With the right tools, and an intelligent strategy, any business can develop market research from the information found across social media sites. Continue reading to learn about using social media as a tool for getting to know customers to a whole new extent.

Define the Marketing Goals

The first step for any type of market research is to determine exactly what is trying to be learned. That could mean looking for insights into things like consumer behavior, marketplace sentiment, product research, brand awareness, and more.

A brand also has to determine whether to go looking for information that is qualitative or quantitative. Quantitative research is essentially the hard numbers: The number of followers on a specific platform or social media mentions. Qualitative research is more associated with feelings: whether people have positive or negative feelings about something.

As an example, a business might find that it has 500 mentions on a specific platform. That would be quantitative information. With a deeper look at the numbers, it may be found that 91 percent of those mentions rate as positive. That would be qualitative information. They can decide which will be the focus of a research strategy in order to gain the specific customer insights.

Choose a Platform

Once a goal has been defined and the type of information determined as to what’s being sought after, a marketer can select a social media platform to mine for information. Depending on the goals or the group of consumers that they are trying to learn more about, some social networks might hold more research value.

Due to the ubiquitous nature of Facebook, it is the social network that offers value for the broadest range of goals, but other social media sites might be able to offer unique insights for specific groups. As an example, Snapchat advertising offers the greatest access to the millenial demographic, and is noteworthy for its high engagement levels.

Use the Right Tools

When it comes to extracting data from social media, digital marketers have an array of different tools at their disposal. These analytics platforms mine information like mentions, likes, and shares to provide businesses with insights into the behaviors and feelings of social media users.

When a brand is looking for an analytics platform, they want to find one that has the ability to extract the information that is relevant to their consumer insight research. They must consider the type of information that the service provides, and look at the different ways that it allows them to collect, manage, and clean data.

Using the Data

The point of market research is to obtain information that a business can turn into action. They might be able to use it for marketing, product development, customer service or any number of other business goals. Marketers shouldn’t just gather this information and sit on it – they should take action and make decisions that can refine the brand and maximize their ROI.

A company that offers a software-as-a-service product might find that customers are unsatisfied with a specific feature, or they might find that a competitor offers a feature that is particularly popular with consumers. This information can then be used to refine the product going forward.

Things like surveys and focus groups still have their place in market research, but social media can provide customer insights that are not available through traditional methods. Marketers can get information from a much larger group, and research can be performed much more quickly and for a lower cost. That means it offers a better return on investment, and the immediacy of the information makes it more useful and more actionable.

Written by: Rae Steinbach, Taktical Digital (via Website Magazine)
Posted by: CueCamp

The post How to Use Social Media to Know What Customers Want appeared first on CueCamp.

With so much happening on social media platforms, businesses would be out of touch if they didn’t pay attention to what people were saying about them online. Accordingly, learning to turn those social media fans into paying clients (and keep them engaged) is extremely important.

Social Media Fan Pages

The first step though is to make sure that your business has a good online presence through social media and your company website. All social media fan pages and platforms that your business uses need to have compelling and useful information to gain social media fans and followers.

At CueCamp, we teach our clients to learn how the sales funnel works. We take our clients through each step of the sales funnel starting with inbound marketing and work our way down to a sale.

Inbound marketing begins with establishing social media profiles on platforms that will work for your type of business in order to start engagement with potential customers. Most businesses make the mistake of thinking that they have to be on every popular platform. They believe the more platforms they are on the more people they will reach. This could not be further from the truth.

We guide our clients and show them how to conduct market research for their industry to figure out what platforms would be beneficial for their business. Some businesses would do well on Instagram, where it would not make sense for another type of business.

Social Media Fan Pages / Platforms

After we help our clients to figure out what social platforms to utilize, we then collaborate to create strong profiles and content to post on those platforms. We look at what the competition is posting, what people are talking about online, and what is trending in your industry. Our marketing team then creates content (videos, blog posts, posts, etc.) to then be posted on these chosen platforms.

The next step in the sales funnel is your company website. All of the traffic that you drum up from your social media platforms will then be taken to your company website. This is where they will learn more about your company, offerings, and services. The best way to get people to your website is through landing pages and blog posts.

Once you have established traffic to your site you can then start making direct contact with your potential customers and finally create a sale.

Where to Start

The best way to start the sales funnel is to figure out which social media fan pages or platforms will work for your type of business. As a general guideline for our clients, we start with a Facebook company social media fan page. Facebook is the ultimate tool to increase visibility in your target market and engage in a relationship with your customers. With over 1.23 billion active users, Facebook is a great place to start.

There are many ways to start engaging potential customers on Facebook. Our team helps businesses figure out what to post and when to post to attract new customers and social media fans. Every business is different, which is why we tailor every marketing plan to fit our clients specific needs. But the only way to get started is to have a solid Facebook company fan page.

Free Fan Page

CueCamp offers free custom Facebook fan pages for new clients. Our marketing team will help generate more potential customers talking about your business with a custom designed and professionally marketed Facebook page. Our social media experts do it all for you! They create a page that is all about you and your business, and then help to build your social media fan base to get the conversation going.

If you don’t have a Facebook fan page or are not happy with what you have now, our team will build a page that gets you a following. Next, we will professionally market your new Facebook page to get you likes, targeting people who will be interested in your business. Finally, we keep these new social media fans interested and talking about your business by frequently updating your content and creating new marketing campaigns.

If you are interested in a Free custom Facebook fan page then contact us today on www.cuecamp.com. Next, we will continue the conversation and talk about the following step in the sales funnel, your website. How can you build traffic and turn those visitors into paying customers? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt, CueCamp

The post Turning Social Media Fans into Paying Clients appeared first on CueCamp.

Inbound Marketing begins with establishing social media profiles on various platforms that will work for your type of business – in order to start engagement with potential customers.

What happens after you make contact with a new potential customer? Typically your social media initiatives will help drive new traffic to your website. All of the traffic that you drum up from your social media platforms will hopefully drive people to learn more about your company, offerings, and services.

Once you have established traffic to your site you can then start making direct contact with your potential customers and then create a sale.

A useful way to use the sales funnel concept is to figure out which social media platform sites will work best for your type of business. As a general guideline for our clients, we start out with a Facebook company fan page. Facebook is a powerful tool to increase visibility in your target market and engage in a relationship with your customers. With over 1.23 billion active users, Facebook is a great place to begin.

There are many different ways to start engaging potential customers by using Facebook. Our team at CueCamp helps businesses to figure out what to post, and when to post, in order to help attract new customers. Every business is different, which is why we tailor every marketing plan to fit clients’ specific needs. A solid Facebook company fan page is an excellent way to begin.

CueCamp is now offering free custom Facebook fan pages. Our marketing team will help generate more potential customers talking about your business with a custom designed and professionally marketed Facebook page. Our social media experts do it all for you by creating a page that best represents your business and its offerings, and then builds your fan base to get the conversation going.

If you don’t have a Facebook fan page or are not happy with what you have now, our team will build a page that gets you a following. Next, we will professionally market your new Facebook page to get you likes, targeting people who will be interested in your business. Finally, we will keep these new fans interested and talking about your business by frequently updating your content and creating new marketing campaigns.

If you are interested in a free custom Facebook fan page, contact us.

How can you retain traffic and turn those visitors into paying customers? Check back next week to learn about the next step in the sales funnel: your website.

Written / posted by: CueCamp

The post Inbound Marketing with Social Media appeared first on CueCamp.

Our view on social’s role in content marketing is threefold:

1. Social should play a key role in informing content strategy
2. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn and so on are all valid platforms that should be used as part of your content strategy
3. Social media (particularly Facebook) has a unique ability to amplify your content placed on other channels

Social Media’s Role In Informing Content Strategy

Social data is an absolute core component of creating a content strategy. From deciding what to create content about, to the weighting of that content within your overall plan, the data you can pull from social should be integral to your thoughts.

There’s a whole host of great tools you can use to get insight in-house, such as:

– Followerwonk: Followerwonk allows you to analyse any Twitter audience by age, location, and bio word clouds to give you a flavour of your audience. Combine this with the most influential followers and see who they are and what you do to give yourself a headstart

– Unmetric: Unmetric allows you to track your competitors social media content and get alerted when there are spikes in engagement levels, allowing you to react or use historical data to plan future activity

– Twtrland: this tool allows you to delve into the Twitter data of any profile to see their most influential tweets, top followers, and basic demographics

We use a mixture of these tools, and some of our own data sets to really understand a target audience in advance of planning content. Outputs from various tools are used as part of the idea creation process, such as this Followerwonk word cloud of the bios of @datifyuk followers for instance:

Or this Socialbakers data based on the top Facebook interests by market, and the age split of people interested in Bollywood in New Zealand:

When you start adding of all of this data into the mix you can start to take intelligent decisions about your content marketing to make it more effective and relevant for your target audience.

Use Social Platforms As Part Of Your Content Strategy

Many brands will see their content strategy as having two sides, on-page (website), and off-page (guest posting/outreach led). Social often gets missed as a crucial part in between. Not only can social help you identify who to outreach to, but should be used as a platform for your content to drive engagement with your brand.

Your Facebook or Twitter updates should form part of your overall content strategy, and tailoring your content across various channels with a focus on social will always be beneficial. In Moz’s recent search rankings factor survey the majority of search marketers surveyed felt that social signals, and in particular the overall influence of Google +1’s on rankings would continue to increase in the future, again showing why social channels should be integrated into your strategy now.

Regardless of which channel works best for you, having a presence across each is important, even if only to own your brand name and keep people aware of you across their chosen channels. Google Plus is a good example of this – the users numbers are high, but interaction levels generally low (outside of the digital marketing community!). However, due to the increased importance Google are likely to place on this as a ranking factor for your content and therefore your site it is crucial that you keep this channel burning with your social content even if only with a few updates a week of content amended from another platform such as Facebook.

Amplify Your Content

Where social really can benefit your content marketing efforts is in putting your content in front of new audiences that are highly relevant and ready to engage. Whether your social audience is big or small, with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn you can now amplify your content through native paid means to reach new audiences at a relatively low cost compared to other channels.  At Datify, we do this for nearly every piece of content we create to ensure that reach is good when our clients have invested.

What’s more, the targeting across all three of these channels is very detailed, with Facebook in particular having multiple targeting levels that can enable you to find your perfect audience in this environment. This can enable you to create an initial buzz around your content, or keep traffic sustained after the initial outreach push.

Being able to target people who engage in other topics in your niche, who are in the right location and the right age grouping is a great opportunity, and can be very cost effective if managed correctly.

Whilst Matt Cutts has denied Facebook and Twitter’s social sharing signals are included as major ranking factors, they are still important as part of your content marketing efforts. Driving increased traffic to the content you create not only generates social shares, but also has the impact of creating ‘earned’ links, brand interactions and the potential for new business.

Facebook is particularly strong for amplifying your content. By using Power Editor you can ensure that your content is only seen in relevant News Feeds of the exact type of person you want to be viewing your content.

Summary

In summary, don’t think of social media as a completely separate discipline to content marketing – in fact, don’t separate the two at all. Social media should be completely integrated into everything you do – from informing your overall strategy, to being included as a platform to think about, and to increasing the distribution of your content.

Embrace social, particularly the paid amplification piece, to ensure that you can drive content marketing success for your clients.

Written by: Ben Harper, socialmedia today
Posted by: CueCamp

The post The Role of Social Media in Your Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on CueCamp.

1. You will find whomever you want to do business with somewhere online
2. You will find whatever knowledge you need about any market or any person online
3. You can reach your market by simply engaging in the right conversations with the right people. This is more effective than advertising.
4. If your business can’t be found, isn’t engaging with the market or worse yet ignoring the market you are not likely to be creating transactional opportunities while your competition does.
5. Communications is a system to leverage your organizations ability to communicate with your market. Social media is the new communications system.
6. Social media saves time and money if you use it right for the right things
7. If you learn “how” to use social media correctly then you’ll understand “what” your market is looking for and “where” they are looking. You’d want them to look for you.
8. “When” your customers and prospects are engaging about you, your industry or your products and services you need to be there listening. Otherwise how will you gain the necessary market intelligence, be enabled to respond or even be aware of problems or needs. If you are not present when and where the conversations are occurring you are basically out of touch with your market.
9. Communications is about reach. Communicating is about relational dynamics between people. Social media provides the means to effectively communicate with your market. However communicating in human rather than institutional terms.
10. If you are not communicating (listening first, initiating second) then how in the world do you expect to create relationship with people and businesses that may want the value you offer?

When people need or want something in the old days they’d look up information in the yellow pages. Today people turn to search engines to find what they want or need. Each day on average Google gets used 235 million times.

When people are looking to purchase something they want and need more and more they are going on line to find out what other people think or say about a product, service or brand. The relevancy that influences people’s buying behavior is other people’s conversation, including yours. That is if they can find your conversation and if it provides value people are looking for.

To sum up: For many, the Web isn’t a place to look for information, it’s the only place.

Written By: Michel Ann Sharritt
Posted By: CueCamp

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