Businesses have long
struggled to assign ROI to social media marketing efforts. To address this, there
is a new trend towards predictive social analytics, which we will discuss in
the post. To assist me here, I sought input
from my colleague, Jeff Revoy, the CEO at Viralheat, an early-mover in the predictive social analytics space.
To date, marketers
have largely relied on engagement metrics, like follows, likes, shares and
retweets, to serve as key performance indicators of social media effectiveness.
This strategy divorces social media marketing from a business’s bottom line, as
likes and comments don’t necessarily equate to purchases. And, sponsored content and ads, which have
been the primary tactics businesses have used to stay top-of-mind with
consumers, can be expensive and obtrusive, using push vs. pull techniques.
Enter predictive
social analytics to the rescue, which finally allows businesses to anticipate potential
purchasers via social media and capture more leads using human intent and
sentiment analysis technologies.
So, how does it
work? Let’s look at an example using hashtags in Twitter. When a Twitter user tweets #moving or
#iamengaged, predictive social analytics tools identify these specific tweets as
indicators of future human intent and sentiment (in this case, as potentially
pre-qualified leads for moving or wedding services), and then imports them into
a marketing or sales automation platform like Salesforce.com, Marketo, Hubspot
or Eloqua. Then, if you were the moving
company or wedding service in this example, your sales team would then reach
out to these users via relevant tweets on Twitter, instead of cold calling
them.
Today, there are an
array of social media management suites available, that provide social
publishing, analytics and monitoring. From
free-trial versions like Sprout Social, TweetDeck or HootSuite, to pricey
large-scale enterprise-ready systems like Radian 6, which require big budgets
and months of training. But, these
systems largely spit out a fire hose of un-actionable social data, and are not
focused on identifying relevant sales leads.
The reason I reached out to Viralheat for this post, is the fact they were the first ones to tackle this “social data to sales leads” opportunity, which I thought was an interesting next evolution in social media marketing. So, in addition to the social publishing, analytics and monitoring tools which most platforms offer, ViralHeat has added these predictive social analytics tools, which takes social media monitoring and turns it into lead-generating workhorse for your business.
More importantly, predictive social analytics is leading to high-ROI case studies, like this one for Viralheat client, Men's Warehouse. It suggests that Men's Warehouse is driving revenues of around 20-30x the cost of their predictive social analytics software (assuming they have around 2MM unique monthly visitors to their website, 2% of which have been identified as coming from predictive social analytics efforts and such traffic converts into sales at normal e-commerce conversion rates of around 3% with an estimated average ticket of $50).
If you have any other questions here, Jeff has gratiously
made himself available. Feel free to
contact him at 866-832-2197 or via the contact form on the
Viralheat website.