This is blog #4 in the series ‘Demystifying digital marketing’

In the earlier three blogs in the series, we saw why it’s crucial to first build your digital presenceoptimise your digital strategy and the role of social media advertising.

It is critical to find out what is working for you and what is not, and why. Social media analysis helps achieve this. Businesses need to gather data from owned media and analyse it to make business decisions. Also, consumer sentiments need to be analysed in order to support marketing and customer service activities.

Before going ahead, let’s ponder over some of these points if you have already built your website / social media channels:

  • Do you have information on visitors to your website? For e.g.: what is the number of people that visit your website, how much time do they spend on your website, where is the traffic to the website coming from, are relevant audiences coming to your website, how do they react to the information on your website, do you have information on how many of them are new visitors and how many are returning visitors?
  • If you do have information on visitors, how are you using this information?
  • Are you aware of your online competition? Do you have a strategy in place to combat competition?
  • Do you have information on your social media followers? Who are your followers, where have your likes come from, when are they socially active, what kind of content do they engage with the most etc.

There are tools available for analysis and most of them are inbuilt in the social media channel itself. What these tools help in giving you is the data on demographic info, behaviour and activity. Most times, this data is not really useful without analytics. Analytics is how you make sense of your data and uncover meaningful trends. For example, if you observe a drop in website traffic during certain times of the year, you may be required to dig deeper and find out why – whether it’s to do with nature of your product or service or with some competition activity around the same time etc.

The insights gained through analytics are incredibly powerful and can be used to grow your business while identifying areas of opportunity. Insights need to be actionable. And the action points may simply vary from changing the time you post or the kind of content you post to a more complex actionable of even completely revamping your website.

If you are seeking help on using social data for business insights & action, contact us for your website / social media audit.

Next in the series “Engage for long-term customer relationships”. Stay tuned!