We live in the age of the ‘powerful customer’, when everyone can contact businesses directly and widely broadcast their opinions into the public realm. While this presents a range of challenges for marketers, it also offers huge opportunities. Today's customers, like all those that have gone before them, are just people: people with personal likes and dislikes, interests and hobbies, opinions and tastes.
Capturing these views to build a complete picture of who your customers and prospects really are and what they want, has long been the Holy Grail for marketers. While social media has empowered consumers, the data it generates has also changed the game for marketers. As pointed out by Forrester Research analyst Allison Smith in ‘The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Listening Platforms, Q1 2014’: “The social media listening market is less than 10 years old, but its importance to companies across industries has grown at breakneck speed: More than 50 per cent of marketers expect listening budgets to grow by at least five per cent in 2014. And social media gives firms access to the world’s largest focus group for customer insights on brands, products, policies and customer experiences.”
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. Tracking and analysis certainly provide huge leaps forward by taking the guess work out of media and campaign planning and their importance should not be down-played. But in order to reach the next level and bring that Holy Grail tantalisingly within reach, marketers need to step it up a notch.
It’s no longer enough just to know what is being said; to gain real, actionable insights, marketers also need to know who is talking about them and why. Sure, you can look at the demographics of your audience, but again that can only take you so far. After all, not every 25-35 male from the UK is interested in the same things. But 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 does not – resonate with them? And what if you could do all this without compromising audience privacy?
There’s direct marketing value, for example, in knowing that people talking about Body Armour clothing are also likely to be interested in ESPN. Or that the audience for The Great British Bake Off talks about Waitrose more positively than other supermarkets. This kind of information about brands and their competitors’ can help to inform more targeted business and media planning.
This is where I believe the future of social media analytics lies. Indeed, Crimson Hexagon customers are already using our new Affinities product, which crucially finds and analyses correlations between audiences and interests, to help plan and execute better marketing campaigns.
Together we are all still learning how best to transform the big data of social media into insights that are actionable across any media. But by digging into fresh audiences and uncovering new market opportunities, brands will target business and media planning far more strategically, backing up big-money marketing decisions with genuine big data intelligence. Now, that really does sound like the Holy Grail for marketers, doesn’t it?
By Luke Moore, European Sales Director at Crimson Hexagon.