Take a second to imagine a world where you stop marketing on social media. Think about how much business you’d lose out on, how many potential customers would go unreached, and how much more you’d need to spend on other marketing channels.
That should really emphasize how important social media marketing is in 2024—and with social media growth showing no sign of slowing down, it’s only going to become increasingly important. Therefore, you need to have a good understanding of how effective your social media marketing actually is.
That’s where paid social media analytics comes in. By using all of the data that you can derive from your social media channels, you’ll be able to analyze the levels of reach, engagement, and brand awareness that you generate from social media. This will provide you with actionable insights to boost your social media marketing in future.
Want to learn more about how to use social media analytics in your organization to improve your brand awareness? This practical guide explains all there is to know for people new to paid social media analytics; read on to find out more.
What are Paid Social Media Analytics?
As digital marketers, we’re used to trying a variety of different strategies for raising brand awareness.
From asking questions like are .ai domains good for engagement to designing comprehensive email messaging strategies for customer retention, there’s so much that we can do to ensure that our digital marketing is effective.
However, it’s worth considering how we know whether our marketing is working as intended or not. To be confident that your marketing is offering a return on your investment of time, energy, and resources, you should always analyze the data to gain insight into its results and outcomes.
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This is why social media analytics is so important. It’s all about collecting and interpreting key data points that produce an accurate image of the performance of your social media marketing efforts.
What those social media analytics will look like depends on the aims of your social media marketing, as well as your overall analytics goals. However, common examples of metrics include return on investment (ROI), engagement rate, and share numbers. We’ll discuss these in more detail later.
Ultimately, social media analytics is a way of proving the effectiveness of your social media campaigns and enabling you to see what aspects of your digital marketing need to be improved or reworked.
Benefits of Paid Social Media Analytics for Brand Awareness
Now that you know the meaning of social media analytics, it’s time to look at the specific benefits that you’ll be able to see when you integrate the use of analytics into your workflow.
Here are the most important reasons why social media analytics can help your organization:
1. Identifying Trends
Being on top of industry-wide trends is a crucial part of any marketing strategy. However, it’s especially important in the fast-paced world of social media marketing, where being at the forefront of a trend can put your accounts in front of millions of new eyes.
Social media analytics can be used to produce detailed insights into browsing and purchasing patterns from your customers, allowing you to see the sort of things that your audience is looking at when they’re on social media. If you see a change in patterns, you’ll be able to adjust your campaigns to make the most of this trend.
2. Improving Customer Engagement
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Social media is unique in the world of marketing: your customers play an active role in sharing your materials and driving your marketing success. With shares, likes, and follows such an important currency in social media, you need to make sure that customers are as engaged as possible if you want to boost brand awareness.
This can be easily achieved through the use of social media analytics. You can see how customers are responding to different types of social media marketing and how users communicate with your brand through social media.
This can be used to improve your offering; if customers respond well to short videos, for instance, you might choose to invest in growing your platform on brand on TikTok.
As well as this, you could data to identify demographics that could respond to more targeted marketing if they engage less than others with your accounts.
3. Promoting Success
When you’re dealing with the day-to-day issues of working in digital marketing, it can be easy to overlook successes. Social media analytics will make the best parts of your marketing appear as clearly as possible. Learning from success through analytics can then have a great impact on your future marketing efforts.
Let’s say that you’ve produced a brilliant product launch that generated a lot of new followers and led to a high conversion rate from those followers. These analytics will allow you to confidently recognize the strength of this product launch, meaning that you can create the core elements of a go to market strategy to be used across the company.
In addition, promoting success through data-driven evaluation can boost morale among your team. Employees who create marketing campaigns that drive high KPIs should be rewarded, while others can learn from their successes.
4. Rectifying Underperformance
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However, social media analytics isn’t just about recognizing and promoting success. After all, not everything that we do in digital marketing is a surefire success; if it was, there’d be little point in social media analytics at all!
With a clear understanding of the impact of your social media promotions through expertly chosen KPIs, you can quickly identify underperforming strategies. Rather than simply repeating these strategies, you have the knowledge needed to adapt your underperforming social media posts.
Let’s say that you’ve spotted that your social media posts aren’t generating the brand awareness that you were hoping for when they are posted at certain times of the day. This data can be used to fine-tune your social media content calendar, and optimize the timing of your posts.
5. Improve your Demographic Marketing
Targeted marketing campaigns, where marketing materials and strategies are personalized according to customer characteristics, are a great way to show that you value your customers as individuals. They’re also a way to make sure that your customers are only seeing the most relevant marketing materials.
Social media analytics can make this targeting more effective. Collect customer data through social media accounts to see key demographic details, such as location or age, that you can use to segment your audience. This will ensure that your targeted marketing is as accurate as possible.
6. Learn About your Competitors
When you’re trying to reach your brand awareness goals, you need to remember that your brand exists in close competition with various other companies right across your industry. Learning about these competitors is crucial if you want to gain an edge over them.
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This is another reason why social media analytics is such a useful tool in digital marketing—you don’t have to restrict your analytics to your own social media accounts! Instead, you can extract data about competitors’ posts and how customers engage with those other brands.
This means that you can see what is working for your competitors and borrow some of their strategies. As well as this, you can see the key features that customers value in your competitors. This can be used to drive competitive advantage as you look to grow your brand awareness.
7. Ability to Use Adaptable KPIs
One thing that gives social media analytics a benefit over other forms of data analytics is the fact that you can easily adapt the metrics that you examine according to your goals. When you’re looking at brand awareness, for instance, you’ll probably want to examine shares or follows on your social media accounts.
Alternatively, you could look at conversion rate if you want to see how effective your social media accounts are at directly driving purchases and leading to business growth.
You could even look at qualitative data such as social media comments if you want to identify the benefits of cloud vs on premise, for example, from the perspective of your customers. This means that you can lead company improvement from the starting point of what really matters to your customers.
Social Media Analytics: Producing Insights into Brand Awareness
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With social media being such an important part of everyone’s lives, it’s vital to have an effective, data-driven social media marketing strategy. The best way to achieve this is through social media analytics.
By producing benefits such as promoting and replicating successful examples or identifying up-and-coming industry trends, social media analytics has a range of uses, especially if you want to boost your brand awareness through social media. Implement social media analytics and start making smarter social media decisions today!