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How to Sell Smarter Using Social Insights

Authors: Devon Wijesinghe Devon Wijesinghe
Posted Under: Social Media
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How to Sell Smarter Using Social Insights
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If knowledge is power, then knowing what’s happening with your customers is the most powerful marketing tool out there. Using social insights and data points are the best ways to gain understanding about any and all parts of a campaign.

Are sales dropping? Find out why. Is engagement down? Discover what your audience didn’t respond to. Are you missing your targets? Identify the right audience. Social data can be used to discover a brand’s voice, perform market and audience research, and determine how effective a future campaign will be.

Forget Focus Groups

During his session for Inbound 2015, Crimson Hexagon’s John Donnelly discussed why social media data is the secret weapon for selling. According to Donnelly, one of the most effective ways to glean consumer insights is by analyzing social media conversations. He suggests that, rather than shelling out for costly focus groups, sales teams are realizing that social media provides endless information about what their audience cares about, how they consume media, and what motivates their decision-making.

Here are five ways social insights can help sales teams (and you) sell smarter.

Understand the Customer Journey

The evolution of the customer journey is no secret, and accessing social insights can help you track these ongoing changes. This includes following customers across all channels—email, social media, and in-store—and using social analytics to adapt and personalize your sales tactics.

A great example of a company that did just that is Coca-Cola. Their goal was to bridge the gap from digital to in-store sales, specifically looking to drive customers from social interactions to redeeming in-store coupons. Through a partnership with Insightpool, Coke was able to create a winning campaign that doubled coupon redemption rates from 7.6% to 15.2%. By analyzing social insights and using them to target, predict, segment, and engage real-world consumers on social, Coca-Cola and Insightpool’s strategy turned social interaction into in-store customer action.

Hyper-Segment Your Audience

These days, the amount of audience data available is almost unfathomable, making market segments much more specific, detailed, and relevant. Thanks to social media insights, we now know more about our targets than ever before: personal facts, interests, hobbies, activities, connections, and more are all out in the open and provided by the sources themselves.

This rich source of information comes in handy when you’re looking to generate Word of Mouth about your brand. Tapping into the “right” market segments—segments whose interests and values are aligned with your brand—can be the catalyst your campaign needs.

Provide Better Customer Service

According to Forbes, social media creates a complex picture that suggests how to connect with customers based on what they identify as important to them. Knowing your audience and what they are saying about your brand—good or bad—can help you effectively manage their needs and provide one-on-one customer service.

See How You Stack Up Against the Competition

Your brand could learn a lot from what people are saying about your brand on social. Word of mouth is a powerful form of communication and arguably one of the most important insights to be gained from social media. Discovering your brand’s WOM Score on Twitter can help you gauge where you stand with your competition based on how many people are talking about your brand, and how influential and topically relevant they are to your brand based on specific topics.

Insightpool has pulled together industry Word of Mouth power rankings to compare the success of each brand on Twitter. We’ve ranked them based on their success at driving conversation around a specific topic to a hyper-relevant audience. See how your word of mouth score compares to your competitors’ here.

Track Strategy Results

It’s one thing to know that users aren’t staying on your site, but it’s completely different to know why they aren’t staying on your site. Tracking customer behavior insights gives you that why.

For example, you might find that the people reaching your site via Twitter links might be the wrong demographic or might not be interested in what your site has to offer. If that’s the case, your brand then has the opportunity to realign your social media strategy with the proper target audience to ensure success the next time around.

There’s a wealth of social insights just waiting to be analyzed out there. If you want your business to get ahead, using social insights to your advantage can increase WOM, segment your audiences, and much, much more.

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