Big data: Basics for effective social marketing

Big data is the buzz word these days but one widely misused and misunderstood. It isn’t some high-level tool used by multinational corporations as believed by many small business owners and marketers.

Big data has a tremendous use for small businesses as well. In particular, big data can be used to improve an organization’s social media marketing.

Some basics tips can help you improve your social media marketing using big data:

Structural Analysis

The first thing that needs to be done is to have a basic grasp of how data is structured and how you can use it for actionable insights.

There are two kinds of data types - structured data and the unstructured data. Structured data doesn’t need much effort and fits easily in your database. It’s the data that is linked to one another such as a consumer’s first name, email, and mailing address.

Unstructured data is the exact opposite as it requires careful study like the social media chatting. For comprehensive understanding, try to bring together both the data. Social media management tools like Salesforce, Ubervu, and Sprout can help you with your unstructured data immensely.

Strategy Building

The next step would be to develop a strategy in tandem with your marketing objectives to leverage the data. It would be something like getting a ‘sentiment score’ by adding your pre-existing data and the new social data.

Exercise caution and discretion when assigning a value to each consumer. You know your industry and audience best.

Once you have a sentiment score, it can guide your highly targeted marketing communications. You can assign a sentiment score to all of your prospects and align a content marketing strategy for each score range- a more personalized communication for a low score and those with higher scores can receive communication to reinforce the brand position.

Execution

This is where it all comes down to. Use the new found data insights that resonate best with your potential consumers.

If your data shows that potential consumers are asking questions or making comments about your marketing campaigns, you need to create content that fills that gap.

This new data can 1) help you create content to alleviate consumer challenges; 2) let you directly communicate with potential consumers with highly relevant information and 3) allow you adjust your overall marketing communications based on this insight.