The Devil Is In The Data

In recent years, social media has become an indispensable marketing tool to global brands and small businesses alike, but are you utilising it to its full potential? Ben Maughan, managing director at Chester-leStreet-based social media advertising agency, Epic Social, discusses why when it comes to social media, its real value as a marketing tool is in the data that sits behind it.

Free, readily available and widely used by consumers around the world, many businesses understand their need to have a social media presence, but lots of people aren’t taking full advantage of it.

Many business owners see social media as something that they simply have to have because everybody else uses it. It is somewhere they can share business updates, promote products and services and keep in touch with customers. What many people don’t realise is that the real value in using social media for marketing purposes is in the data it collects about your audiences, and if you’re not analysing this regularly, then you could be missing out.

Monitoring your social media insights is absolutely key to ensuring that your social media activity is first and foremost, being engaged with, but also, that it is hitting your target demographic. Unlike traditional forms of marketing like direct mailshots or print advertising, social media allows you to assess the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and monitor your return on investment through the data that is collected by the platforms’ inbuilt analytics tools.

From this data, you can learn everything that you need to know about your target audience, from who they are and where they’re from, to how they interact with your brand and your posts and what type of content they find most engaging. In order to do this however, you need to analyse.

At Epic Social, we are specialists in creating high-quality content for brands, custom designed to engage target audiences. Our team of inhouse social media experts monitor the effectiveness of these campaigns closely by analysing social media data, which we then use to inform future campaigns.