I started this blog on the foundation that small businesses can benefit from using social media as an effective marketing tool. I wanted to help by giving my insight and some useful tips for small businesses to “level up their social identity” and get started in the realm of social media. In my previous posts I went over some of the basic principles involved with social media. For example, my first post “What Can Social Media Do For Your Company” covered what social media was and how companies can can effectively utilize different social platforms. My most recent post “Social Media Resourcing”, discussed the topic of whether or not companies that choose to use social media as a marketing tool, should outsource or manage their social media efforts in-house. In this post I want to change gears a bit. If you haven’t figured out already by the heading, this weeks topic is on consumer insight and how companies can use social media to gather information on their target market.
I assume most everybody reading this is familiar with common business lingo and concepts, but for those who are new to business and are looking to get a head start over the competition let me clear a few things up. When I say “consumer insight” what I am referring to is what Web Definition defines as “an intrinsic need or desire of the consumers, to which the brand alludes with its solution offer. “Insight” can be derived from classical market research understanding or from psychological knowledge about emotions and behavior in relation to the brand.” Next, the concept of “target market”. A target market according to entrepreneur.com is “A specific group of consumers at which a company aims its products and services.” Now that we are all on the same page, let’s dive in.
Social Media and Consumer Insight
Since social media is now a major part of our lives, businesses and marketers cant help but gather information on us as consumers. So from a business standpoint social media and consumer insight go hand in hand. A study done by socialmediaexaminer.com found that in 2012, approximately 58 million Americans have developed a “social habit”, which is the tendency to use social media sites multiple times a day. That is a shocking 17% increase from 2008. For more information on social media as a habit check out Tyler Crabbs post “Analysis of How Social Media Affects Our Everyday Lives” over at tycrabb.wordpress.com. Meanwhile, back to the topic at hand. If this many people are connecting to these social platforms multiple times a day what can we learn from them as consumers? How can this information help us in our goals as a company? Why do we need to know what they are doing on social media sites? All essential questions I am sure your asking yourself as your reading this (if your not, you should be). I will answer a few of those questions in a second, but I want to ask you a few first. My first question is what does your company expect to achieve from social media? Next, how do you expect to find your target audience on these social media platforms? Last but most important, if your already using social media, hows that working out? Yes, that last question was sarcastic. If a company is engaging in social media marketing and hasn’t gathered any consumer insight, my guess is its not working out so well or at least it is not as effective as it could be.
As a small business I don’t expect you to spend countless resources or valuable company time messing around to much with social media. However, gathering consumer insight is vital to make social media marketing effective. So if you do choose to manage a social media platform for your company or outsource your social identity make sure you gather some information on what your consumers are doing.
Now let me get back to those questions I mentioned earlier. What can we learn about consumers from social media platforms? Wow! I could go on and on about this question, but let me point out just a few of the basics:
- The amount of time consumers spend researching a particular product or service.
- Who is using particular products or services?
- How often are people sharing or interacting with a company before being considered a “loyal” consumer?
These are just some of the many things we can determine from consumer behavior on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and some of the other leading sites. The next question is, how can this information help our company achieve its goals for social media? This is one of the questions I hope you don’t catch yourself up on to much. It is a relatively simple question to answer. It has every thing to do with your company achieving your set goals for social media. I say this because, with out understanding your customers or potential target markets, how are you as a company suppose to design a marketing plan around social media if you don’t even know who your looking to target? You cant! I cant stress enough how important it is for you to learn about your consumers before you try to market towards them. If you don’t you will waste valuable company time, money, and resources. This all leads into the next section which is how marketers use social media to target a specific market.
Target Marketing
Understanding customer behaviors and gathering insight allows marketers to effectively target consumers who will most likely use their products/services. Now that we have an understanding of consumer insight and what that information can do for your business, its time we implement some of the knowledge gained. In this section I am not necessarily going to tell you how to target customers/consumers, that is for a whole other post. Instead, in this section I am more concerned with going over what to look for in consumer behavior that will help identify your companies target market.
This idea or concept of target marketing ties back into what I said earlier about consumer insight. How are consumers spending there time online, who is using particular products, and who is talking about what? Nielsen a consumer insight company in a recent study “State of the Media: U.S. Digital Consumption Report, Q3-Q4 2011” released that internet users spend roughly 21.3% of their time on social networks.
Another important factor in specifying a specific group or target market is finding what the 21.3% or so of people spending their time on social networking users are talking about or doing in those realms of there social platforms. Not only is it important to find the social media users, but that information does you minimal good unless you know what they are doing with that time. Consumers are discussing brands, companies, and experiences on social media. According to Ravi Condamoor, CEO of Serendio a firm that mines social media networks said “While some consumers will still pick up a phone to call a help line, the vast majority is now turning to blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, etc., to provide real-time experience feedback,” So it is important you understand what your consumers are doing and how they are reacting.
The information is out there! There is no question about that. It just matters on how effective or how much time you have to find it. A lot of target marketing comes from consumer insight. So the more you spend learning about consumers and their behaviors the more ammunition your company has to target and “attack” future and current customers.
Level Up Your Social Identity 