Do Social Marketers Really Know How to Put Data to Work?
Published on May 21, 2017
We’ve talked before about the importance of monitoring your social media analytics. Understanding how your social marketing campaigns are operating can give you an enormous insight into what to do with them in the future, in order to maximize their efficiency and help you attain your unique social goals, whether that’s increasing engagement, capturing leads, or refining your brand narrative.
But it’s important to realize that the raw data generated through social media goes beyond mere “likes” and “shares;” instead, your social marketing is yielding valuable information that you can apply to every aspect of your digital marketing.
Using social media to “listen” for potential clients, for instance, is a highly effective way to define – and reach – your brand’s ideal audience; monitoring the performance of different Facebook Ads and spend can help you refine your approach to copywriting, and even your overall brand messaging.
In short, there is a bevy of useful information that can be gleaned from your social media efforts. What’s dismaying, then, is to see how many our industry leave a lot of this valuable insight on the table. Why do so many miss out on the opportunity to put their social results to work? Perhaps, the problem is that there’s simply too much raw data.
In fact, according to a recent survey by Business Intelligence provider Unified, a full 50% of social media marketing users think of their data as a “kludge,” reporting that their data can be “labor intensive and error prone.”
In that same survey – available as a handy infographic here, via Hubspot – 36% of marketers admit that it’s a struggle to tap into the power of their raw numbers, stating that it’s hard to “distill data into insights and actions.” Even more troubling, 38% say that they have no capability at all to “normalize and enrich social data to make it usable;” perhaps this is why, according to Unified, 56% have no transparency when it comes to social advertising performance trends.
With all that being said, the Unified survey respondents argue that they need to get better, with 57% of marketers stating that “the ability to understand creative and targeting on a granular level” was somewhat to extremely important, and nearly 60% of marketers agreeing that “having a single view from the top across [an] entire brand portfolio” was somewhat to extremely important.
So now that we’ve given you a lot of raw data, what should you do with it?
This exhaustive survey is a great reminder of how vital it is to not only monitor your social media results, but to consistently refine and update your approach to social marketing, as a result. In addition to being able to improve your creative (including copy and visuals), having a firm, comprehensive grasp on your social media performance can help you save a lot of money in the long run. How so?
Unified reports that 60% of social marketers have little to no transparency into how they are performing against benchmarks, and 56% have little to no transparency when it comes to ROI; with a more insightful and analytics-driven social marketing plan in place, you’ll be able to understand how and how well your marketing is working, in order to optimize how you then continue to spend on that marketing.
What that means is that you may even be able to have a more sophisticated, effective, and, ultimately, successful, approach to social than your competitors or industry peers – while actually spending less!
This is where the Geek team comes in! We have an extensive background in all aspects of social media marketing here at Geek, and we have a proven track record of helping our clients optimize their approach to social media for maximum efficiency and ROI. Whether that means understanding and implementing paid advertising campaigns, responding to consumer feedback, or creating and sharing original multimedia content primed for social audiences, we’ve done it all – and we have the data and the insights to prove what works, what doesn’t, and what we can do for our clients.
Want to put us to the test? Looking to drill down into your social media data, or launch a new marketing campaign in the months ahead? We’d love to hear from you! Drop us a line today to get the conversation started!
