More than Big Data, Listen for Insights

With the rise of digital marketing, so has been the rise of valuable data. There is no shortage of things to measure, and no shortage of tools to implement. We can capture and segment demographics, dissect behaviors such as likes, clicks, and shares. We can find the most relevant keywords and measure the most efficient ways to spend our budgets. We can plan our content and schedule it knowing the statistical best times of day to push it out.

But your customers are not demographics or behaviors, they are people. Through the many social media channels available, customers’ voices are there telling you how they feel, what keeps them up at night, what delights them or what they want. Don’t miss the opportunity to learn the “why” behind customers’ behaviors.

The content of social conversations offer potential insight to make impactful business decisions. For example, your top customers may appear to be men aged 20-45, but within that group they may have distinctly different reasons for purchasing your product. Often it is more insightful to understand the common need that drives your customers rather than knowing their age or geographic boundary. By aggregating and segmenting the nature of conversations, you are able to identify patterns to improve service, products and marketing messaging.

Tools now exist to help make use of the unstructured data around social conversations – to quantify the qualitative. Some use natural language processing (NLP) to understand and map intention, provide nuanced sentiment analysis, and filter the influential conversations that really matter. More robust social media profile information gives you a stronger basis to segment your customers and identify the best leads. And there are even tools to help you identify hot trends about to go viral before they actually do. Sites like Quora let you see what your customers really want to know.

Of course, there is still no replacement for actually talking with customers. At Mambo, we always encourage our clients to spend time in conversation with customers to inform any strategy. Let us know how we can help you learn more about your customers and find actionable insights for your business.