The old saying that the ‘customer is King’ is perhaps now more true than ever, as we live in an age when everyone can contact businesses directly and widely broadcast their opinions into the public realm. Yet some things don’t change. Today's customers, like all those that have gone before them, are still people with personal likes and dislikes, interests and hobbies, opinions and tastes – it’s just that with the advent of social media, it is much easier to tap into what those might be.
Social media is already hugely influential and it’s becoming more important by the second. With the right tools to tap into it, businesses can quantify the qualitative on a massive scale, to learn consumer preferences and inform not just marketing communications and campaigns, but almost every aspect of marketing and business.
With the ability to track conversations across social media, analyse sentiment and opinions, and segment customers, businesses should have a pretty clear and complete view of their audience right? Not quite – many are still missing a trick, with that much sought after total customer view still tantalisingly out of reach. Tracking and analysing sentiment certainly provides a big advantage and the value of this should not be ignored. But in order to reach the next level marketers need to step it up a level.
It’s no longer enough just to know what is being said; to gain a real advantage, marketers also need to know who is talking about them and why. What if you could reach into the minds of the people actually doing the talking and quantify what they like, what else they’re engaging with, and what does – and perhaps more importantly does not – resonate with them? And what if you could do all this without compromising audience privacy? Next generation social media analysis can take the guess work out of campaign planning by finding and analysing crucial correlations between audiences and interests, to help develop and execute better marketing campaigns.
Adding a data-driven look at the psychographics and interests of your audience is a critical layer marketers, business managers and social media strategist should consider in addition to the demographic grouping, conversation tracking and sentiment and opinion analysis they already do. There’s direct marketing value, for example, in knowing that people talking about The Tour de France are also interested in and discussing the brand Garmin. To me, this is the future of social media analytics.
By Crimson Hexagon
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