Why Every Brand Needs Social Intelligence

If you’re a brand trying to identify your target market, there is one place you can find them all: online. Your existing and potential customers have fully completed the digital transformation- it’s time for brands, marketers, and businesses as a whole to do the same.

Blog originally published by Social Media Strategies Summit - find the original post here.

What is the digital transformation?

The digital transformation is the active shift that consumers are making in order to access their desired products and services through a real-time, social, and customer-first approach.

Thanks to services like Uber and AmazonFresh, hailing a cab and grocery shopping are now both just time-consuming memories of the past. These two relatively young yet powerful tech giants have provided instantaneous access and convenience to their loyal customers, giving them an unparalleled advantage in the market.  As marketers try to follow suit, it’s important not to dismiss their success as sheer luck. Instead, acknowledge that these are companies that worked quickly when they noticed the shift towards a digital lifestyle.

As a part of the digital transformation, businesses have been given access to inconceivable amounts of data. So much data is now available at your fingertips, that often times it feels more like a burden than a blessing. With 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day, there is no question that getting access to more data doesn’t necessarily mean getting access to the right data. That's where social intelligence comes in.

What is social intelligence?

In psychology, the term ‘social intelligence’ is defined as the ability to know oneself and know those with whom you interact. In the marketing world, this definition doesn’t change all that much. A brand needs to not only understand its own vision, mission, core benefits, and differentiators internally, but it must also understand its customers, competitors, and market.

To better understand themselves and their target market, brands use social listening as their go-to solution for a noisy digital ecosystem. Social listening entails monitoring digital consumer conversations about your public perception, consumer feedback, brand reputation and more.  Social media managers and consumer insights teams have historically looked for trends by analyzing social media for Facebook likes or top Twitter hashtags. They have also relied heavily on tracking trending topics with agency-like media monitoring tactics. But conducting brand and market research this way is likely to leave you with surface-level insights about your consumers (gender, geo-location, occupation, hobbies) and no clear next step. To turn this data into something useful, brands need a more powerful technology solution that aggregates data and creates insights to tell a more complete story.

Data that is quality and complete

Buyer personas are becoming increasingly popular with marketers, however, the process of building a persona is still unclear. Brands rely on high-level data from their existing customers and social media audiences, but a large part of the persona creation exercise is still a guessing game. Personas, just like the consumers they represent, are multidimensional and complex. In order to build accurate and comprehensive personas, brands need higher quality data.

Brands need to go beyond basic demographic data and into psychographic data around their personality traits, values, behaviors, interests, lifestyles and more. Building personas that are based on psychographics requires thousands of data sources ranging across social, news, review websites, blogs and more in order to be statistically significant. Once they’re able to do so, brands can better understand how their personas consume marketing messages, conduct research on products and services, and prefer to make purchases- which is extremely valuable information for marketers and businesses looking to improve how they communicate with their customers. Furthermore, understanding personas makes it easier for the brand to build a more successful business, as well as provides higher value and a more positive experience to the end user – your consumer.

Actionable Insights

When a brand has more accurate, powerful data, making business decisions with confidence becomes much easier. Using social intelligence, your brand can optimize existing products, campaigns, and processes by answering the questions that truly impact your business such as:

• Do my customers trust the opinions of Instagram influencers, Yelp reviews, or celebrity sponsorships?
• Do they tweet about excellent customer service or complain about my brand’s shortcomings instead?
• Are they actively looking for a solution that my brand can build and easily provide?

Once you’re able to answer these questions, your team instantly has a clearer path to creating solutions and creating messages that are effective and drive real business results, all based on quantifiable data.

The Technology Advantage

While social intelligence sounds promising in theory, how can brands implement it easily and effectively? The answer is simple: To tackle technology, you must use technology. Investing in a team dedicated to social intelligence is undoubtedly going to be more expensive, slower, and less accurate than using machine learning technology. Digimind is able to collect data from more than 850 million online and offline sources in over 190 countries in 20 languages. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP), Digimind is able to analyze your brand and industry for sentiment analysis and brand reputation within minutes.

A brand is more effective when they allocate their human resources not for aggregating data, but rather for to making insight-driven business decisions based on the data. Furthermore, by relying on technology, insights are no longer isolated within a department – they are available to every team across an organization. Digimind’s ability to customize our solution based on your organization’s needs means that insights are not restricted just to the marketing team. Product teams, executive boards, HR departments, and more are all able to take advantage of data in their own respective ways.

To learn more about how Digimind can help your team make more informed, insight-driven decisions, schedule a demo with our social media experts today!