Learn One Thing, Please!

How To Create A Social Intelligence Strategy

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As the founder and CEO of a digital marketing agency, after creating?almost 7,000 posts within a year?for various clients,?I've found that the fastest, most cost-efficient way to benefit from social media is to create an engagement, listen to strategy and set aside a test budget for targeting.

Here's how to get started:

First, decide what you want to learn.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when sourcing information from their social media channels is relying solely on organic reach. They haphazardly throw images and copy together and cast them out into the ether, like spaghetti noodles flung against the side of the refrigerator. Sure, some will stick, but there are better ways to determine if they’re done well.

Use your marketing team’s collective brainpower to determine your initial value proposition and your presumed visual appeal. Make assumptions, and give reasons to back it up. Pair copy and images with a scientific approach. Make a goal to learn something with every piece of content that is distributed to your intended audience.?

The moral of the story here is this:?don’t waste your noodles.

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Then, decide what you want to test.

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You’ll need to identify a control, or a consistent part of the test that you’ll measure your results against.?

Let’s use Facebook ads as an example: consider that?you are like most companies and assume you know your audience pretty well. You have a current target audience of women, ages 25 to 55 years old. You know this is a broad group, and you’d like to tighten your targets to figure out who responds best to the value propositions you’re presenting.

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To do this, you would need to set aside a modest test budget to carve out an identified audience segment.?

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This test budget is a fraction of your overall spending and it has one goal:?to measure a response.?(Don’t expect to get leads or engagement here; that will come later).

You don’t need to spend much at this stage to get the answers you need; remember you are using this information to gather how your audience responds to what you have to sell.

Using an image as the control for this test, you could try building different Facebook ads with different copy value points and show them to your test budget focus group.?

When the data rolls in, you can see which ad won out. As a result, you might discover that you have an unexpected core audience of women in their thirties with military experience.

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Once you realize what resonates, you can use that information to scale up your marketing, drive those connections and communities deeper. Which will allow you to use that information in other forms of how you’re positioning your business.?

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Don’t guess. Test.?

Sourcing business intelligence from social media is one of the fastest and smartest ways to scale up successful campaigns to?position your business where and how you are most effective.?

Instead of losing money, time and focus on value propositions that won’t deliver, you’re investing and concentrating those resources on marketing and messaging that works.?

Your company, your team and your customers all benefit because everyone finds what they need a little more easily.?

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And that’s exactly the point.