Every marketing professional knows that it is impossible to launch a social marketing campaign without relevant data. Target audience data has also been an object of speculation for many years.
Here is why: by 2020, 92.1% of U.S. companies were using social media in their marketing campaigns. The social media market alone costs billions of dollars. This money companies spend is focused on a sole thing – capitalizing on user data for advertising, traffic, and more.
Why is it so precious, you may ask? Because this data gives insights about a brand’s target audience. It helps companies sell more and build more leads of higher engagement levels.
What Is Social Data?
Social data is a set of information that summarizes characteristics of an audience. Marketing managers manipulate these features to touch the heart of potential buyers. You can divide the data into the following categories:
Demographic Data
Demographic data consists of various bits of information about the audience. It gives us an idea of the location and habitat, of life style, of the target audience. It also includes:
- Age
- Gender
- Identity
Sometimes companies violate the rights of social media users by using or collecting data in less ethical ways. Don’t do this – it always ends badly for any company who misuses customer data.
Psychographic Data
This kind of data outlines more behavioral variables, including things such as:
- Habits
- Lifestyle
- Hobbies
- Interests
- Values
- Needs
With all of this information available, you can promote products, views, or just about anything. This is the reason politics has become so commonplace online.
This is so true that you have to confirm that your ads do not promote any political views before launching campaigns, lest you risk offending or repelling a significant portion of your target audience.
How to Use Social Data in Marketing Campaigns?
Before collecting and using any social data, you have to decide which platforms you will use for your campaigns. For example, the most popular platforms right now are:
- Social media
- Search engines
- CPA networks
- Teaser networks
- Marketplaces
- Aggregators
The market is developing and adding more and more platforms, but Google and Facebook are the top two you’ll want to focus on.
Once we have decided what platform(s) to use, then we can consider what are the next steps in social media data usage.
Create a Customer Audience Avatar
The customer audience avatar is a hypothetical segment of the target audience. It explains the details of the demographic and psychographic data of the potential buyers. Some marketers refer to this concept as a buyer persona, which you may have heard of in the past.
If you have a market and competitive research, you can create the avatar. If you have a customer avatar, you can create a marketing strategy.
Choose a Platform for a Marketing Campaign
How should you choose a platform to focus on for your campaign? It depends on your business.
For example, to promote e-commerce, you can pick social media and search engines. They have both provide very effective outreach capabilities for an online store.
If you want to promote services or financial technologies, choose search engines and aggregators.
As you can tell, the choice will ideally depend on the combination of the platform audience, size of the audience, location, and the types of campaigns you wish to launch into the market.
Create Your Marketing Hypothesis
The marketing hypothesis is a theoretical construct on how and why the target audience will interact with your marketing messaging.
To create a good hypothesis, you’ll need to first understand the pains of your end-user, which is the main bargaining chip for your ultimate success.
The texts, images, and offers within your campaign should be the solution to the pains of your target audience.
For example, if you promote online English courses, make your ads native. Promote them in front of people who already joined an English learning group or interacted with this kind of material online. Look for the touchpoints, and success will be imminent.
Conduct A/B Testing
A/B testing, a.k.a. split testing, is a type of marketing tactic which confirms or denies your marketing hypothesis. Usually, it includes two approaches to one specific variable which shows the weaknesses or strengths of the strategy.
For example, you can create two ads with the variable of gender: male and female. Like I mentioned earlier, only test one variable at a time. After you get the results, you will see who is more likely to interact with your ads – men or women.
Analyze and Optimize Your Marketing Campaign
A/B testing can show you a number of things, such as which segment of your target audience is more likely to interact with the campaign, or which is more likely to buy your product / accept an offer.
Basically, testing can greatly help you understand which parts of the campaign worked well and which did not.
A simple post-campaign analysis consists of effectiveness, engagement, and improvements of the ad set. Promote the campaigns that worked well and move on from those that did not. This is how you’ll get the best results.
Summary
Social data is one of the most valuable things we can get from the Internet. Using this data, companies can reach their clients and solve their pains.
When doing so, however, always be responsible with how you handle and use this data. Never violate users’ privacy – if you do, you should expect it to backfire quickly and significantly.
When launching a marketing campaign, always focus on remaining ethical and honest with your potential clients. Be sure not to repeat mistakes or publish inappropriate materials, or you may even risk being banned altogether. Not to mention the negative impact that would have on your brand reputation.
So use social data to your advantage, but use it wisely, and everything will work out in the end.
Feature Image Credit: CC 0; Public Domain. Feature image sourced from pixabay.com.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
This guest post brought to you courtesy of Return On Now, Professional Austin SEO and PPC Services Company.
Ryan Pell
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