Using Social Media for Market Research

Market analysis and gathering data on your potential and existing customers can improve your ROI, help you find weaknesses in your customer service or channels of communication, and highlight potential new audiences.  Understanding your customers and potential customers, and being able to predict their behavior can be VERY profitable.  That’s why huge corporations pay tremendous amounts of money for “big data” market research and analysis.

If you’re a small business owner, you may think that market research is beyond your budget.  It’s not. If you’re on the right social media platforms, and using best-practices to schedule relevant posts, provide engaging content, and interact with your audience, you ARE doing market research!

Reactions to posts or content on Twitter, Facebook, Pintrest, FlipBoard, Tumblr, your e-mail service, or your website can tell you what topics or products your customers are most interested in.  Evaluating analytics on these platforms can provide the small business owner with insight into what time of day followers are online, look-alike audiences, gender, age, and even other interests.  When evaluated correctly, patterns may be found that can provide enormous opportunities for you to enter into a users’ day and insert your product or service as a solution to a problem, or a complimentary addition to their lifestyle.

For example, if you are a small cafe that serves pastry and coffee in the morning, you’re probably posting “foodies” on Facebook and Instagram galore.  Which ones performed the best? Chocolate, cinnamon, something with a cute design, or maybe an image of a PERSON enjoying the delicious pastry performed best.  When you look at the data, and find a pattern or insight, you’ve just done market research!

Using that same example of the cafe, let’s evaluate what time of day most followers are actively using that platform.  If most users are busy working people who login during their lunch break, make sure you’re running tomorrow’s breakfast special when they’re most likely to see your post – during the 11 to 2 window.

Now let’s have a look at this same cafe’s email data. What is in the subject line of the emails that are opened the most? If “Monthly Newsletter” is in the subject line of the (wait for it…) Monthly Newsletter, but you’re not happy with the open rate, try putting “Pastry of the Month” in the subject line instead!  Let that run for a couple months, and see if your open rate goes up.  After that try “Images of Fun Latte Art” in the subject line, and see how that performs.  Collecting this data, and searching for patterns over time is a form of market research.

So at this point I’m going to shamelessly promote the Savvy Sister Marketing Team because whether you’re using primarily social media, PPC Ads, or relying on email, you probably do not have the time or energy to look at the data and determine what information will help you make the key business decisions that will move you forward.  WE CAN HELP YOU!  Data analysis is one of our strongest offerings for our clients.  By providing business owners with the data they need to make key business decisions and improve their profit margin, the team at Savvy Sister Marketing allows small business owners to confidently make smart choices. Get in touch now.

If you want to learn analytics, we can help.  If you want solid business analysis based on your online performance, we can help.  Contact Robyn at Savvy Sister Marketing today!  I’ve got 10 minutes, let’s talk… 727-742-6473