Social Selling is Impossible Without Big Data

Social selling is a new concept that has been proven to be tremendously effective. According to the 2014 Sales Benchmark Index, social sellers outperform other marketers by 66%.

However, your social selling strategy must be executed properly to get results. In 2017, social selling campaigns rely heavily on big data.

Here are some important big data considerations social sellers did keep in mind.

Your Customer Speak to You Through a Big Data

Customer engagement is crucial, but it isn’t the backbone of your marketing strategies. First and foremost, you must understand what drives your customers to take action. You should conduct marketing research to find out:

• What solutions your customers are looking for
• What social networks, apps and websites they use
• What messages they have responded to in the past

Glenn Gow, the CEO of Crimson Marketing, emphasizes the importance of using big data for market research. “If you intend to harness the power of Big Data, first you need to observe what the market has to say. With so much data and marketing intelligence available, it can be rather daunting to know where to begin a data listening program. Fortunately, there is no shortage of marketing analytics tools to help.”

Without detailed knowledge of your customer base, your social selling strategy will implode before you launch your first ad. If you really want to understand your customer base, you must tap into big data. Many brands retain extensive data on their users, which makes it easier for other companies to conduct market research. Social sellers should leverage Google trends, Statistic Brain, Facebook, Quantcast and other market research tools to learn more about their target customers.

Adopt State-of-the-Art Analytics Software

Big data provides millions of insights on your users, but you need to take advantage of analytics software that is capable of tracking and deciphering it.

There are numerous analytics tools that enable you to track behavior of anyone using your website, apps and other digital properties. You need to understand the functionality of these analytics tools to use them effectively.

Analytics tools are frequently used for monitoring traffic and conversion rate optimization, but they also provide great insights for social selling. You can monitor bounce rates, heat maps, click through rates, time on site and other important variables to see how users engage with different types of social media content. This analytics data can help you test new ads, angles, engagement styles and pain points in your social selling campaigns.

Here are some of the top analytics tools you should look into:

• Google Analytics – great for monitoring website traffic and user behavior.
• CrazyEgg – a great tool for creating heat maps to monitor user activity on individual web pages.
• Prosper202 – makes it easy to track how users are engaged with paid traffic sources that use referral tokens.
• KissMetrics – an excellent solution for A/B testing and monitoring the ROI of your social selling campaigns.

It’s a good idea to explore different analytics software, because they all use big data to provide different insights.

Big Data Helps You Identify What Factors Influence Your ROI

Maximizing ROI is the underlying goal of every social selling campaign. Big data helps you conduct regression tests to see what factors have the strongest impact on your bottom line.

Your analysis should measure the ROI of:

• Testing new headlines in your ad copy
• Pursuing new traffic sources
• Acquiring new Facebook, Twitter and Instagram likes from popular tools such as Like 4 Like
• Adopting new conversion funnels

It takes time and money to conduct the testing you need to create a profitable social selling campaign. Big data provides the insights you need.

Use Big Data for Targeting Capabilities

Organic traffic is the most cost-effective way to run your social selling campaigns, but it isn’t very scalable and lacks the volume needed for split testing. This is why social selling campaigns rely heavily on paid traffic.

While paid traffic can be a boon to any social selling campaign, you must get your targeting right or risk losing money on unengaged audiences. Fortunately, due to advances in big data technology, Facebook and other social media platforms have extremely sophisticated targeting features.

Big data enables you to target users by age, gender, geography, interests and countless other variables. As promising as these features are, they are only beneficial to your social selling campaigns if you are aware of them and greet them into your targeting strategy.

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