Data-Driven marketing to leverage your Social Media presence?

Let me start with a confession. I am not at all a data geek. I hate sitting all day in front of my computer and make all those spreadsheets that might make some sense to some people. I am pretty bad at math.

However, what I love are patterns. No matter how delicate the pattern is, the more motivated I become to reverse engineer that pattern.

This is why social media marketing started. Social media marketing is not just posting random stuff on social media profiles. There is a complete science behind it. Those catchy captions, funny GIFs, and hashtags are carefully crafted to steal your attention.

To create a strong social media presence, you must move away from a 'spray and pray' attitude, which will give you a bad reputation. Some marketers claim that there is no ROI on social media. The reason you don't see any improvement in ROI is that you are not analyzing the right matrices.

How can you improve something if you don't take some time to analyze it?

You can't.

Before we get any deeper, let's first ask the question and the reason behind this blog.

Why you require Data-Driven Social Media Marketing?

When do you ask a marketer why you are not using data with social media marketing?

The usual answer be like, "It sounds too complicated" or sometimes, "I don't have time for that."

The problem here is that when you don't take some time to analyze your social media performance, you'll end up wasting a lot more time than you think. This means that there will be a loss of your resources, money, and tons of opportunities that come along with the potential audience.

The worst it will do is it will damage your brand image, not giving your audience what they want - because you don't know what they are looking for in the first place.

And that's why you must adopt the data-driven mindset towards every aspect of your social media marketing. Data can inform you a lot about your audience. In fact, currently, more than 90% of the brands in US alone are using social media to create their brand reputation and engage potential customers.

Data tells, what your audience is looking for, what is working for you, and what is the thing that needs more investment or your money and time. Moreover, what are the places that need your least attention?

In essence, if you want to grab the attention of your customers, make them subscribe to your email list, or buy your product - you need to track every move or your customer and analysis data.

Positive Effects or Data-Driven Marketing in Social Media

There are a plethora of benefits that you will get when you start thinking from a data-driven mindset for your social media marketing:

• You'll be able to identify the right persona for your brand;
• The most active social media platforms for your target audience;
• You will be able to create engaging social media campaigns;
• Create something for your competitors to follow;
• Overall improve your social ROI.

Doesn't that all sound heavenly amazing? It does. Because it is.

The most striking thing about initiating a data-driven social media is not that difficult. If you start with the premeditated strategy you can actually make well-informed decisions.

You might be thinking about building a data-driven social media strategy that seems awesome, but where should you start?

To answer that you must ask yourself this question

What are your goals?

If you are just starting out with data, you might feel flabbergasted with the number of metrics that you want to analyze. If you're just starting, defining your KPIs for social media is a great way to start your goals.

Match the metrics with your goals

If you want to leverage the full power of social media, you must match your goals with the metrics. Here are some goals that you can steal and boost your social media presence.

Here are a few examples of what I mean by matching the right KPIs to different objectives.

Goal 1: Increase Brand Reach

When you start with the goals, the first metric is to analyze the basic metric which is follower count.

A lot of people might argue that this metric might not drive the intended results. To an extent this is true. 20K followers won't generate the revenue that you are looking for.

But still, this is quite a good indicator of how your brand is doing in social media, how many people are engaging with your brand, what is the reach? When people haven't heard about your brand, they will judge the credibility of your brand.

Next, what you need is to engage the top influencers. These influencers will boost your brand presence and get your brand to a new level.

When you start tracking the influencers it will help you to analyze your brand reach, especially if you are starting out, you might not have a big audience, so the influencer will help you create a brand name and reputation in the unknown market.

Another way to learn more about this metric is to track the reach of other competitors. When you find out what people are talking about your competitors, it will be easy for you to make a better strategy.

You might think that you are doing good with 5k impressions per week, while your competitors are doing 500k mentions. When you compare against your competitors, you will get a reality check on your metric.

Goal 2: Enhance the brand image

The second goal should be to improve the brand image. For this, you will have to measure the number of mentions, and the quality of those mentions.

How are people feeling about your brand?

What are they discussing about your brand? Are they saying good things, or are they bashing you online?

Brand sentiment is something that is done over time. And if there are certain spikes, you can always go back and see what you did wrong.

When you know the numbers, it will be easy for you to make the necessary changes and get more out of social media.

Social media is a place where you will get transparent feedback from customers. It is that feedback that will help you devise a better strategy for your customers.

The goal is to keep the image positive. Even if customers are angry about your brand, you can use social media to clarify things and make your reputation better.

Goal 3: Increase website traffic

Driving insane traffic is another metric that measures some people. For these people the brand sentiment and the follower count means nothing. If there is enough traffic on the website, they will be okay. To make this traffic useful it is another thing.

The traffic on the website is a good start because you know that there are people reading and listening to your brand voice. You will know which platforms are bringing most of the traffic to your website.

You can work on those platforms. Make campaigns. And see how people are responding to your brand on social media.

What you can do is to learn from the experts. Go to some of the famous brand social media pages and learn from them. How are they engaging the audience? What are they posting? This will give you a better idea of what strategies you need to gain attention from the users.

Goal 4: Increase conversions

A business without a sale is nothing. If you want your business to survive, the only goal you need is sales.

You got traffic on the website. People know your brand name. Now, it's your responsibility to convert those and do them some good.

You can use some online tools to track the conversion. Just Google and pick the top from the list of search results.

Tools like Google Analytics and Hubspot are a great way to get in the minds of your customers. These tools will help you know exactly what the customers are looking for and you can give them exactly what they are looking for.

The Google Analytics and Hubspot are free tools but there are paid tools as well.

Both paid and free tools have their own pros and cons.

But if you are just starting out, it is best to start with a free tool. Paid tools are complex. You cannot start with them. If you want to schedule your posts. You can take help from task management tools like TaskQue to manage your productivity and save some precious time.

To wrap it all up

Data alone cannot do you any good. But when that data is combined with analytics it will get you some real results. You can use these results to recalibrate your social media marketing campaigns. Talk to the customers and help them solve their problems in real-time.

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