Inbound marketing isn’t new anymore. Brands of all sizes in any number of industries use it to generate qualified website traffic, leads and conversions. They’re writing articles, creating videos and sharing all kinds of content across the Web. It’s about sales, of course, but it’s also led to some really great content designed to improve the customer experience and increase brand awareness.
It’s only natural that inbound marketing will continue its upward trend and evolve even further as companies find more uses for it and refine their approaches. Educating customers with relevant information is the goal of any inbound strategy, but the challenge is figuring out how to create a continuous stream of content that’s actually interesting to a target audience.
Whether you have writer’s block, lackluster traffic numbers or a need to reach a new market, insights from social media conversations can be incredibly helpful for boosting any inbound campaign. Here are three ways that social media analytics can transform a stale, boring inbound campaign into the dynamic, lead-generating tool it’s supposed to be.
Gain Greater Understanding Of Audience Interest
To be successful, inbound marketing content must speak directly to what your audience cares about.
It’s not enough to know the basics of superficial buyer personas. You have to gain an understanding of their interests, pain points, and the type of information that they seek from your brand. Sure, you could pay for a focus group or conduct surveys to get this type of insight, but the fact is that these conversations are already taking place on social.
Pay close attention to your brand’s Facebook page. What types of patterns do you see in fans’ comments? Look at your Twitter followers. What interests do they have in common? What types of tweets resonate? What do they tend to complain about?
These data points are gold when it comes to determining the high-level themes that help shape inbound campaigns.
Differentiating inbound marketing content from competitors means understanding exactly what a target audience wants and delivering against that every single day.
Get New Ideas For Content
Perhaps you know what your audience cares about, but you’re struggling to come up with new focuses for blog posts, video content and more. Social listening can help brands with stale concepts find new angles and topics around which to generate content.
CoverGirl is a good example of this. The makeup brand knew that its audience loved how-to posts, makeup tutorials and video content. But how could it best determine the specific focus of that content?
By diving into the wider social conversation about lip care, CoverGirl could see that lip balm was one of the most popular sub-topic discussed. Many tweets focused on the frustrations of losing lip balm.
Using insights like these, CoverGirl can create how-to videos and site content that’s focused on lip balm in order to generate more engagement with its target audience.
Learn About New Markets To Target
Every brand has a handful of demographics it already targets with its content and other marketing strategies. Social monitoring provides companies an avenue directly to other groups of people likely interested in their products and services.
Take Under Armour as an example. By looking more closely at the users following or talking about @UnderArmour on Twitter, the brand could see that its social audience stretched beyond team sports athletes, like lacrosse or football players.
In fact, it turns out that yoga enthusiasts on Twitter showed a great deal of interest in Under Armour. This type of information gives the brand an entirely new segment to target with its videos, blog posts and distribution strategy.
Differentiating inbound marketing content from competitors means understanding exactly what a target audience wants and delivering against that every single day. The competition for audiences’ attention – and their business – grows each day.
Fortunately for marketers, there are a few places on the Web where customers talk every day about their experiences and desires. Keeping an ear open will help brands understand what they’re doing well and how to improve their strategies. Moreover, it can help any inbound marketer uncover new strategies, topics and audiences for their content.
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