How Big Data Analytics Will Determine Future of Marketing and Sales: A McKinsey Report

In this era of Big Data where competition is fueled by your ability to harness the power of data in order to make it work for your business growth, the need of the hour for every brand and business organization is Analytics. In fact, a McKinsey report in the Forbes says that Big Data Analytics will determine how sales and marketing are conducted in the future.

One of the most important facets that the report highlighted was that gathering customer insights and converting that into critical business intelligence is inevitable for modern businesses. The report says, “The explosion in data and digital technologies has opened up an unprecedented array of insights into customer needs and behaviors”.

Thus, while businesses understand the importance of Big Data and Analytics, they are also making the smart move towards adopting Social Media Analytics tools for helping them make sense of their Big Data. According to the report, “Those (businesses) that use Big Data and analytics effectively show productivity rates and profitability that are 5-6 percent higher than those of their peers.” 

In other words, the report by McKinsey defines the success of organizations using Big Data to their wisdom to use analytics effectively. It says that such organizations are successful because they use analytics for the following:

  

a)      Identifying and pinpointing specifically the immense business building opportunities existing in the micromarkets.

b)      Understanding consumer decision journey and finding out what factors lead the consumer from starting with merely showing interest in ending up buying the product. Analytics are also used to spot reasons for and solve customer attrition. 
c)       Using analytics to create detailed customer profiles that include their specific likes, needs, wants and affiliations and use it to aim customers with perfectly targeted and often personalized marketing campaigns plays a crucial role in business success (increase sales by 10% and marketing ROI by 5-10 times). 

With regard to how competent must modern analytic tools be to successfully tackle the challenges of expanding data streams, McKinsey noted that that natural language processing, predictive and sentiment analytics (to decipher customer behavior) and “algorithmic marketing” will be the key components to look for in advanced analytics solutions.

We at Shout Analytics, take pride in the fact that our social media analytics solution fits the McKinsey description totally

To know more about our analytics capabilities or to find out Shout Analytics can help you in your Big Data analysis needs, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

3 Easy Steps to Build a Brand’s Online Reputation

In my previous post on online reputation, I mentioned why building and maintaining a healthy online reputation is crucial for BFSI and other organizations is in the age of social. Here, I’ll tell you how you can add credibility to your online reputation in three easy steps, and how social media analytics can help you boost your online reputation.

Step 1 – Develop and Post Great Content:

If you want your audience to say good things about your brand, then you must start a ‘good’ conversation. Say nice things (read interesting, useful and likeable social media content) and your audience will surely appreciate it and share it with their social network.

Step 2 – Engage Well With Your Audience:

Customer engagement is vital for your brand’s online reputation.  Therefore, ensure that the methods of brand engagement are ingenious too. Having posted creative, resourceful content, ask your audience to comment on it. Urge them to participate in contests, games, polls and quizzes and when they do, thank them generously for their interest and enthusiasm. Also, reward them with discount coupons and vouchers, special mentions and surprise gifts et al.

The bottom line is – go that extra mile to truly make customer engagement a pleasurable experience for both you and your audience. When your audience notices that you are making an honest effort to reach out to them, they will respect you, regard you highly, remember you and reciprocate the goodwill.

Step 3 – Take Bouquets and Brickbats Equally:

Let’s face it – in spite of your best efforts at building a good customer relationship, not all of them are going to be your loyalists or fans. For every satisfied and happy customer you would have an equal number or perhaps more unsatisfied customers. However, don’t sideline then. Instead, welcome and accept their criticism too.

When you see a complaint posted on the social media against your product/service/brand, acknowledge it and work to solve the issue at the earliest. If you are unable to resolve it, apologize.  Honesty and transparency on the social does wonders for your brand’s online reputation.

Having said that, a question still persists – how to effectively implement the above steps? The answer lies in social media analytics tools.

SMA tools like Shout Analytics effectively enhance your brand’s online reputation. Using these tools you can monitor, measure and analyze your customers’ conversations on the social and gather rich, actionable insights about your brand’s online reputation.

To learn how, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com.

How To Increase A Brand’s Share Of Voice?

Ever wondered how high or low is your brand’s Share of Voice on the social?
 

Share of Voice refers to the total amount of social mentions that a brand or product garners over that of its competitors. 

Here are some simple but very effective ways to increase a brand’s Share of Voice:

1. Measure and Monitor Your Share of Voice:

If you want to see an increase in your brand’s social mentions, then you must first monitor and measure your brand’s Share of Voice. You can do this successfully and most effectively by using a Social Media Analytics tool. 

To give you a very recent example, Using Shout Analytics, when we studied how the film Chennai Express was going to fare at the box office, we found that the film’s Share of Voice was this –

2. Get People Talking:

Getting people (your audience, fans and followers) to take notice of your brand is crucial to the brand’s Share of Voice. Hence, there is no better way to get people talking about your brand other than through awesome, engaging and shareable content. 

For Chennai Express, it was Deepika’s Tamil accented dialogue delivery and the film’s stereotypical South Indian look and feel that initially got people talking. On YouTube, there were videos of the film’s trailers, songs, scenes with popular dialogues and even behind-the-scenes snippets. These were interesting, engaging enough topics for the film’s fans to get talking on the social. Needless to say, the film’s Share of Voice simply catapulted to glory.

3. Now, Talk To Your Audience:

So, now that there is sufficient ‘talk’ about your brand on the social, the next step is engaging with your audience. Do they appreciate your social content – like it, share it, retweet or repin it? Then, go ahead, thank them. Tell them you appreciate their efforts. Similarly, are there dissatisfied or disgruntled customers complaining about poor service? Then, get in touch with those customers immediately, assure them that you’ll resolve the issue and keep your word. 

Good and effective customer service never goes unnoticed or unappreciated on the social.

Thus, the key to increasing a brand’s SoV lies in giving engaging content to your audience, then building an honest engagement with your audience and finally, to measure and monitor your SoV to identify the highs and lows of your social media engagement efforts.

What were your strategies for increasing your brand’s Share of Voice? Tell us in the comments below.

Top 3 Ways How Social Media Monitoring and Analytics Boosts Social Media Marketing

Is social media marketing only about aggressively selling products on the social or only limited to garner the maximum number of likes and fans? 

As someone who believes strongly in the business intelligence  of the social, I would say that brand marketers must explore and exploit social media for gaining actionable marketing insights. And if there is one trusted way to do this, it would be using social media monitoring and analytics tools.

Here are 3 ways in which Social Media Analytics tools can boost social media marketing:

Pick the Right Marketing Channel(s):

While your brands may be active on more than one social channel, it is extremely essential for the marketing team to know which social channel is best suited for achieving the brand’s business goals. Social media monitoring and analytics tools help you answer this question by correctly monitoring and analyzing your success rates with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube etc. 

Measure ROI:

I have said this repeatedly – social content drives social engagement and such sustained engagement eventually materializes into successful sales. While social media allows marketers to do this easily, they can rely on social media monitoring and analytics tools to measure and gain insights from the engagement levels of their content to know if they are posting the right content or not. 

Also, through clear, in-depth analysis, these tools give insightful reports and inform organizations what their ROI, their social media marketing have been.

Convert Probable Customers Into Loyal Customers: 

While marketers are already successfully promoting and selling products on the social, wouldn’t it be great if they could zero-in on just the right prospects for their products? 

Social media monitoring and analytics tools help brand managers to list specific keywords related to their products, monitor the social channels for their mentions and frequency of mentions. Plus, with sentiment analysis and predictive analysis capabilities, the social media analytics tools accurately signals to the marketers what their customers want and expect from a product like theirs.

This critical information guides the marketing and sales team to target the right prospects, nurture them over time through greater engagement, build a strong relationship through exemplary tailor-made services and successfully convert probable customers into loyal customers.

Have you sensed the need for social media analytics for your marketing efforts on social media? Share your views in the comments below. To know how Shout Analytics can help boost your social media marketing, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

The Fidor Bank Story: A Lesson in How and Why Banks Must Utilize Social Media

In April this year, computerweekly.com published an article based on Ovum’s various studies of the global banking sector where the research agency predicted that “social media will become a significant channel for retail banks in Europe within three years”.

Let me give you one of the finest examples of a bank utilizing social media. Germany’s Fidor Bank was established in 2007.  It is the world’s first online-only bank that operates only through the internet and using social media. From customer service, communications and engagement to new product development, everything happens on social media at the Fidor Bank.

Fidor Bank’s success through social media is best described by Karl Finders in his article when he says, “Fidor currently has more than 200,000 people registered and 150,000 community members. It has €160m worth of deposits, and its lending totals about €100m. With only 34 staff, no branches and a cost of only €3.50 to set up a customer with full banking, the overheads are low compared with traditional banks”. He adds, “Fidor’s customers trust it because it listens to them all the time through social media and customers have a trusted community supporting them”. 

How did Fidor Bank achieve this?

At a time when customers’ trust and faith in their banks was at an abysmal low, courtesy global economic crisis, Fidor Bank’s leadership took a bold move. They were brave enough to rely entirely on social media to restore that trust through personalized social media interactions. They communicated openly about issues related to banking and personal finance on social media. They opened channels on Facebook and Twitter for their customers to interact candidly with them, thus creating a high level of operational transparency. In no time Fidor’s customers realized that this bank was genuine and trustworthy. So, customers who came to Fidor Bank, stayed with it. In fact, even the bank’s customer service is handled by loyal customers on their social community.

Key takeaways from Fidor Bank’s strategy:

• Use social media to overcome the cost and complexity of traditional banking
• Always listen to your customers.
• Make social media a customer engagement tool.
• Increase customer trust through an online community
• Increase sales and improve customer service through enhanced customer communication strategies.

So, would you like to emulate Fidor Bank? To know how Shout Analytics can help you, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com.