Marketing is hard. People don’t open sales messages. For the most part, prospects are not happy to get another “cold email.” They don’t eagerly read and don’t even click on web banners anymore. Traditional marketing had stopped working a long time back. AdWords has also become an eBay for advertising and ridiculously overpriced for what it offers. It’s becoming challenging to pull a user from their busy life; right onto your campaign and sell. Modern marketers & salespeople have to realize fast that real marketing knowledge lies in the relevancy of the user analysis. Bottom line – First, we need to go back to the whiteboard and try to understand our prospects.
…and that’s what we’re going to talk about. The aim is to recognize the need for social analytics tools and their usage. These profound thoughts are taken from a lively webinar hosted by Jason Sibley, Head of Strategy at Creation Agency. The guest today is Sean Harmon from IBM Watson analytics team. Together, they discussed the fast-changing marketing environment and the need for the social analytics. The key takeaways will introduce you to new tools to better understand your buyer. Let’s dive in.
Problem with Traditional marketing
Fact is, traditional marketing has almost stopped working, which lead to a rise in “interruption marketing.” The concept of interruption marketing is inherently flawed since it stops your prospect from doing what they’re doing and tell them your story.
That’s where persona-based marketing proves to be successful. You start by making powerful, individualized buyers personas. Then you develop buyer personas and create targeted content according to the customer lifecycle stage – highlighting your persona’s pain points. Check out the free HubSpot buyer persona tool to create your personalized buyer persona. It’s simple to use and puts you on the right track for your sales and marketing campaigns.
Begin your journey with buyer personas
Once you’ve broken down your target market into persona groups, it’s essential to find out more about the specific patterns and habits of your prospects. For example,
- Whom do they follow on social channels
- What hashtags they use
- What type of content they like & share
- When are they online
- What’s the right time to get your message in front of them
- Who influences them
Analyzing these pertinent questions will help you get genuine traction with your audience. Naturally, when you compare this approach with traditional marketing, you are already far ahead in the game. The data you’ll get would help you with when you’re doing social advocacy or native advertising.
Enter social and behavioral analytics platforms!
Not every prospect has similar interest. You need to find tools to go beyond somebody’s name and job title. That’s why you should combine persona-based marketing tools with behaviour analytics platforms to take your user research to the next level. Broadly speaking, different analytics platform is classified into two categories. Although both come under the umbrella of social analytics platform, they carry out various functions (think of it like micro and macro solutions to one problem!)
Live listening social analytics platforms are helpful for social media teams looking for up-to-date conversations that are happening today.
Behavioral analytics platforms go beyond primary metrics and reveal how real customer engagement happens. The data helps organizations to optimize their marketing campaigns for better user experience, and increase overall conversions.
IBM Watson Analytics social – An overview
With IBM Watson analytics platform, you get cloud-based predictive analytics for business insights, and with the help of cognitive computing services you could ask natural language questions and visualize the significant data patterns. For example, you could set up a topic, and pull in content from the Internet through string matching, and explore, analyze and visualize your content.
You can read the data from 10 different ways capturing an overall idea of the voice trend. Once you understand the tool better, you can always fine-tune your queries to discover the most relevant facts, and unseen patterns to enable smart predictive decision making.
Drive better decisions with IBM Watson
IBM Watson analytics is specially designed for performing complex macro analytics. You can also carry out the competitive analysis, all with the help of easy-to-understand visualizations. The thing is when people buy any product; they let their feelings known in the online world. So we have this ready-made pool of information that you can tune in to listen to any audience, community or consumer group.
Two bonus tools:
Followerwonk helps you explore, analyze and grow your overall social graph through powerful twitter analytics. It tells you the real spread of your followers, where they belong to, and at what time they’re active in a day.
Audiense is another powerful tool to analyze social communities. Audiense utilizes the cognitive API with IBM Watson to power the social engagement engine. You get the power of two tools thus offering a unique new solution which helps businesses gain insights toward customer affinities in real-time.
If you’re interested in trying out IBM Watson Analytics, follow this LINK – you’ll get access to a 30-day free trial.
Concluding thoughts
Behaviour platforms are where the real results and money is! This is where psychology collides analytics, and you get a unique way to analyze (and streamline) your existing strategy choices. It allows you to carry out every kind of analysis not restricted to just a global stage but the individual, product, and geography level. You can pull a source from social, or email, and map them alongside each other to create a terrific outreach strategy.
If you’re intrigued with the potential, these new tools offer, sign up right away. We’ll ensure this resourceful webinar is available on demand for you. You’ll see real-time demonstrations that’ll blow your mind and transform your social media game.
Are you ready to take your user analysis to the next level!
