How Social Insights Can Inform Your Marketing Strategy

One of the key advantages social media has over other marketing channels is the ability to get feedback from consumers in real-time. For more traditional marketing channels, like television, print, etc., it can take weeks or months gather insights from a campaign and then even longer to implement. With social media, both quantitative and qualitative data can be gleaned from your audience and reported to other disciplines to inform overall marketing strategy.

Quantitative Social Insights

Quantitative social insights are established through measurement and goal-setting. Depending on your resources and your objectives, using the reporting dashboards built in to the channels natively might be enough. If your goals are around SOV, benchmarking against competitors, etc., you will likely need some third-party tools to pull this data.
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The second piece is accurate goal-setting. In order to determine if something was good or bad we need to benchmark performance. Setting goals requires analyzing past performance and projecting a trend forward based on a strategy and understanding of the social space. It is important to remember that overall goals should ladder up to larger business objectives. Once we have those benchmarks, frequent reporting against them will help gather quantitative insights. Common KPIs to set goals for include: impressions, engagements, engagement rate, click-thru rate, advocacy actions, etc.



An example of this in action is one of our clients has a CPG product that makes up a smaller portion of sales than their hero product. However, when we feature this product on social, it continues to be a top performer in terms of the benchmarks we set. These insights are then relayed to the product team to show that there is a strong demand from our audience for this particular product.


Qualitative Social Insights

Quantitative insights are great; however, I believe that the qualitative insights that you can gather from your social audience can be even more valuable. The near immediate feedback you can get about a new or existing product or service from social is a gold mine. If you see a trend in the questions or comments from fans these insights can be used to inform social content, programs and potentially your overall marketing strategy.

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An example of this is that one of our clients posted a DIY water bottle hack to encourage people to drink more water. Fans loved the hack and expressed how much they would want to have that water bottle like this. Those comments were raised up the chain and the brand created a new water bottle based on the feedback.

How Quantitative & Qualitative Insights Come Together

Quantitative and qualitative insights are the most effective when they come together to make an informed decision. Here is a checklist of what is needed for that to happen:

  • Benchmarking & goal-setting for social
  • Frequent reporting on social performance with analysis
  • Community Manager who can identify questions and trends from fans
  • A nimble social team that can adapt to those insights
  • Social reports shared with larger marketing teams and executive decision makers


Ignite Social Media