How to Use Social Media Data for Marketing Strategy: Targeting the Right Audience, Creating a Post-Channel Strategy, Testing Content, Improving Data Quality, and Performing Competition Analysis

Use social media data for marketing strategy.

One of the tools that brands can use to take their marketing strategy to the next level is social media data. This is because it contains essential metrics on how users view, engage, and share your content. It can show you the kind of content to produce, whether it generates interest and the best distribution channels. This article will guide you on how to use social media data to create a top-notch marketing strategy.

How to Use Social Media Data for Marketing Strategy

Here are ways to use social media data to develop a marketing strategy.

Target the Right Audience

If your marketing strategy targets the wrong audience, you are not likely to see engagement and conversion results. Fortunately, many social media sites will provide you with the details of your followers. They will show you metrics such as age, sex, geographical location, education level and industry.

By collecting and analyzing data on your audience, post-performance, and engagement, you can have a better understanding of the kind of content they love. You can then tweak your campaigns to meet their needs.  

You can then:

  • Send targeted campaigns to people who have shown interest in your brand or taken action. You can also target audiences with similar profiles to those who have converted.
  • You can upsell your current customers by offering them newer models.
  • Cross-sell to yor customers by selling them products that complement what they purchased.

These steps can help improve your return on investment on your social media ads or posts.

Creating a Post-channel Marketing Strategy

Social media data can help you create a great social media strategy. For instance, if your campaigns convert better on Snapchat, it could indicate that your content resonates better with the younger demographic; therefore, you can create similar content on Instagram targeting GenZ and millennials.

When analyzing the data of different channels, you should take note of the following:

  • The best-performing post and the exact performance on different social media sites
  • Number of posts for each social media platform
  • The engagement level of individual posts
  • Engagement level of each platform as a whole
  • Conversion rate.
Create a marketing strategy using social media data.

Test Your Content 

A/B testing is one of the key steps in marketing and also works for social media. For instance, you may be unaware of how your audience will react to a post. In such an instance, you can test the content ideas to see if they perform well and on which platform.

 When testing content, measure the metric that aligns with your marketing goal. For instance, if you want to test the ability of the content to go viral, measure the virality rate. You can also try the performance of the same content between two different demographics.

Some of the metrics to keep track of when testing social media content are:

  • The number of followers added by the campaign
  • The reach of the different demographics
  • The amplification rate: the ratio of shares to the total number of followers
  • The conversion rate of the audience that sees the post
  • The scroll depth: how far a user scrolls on a page.

Improve the Quality of Data

When creating a marketing strategy, you must keep track of various metrics, such as sentiments towards your brands and the demographic sharing your content. You can respond better if you are relying on quality data. 

With Apple devices blocking user data tracking, finding data from other sources is necessary. Different social media platforms’ built-in data tracking tools can help marketers get better quality data for their marketing campaigns.

Perform Competition Analysis

Many social media sites allow brands to check what their competitors are doing. For instance, you can check the kind of content your competitors are posting, providing them with more Instagram likes. Are they publishing photos of their products or posting short videos?

 This can help you understand the preferences of your target audiences. You can then use the data for your new campaign or product. Remember also to check if your competitors are also working with influencers. This can show you if influencer marketing can be a good content marketing strategy.

Add Social Media to Your Sales Funnel

Many businesses use social media to create awareness of their products or services. However, you can use social media data to improve conversion. When promoting a product on social media, you can track the conversion rate from the post. If you understand the demographic interested in your product, you can promote your product more to that group.

Use social media data to test content.

Wrapping Up

Tracking social media data can help marketers improve their strategies. It can also help you understand your audience and their interest. By following this guide, it’s possible to track social media data to enable you to create campaigns that convert.

Benjamin is a writer with over ten years of experience in the content writing field. He holds a Bachelor's degree in  Journalism from Strathmore University. He writes on various niches such as product reviews, self-improvement, and making mone online. You can find him curled on his couch with a self-improvement book when he is not blogging.