The Latest Trends In Marketing Analytics
Social media has provided a way for people to share their inner most thoughts and feelings on an unprecedented level. What often seems like TMI to the reader is quite the opposite for a cutting edge marketer who has the know how and the tools to mine that data to make predictive marketing decisions. Marketing analytics technology is moving fast. New robust tools to dig into social data are popping up all the time. Whether all this sounds like a foreign language or you’re feeling pretty proud of how up to speed you are, here are the basics of what you need to know about the latest trends in marketing analytics right now.
Social Monitoring
We have found there is some confusion around what this is and how it is different from Sentiment Analysis and Social Intelligence. Social monitoring is the most basic and most “low tech” way to analyze social data.
Technopedia defines social monitoring as “a process of using social media channels to track, gather and mine the information and data of certain individuals or groups, usually companies or organizations, to assess their reputation and discern how they are perceived online. Social media monitoring is also known as social media listening and social media measurement.”
There are a number of tools available to help you but they are aggregating the social data from a number of different channels so that somebody can analyze the results of specific keyword searches to overlap with other data points in the hopes of providing information about customers, products, competitors, etc.
Sentiment Analysis
This is essentially a subset of social monitoring. It is the next level in digging deeper into how you mine and use the data derived from social chatter.
Brandwatch, developer of a sentiment analysis tool, defines sentiment analysis as “the process of determining the emotional tone behind a series of words, used to gain an understanding of the the attitudes, opinions and emotions expressed within an online mention.” On the Brandwatch blog they go on to explain how this newer technology can be very insightful for companies to gauge sentiment trends about a particular topic or brand.
Sentiment Analysis can help determine the success or failure of a marketing campaign or allow a brand to be more responsive to a large segment of customers as these trends emerge. However, Brandwatch closes the article by stating that the phase of this technology’s “focus will be on how to make results interpretable and actionable.”
Social Intelligence
Enter the latest evolution of social monitoring, social intelligence is the next generation of the earlier, less actionable iterations and is able to provide powerful real-time predictive social data for brands.
Frrole, a leader in this space, has developed a social intelligence platform that provides “people intelligence” which gives companies “organic, unbiased, multi-segmented, real-time insights about their industry, competition and brand.” While there are many emerging platforms for this technology Frrole is pushing the outer limits by providing people intelligence, topic intelligence/social listening and real-time marketing research all in one platform. In a recent blog post, Frrole describes how social intelligence is so much more than merely listening to what people are talking about in social media.
Social intelligence is about using that information to truly understand your customers needs. Frrole states that “Customers today are more than just customers. They are the last mile marketers and truly the brand converters” and I think we can all agree that is what every company desires to be closest to and understand the best.
*This post was sponsored by Frrole.
