[Strategy 5] Start with social media to understand customers and expand your fan base

This series commemorates the release of the book "10 Essential Strategies for Digital Marketing Success: Creating a Mechanism for Sustained Sales Growth Made Easy to Understand, " published by Dentsu Digital Inc. and authored by its top marketers.

Part 5 features an excerpt from Key Principle 5: "Start with SNS Utilization to Understand Customers and Expand Your Fan Base."

 

Marketing using SNS starts with "Social Listening"

SNS (Social Networking Services) were originally designed to facilitate communication between individuals. However, businesses have also recognized their usefulness for customer communication and adopted them early on.

The variety of SNS platforms has also increased. Starting with Twitter and Facebook, platforms like YouTube, LINE, and Instagram have emerged, each with distinct features. It's said there are now around 20 different types.

For companies and organizations, deciding which platforms to use, how to use them, and what to achieve with them can be challenging. Some examples include haphazardly launching new SNS accounts, switching to popular platforms, or starting operations without sufficient infrastructure, which can actually increase risks like social media backlash.

It is essential to clearly define objectives and goals, select SNS platforms based on factors like who the target users are for the company and whether the platform aligns with the company's branding, and simultaneously plan in advance how to operate the accounts, how to utilize the data, and other aspects of the operational framework and subsequent usage methods.

Therefore, the first priority should be listening to customers' "raw voices" through social media before engaging in communication. For example, on Twitter, this means paying attention to customers' "tweets."

This practice of listening to customer voices expressed across social media, including SNS, is called "social listening." Through social listening, companies (our company) can understand how they are perceived by customers, what topics are being discussed, the significance of those discussions, and what challenges exist.

Even when engaging in direct communication with customers, doing so with this background knowledge not only prevents misunderstandings but, more importantly, fosters positive (in a good sense) new voices. Responses to these voices then multiply on SNS, creating a cycle where fans attract more fans.

 

Analyzing the big data accumulated on SNS from both "quantitative" and "qualitative" perspectives

The volume of user comments circulating on SNS is enormous. What would have largely vanished as fleeting conversations or private musings in the pre-SNS era can now be leveraged as a "treasure trove."

From the vast sea of user voices on SNS, we can grasp not only comments about our own company's initiatives or products, but also comments about competitors and the needs within that category. Unlike traditional survey methods where companies pose questions, these are authentic, unfiltered voices of consumers voluntarily posted on SNS. This makes them highly realistic and a valuable analytical resource for marketing.

Social listening involves interpreting individual situations, feelings, and needs from each customer's voice. From a marketing research methodology perspective, this might be perceived as qualitative analysis (focusing on qualitative information like consumer purchasing intent that cannot be expressed numerically). While it is qualitative in the sense of analyzing the reasons behind customer actions and emotions, we also quantify this data into numbers and percentages for quantitative analysis.

Furthermore, even when focusing primarily on qualitative data analysis, we categorize (classify) statements based on their relevance, grasp the quantity within each category, the overall volume, and the proportion it represents, before conducting qualitative analysis.

In other words, one characteristic of SNS data is that it can be analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. For example, "how much that product name is being discussed" can be captured as "quantity." Furthermore, since it is data from posts, we can simultaneously grasp from the context present whether it is "perceived positively?" or "perceived negatively?"

It is precisely because of this characteristic that social big data can be effectively translated into marketing strategies.

Book now available! Details here