How to Use Social Media Insights to Win More Business

The modern marketing world runs on personalization. Generic, blanket approaches are no longer seen as useful tactics, instead, campaigns are targeted at a specific audience in order to have the biggest impact. This tends to lead to a higher proportion of conversions, such as customers making a purchase.

In order to personalize your marketing, you need data. Specifically, you will need to gather as much information as possible about your audience, who they are, what they are interested in and what drives them to click a link, read an article, download a white paper or make a purchase.

Social media insights can be incredibly valuable in this regard. Here is how your business can make the most of them:

Discover what people are talking about

Understanding your audience can involve costly surveys and focus groups, but there is a low-cost solution at your fingertips if your brand has a Facebook page or Twitter account. All you need to do is look at what your followers are talking about.

You can also invest in social listening tools to discover conversations around a general topic. If you know you want to sell antivirus software, for example, social listening could inform you of the frustrations people have with this kind of program as well as the aspects they enjoy. This will better help you market your brand.

Ryan Holmes, the CEO and founder of Hootsuite, knows the benefits of social listening. He has listed "real-time intelligence on competitors; instant feedback on how your own brand is being perceived; and actionable data for designing or tweaking marketing campaigns" as elements that businesses can gain by using this technology.

Uncover new audiences

If you have an established audience, you might already know how best to target them. However, that does not mean you can't expand into new markets. Social media insights might be able to inform you of an audience for your service or product you never knew about, giving you a new market to target.

John Donnelly III, senior vice president of global sales and marketing at Crimson Hexagon, wrote on MarketingLand about Under Armour. The sportswear brand assumed its audience was made up of team sports players, but discovered that it was popular amongst yoga enthusiasts. This shows how important social insights can be.

Track your progress

Finally, one of the most important aspects of any targeted marketing is how well it works. If you are running anything on social media, you will need to be able to judge its success in order to shape future campaigns. The data you can get from Facebook and Twitter can help you uncover this information, showing increasing (or decreasing) engagement, clicks, retweets and so on.