Are you an ecommerce business struggling to grow? Here’s how to use social listening for ecommerce.
The growth of eCommerce has been exponential over the years.
To put things into perspective, in 2021, the worldwide eCommerce sales amounted to approximately $4.9 trillion. This figure is forecast to grow by 50% and reach $7.4 trillion by 2025!
More products, more eCommerce sites, more consumers… For retailers, the industry’s aggressive growth has led to more competition for consumer attention.
Everyone seems to be selling similar products and doing things in the same manner as the others.
And that’s why, the need of the hour is to employ new strategies to steal consumer attention.
That’s where a social listening strategy comes in!
How to effectively use social listening for your eCommerce business
To offer better customer service
The retail industry is all about experience. Most people choose to buy products from their preferred brands – more because of the way brands make them feel, and less because of the products. Afterall, those products are most probably available on 100 other sites.
And when speaking of experience, you can’t avoid customer service. 96% of customers say customer service is the most important factor in their choice of loyalty to a brand.
Besides, today’s customers want everything to be ‘now’, including customer service. That’s where social listening helps.
Here’s how:
When customers mention your brand name or product, or when they have a conversation about you, you can instantly get to know about it through social listening.
This means you can respond to your customers’ comments, complaints, or queries in real time.
Social listening helps bring to your notice even those comments where customers don’t tag you. This way, you can never miss any mention.
But according to a study by Bain & Company, while 80% of companies think that they offer good customer service, only 8% of customers agree they’re satisfied with the customer service of those companies.
That’s a huge gap. As well as a great opportunity for brands to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Isn’t it?
A simple strategy such as social listening could change your customer service game.
Business insights
Another way social listening can help is uncover insights that can help shape your business decisions and action plans.
Social listening can enable you to not just know what the audience is saying about you, but help you dig deeper into information such as why, the context in which you’re mentioned, etc.
Compare people’s perception of your brand against your brand values and mission
Understand patterns of purchase behavior through social media insights for eCommerce. These can help inform your future marketing decisions
Understand your customers better, which helps in bettering engagement
It helps you improve your products/ services based on customer feedback
Make changes and tweaks to your products, services, content, etc. based on the ground reality of things
The above are just a few ways in which social listening helps gain business related insights. Every business has different goals. And social listening can be employed to achieve those goals.
Here’s a graph that shows how the airline industry benefits by fast responses to customer complaints on Twitter.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is bigger, or rather, deeper than you imagine it to be. It is no more about big celebrity influencers with a following of millions of people.
Micro influencers (those with a niche, quality followers relevant to specific industries) are equally influential.
And it’s important to find these strong voices – both micro and macro influencers. But finding the right fit influencer is also one of the biggest challenges.
One way to find them is through social listening strategy. Not just that, social listening has many more advantages for influencer marketing. Here are some:
Social listening can help you find the best fitting influencers for your brand based on targeted keywords and research. The result: improved influencer marketing ROI
Businesses need to constantly look for new influencers because after a point, your current influencers can get saturated. Social listening can help you discover new voices
Social listening can help you discover influencers across social platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, blogs, news publications, etc.
Social listening can also contribute in monitoring and tracking your influencers, what they’re saying about you and their performance
A short case study
An example of a social listening use case– how a grocery brand found their strongest influencers, mommies, through social listening.
Iceland, a UK-based grocery store, had big name celebrity ads to promote their brand. However, their celebrity promotions weren’t working out and affecting their approval rate. So they began their search for ‘real’ influencers via social listening. They found real-life mothers to talk about their brand.
The result: an increase in approval rate from 10% to 70% and more than 50% retention rate on Facebook and YouTube.
Generating leads
Let’s face the truth – even though your business may have a huge following on all channels, generating leads is one of the biggest challenges for all businesses.
And that’s why every eCommerce business has to constantly look for leads on various channels.
Well, your social media channels are one of your biggest goldmines if you put in the right kind of effort.
There are 4.65 billion people using social media. These people are also consumers. Many of them probably use products and services that are similar to yours. It’s just that they don’t know about your brand or your products.
You can use your social listening strategy to generate leads:
Social listening can help you know your buyer persona
Discover what your competitors’ customers are talking about
Know what your competitors are offering and why customers like them
Understand consumers’ preferences, likes, and dislikes
Discover trends and new market opportunities
Improve engagement by finding the right people and creating the right marketing campaigns to target them
Identify trends
Everything on the Internet is constantly changing – from online buying trends to tools to social media trends – just about everything!
And to be ahead of the competition, you need to constantly be on the hunt for what’s new. In other words, spot the trend before your competitors do.
For example, brands that adopted TikTok into their marketing campaigns early on were able to reap the real benefits of the platform that now has a billion active users.
But trendspotting is a vast field. You might want to spot trends in social media, or industry-specific trends, or customers’ buying trends, etc.
One way to identify these trends is through social listening. Here’s what you could do:
Listen to your customers, potential customers, and target audience
Listen to your competitors and their loyal customers
To get a headstart, start your trendspotting social listening campaigns early
Monitor products in your industry that don’t sell so you’ll know if they start trending
Segment your customers to spot trends within segments
The above methods to spot trends via social listening is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s plenty more you could track to identify trends, depending on your niche and business goals.
Watch competitors
To be able to do better than your competitors, you’ll first have to know what exactly they’re doing.
What product and services are they selling?
How are they promoting it on social media?
What kind of campaigns are they running?
Who are their customers and what are they saying about your competitor?
What are the prices and perks they’re offering, etc.
To keep a sharp eye on your competitors, use social listening for eCommerce.
Listen to your competitors’ mentions – positive and negative
Listen across platforms – social media, websites, blogs, forums, news publications, etc.
Set up searches for your competitors’ names
Listen to the sentiment behind your competitors’ mentions
You can use data gathered from the above listening to benchmark your business against theirs. You can gain an overview of their overall strategy and learn from them, too.
Such a competitor watch can also help you understand where you lack and why you may be losing customers to your competitors. And that’s why it’s important to include a social listening strategy in your marketing plan.
User generated content
If you’re a digital marketer, you’d know how difficult it is to get more likes, shares, followers, and mentions, leave aside user-generated content that tag you with brand name mentions. Right?
You also know how valuable user-generated content is for eCommerce brands. When your customers talk about your products, brands, and their good experiences with you, almost half your job is done. That too, for free!
Consider these numbers:
92% of customers trust user-generated content such as reviews and recommendations
86% of companies say user-generated content helps them build loyalty and trust
70% customers want to read reviews from real people before making purchases
The good news – social listening can help you source user-generated content.
Not all your customers would care to tag you on social media platforms. But social listening can help you discover these posts
With social listening, you can get alerted about user-generated content instantly, and re-share it or engage with the customers instantly. For example, time-sensitivity is extremely important on social media platforms such as Instagram stories
You can make your customers’ content go viral if you re-share it at the right time, on the right platform and increase your engagement rate
An example of a social listening use case – Starbucks.
So, are you ‘listening’?
eCommerce is no more just about offering products, services, discounts, and convenience. It is about meeting consumer needs faster than your competitors.
This is why social listening is almost inevitable and a critical need for online businesses.
To keep your brand competitively intelligent, fast, and agile, get started with social listening.
If you’re an online publisher losing readership or finding it hard to scale your audience, this is for you – social listening for publishers.
The online publishing industry is exploding like wildfires. There has been a tremendous increase in the number of publishing sites, types of content, and platforms to publish on.
Digital publishing is no longer a space only for the big players. Smaller companies, start-ups, and individuals, too, have taken online engagement by a storm.
Consider this – the global digital publishing market size is expected to reach $68.81 billion by 2026, from $41 billion in 2022.
For publishers, such growth means there’s an increasing amount of competition to get their content noticed and build readership.
Digital marketers know how big a challenge it is.
And that’s where social listening can do wonders for publishers.
What is social listening?
Social listening is the process of tracking, monitoring, and analyzing social media mentions, conversations, and trends that are relevant to you, your brand, the industry you are in or even your competitors.
Now let’s get into the specifics of how social listening can help content publishers rise to the next level.
How to use social listening for publishers to stay ahead in your game
1. Catch up with trending topics
One of the best ways to engage your audience on social media is to combine trending topics with your content and social media calendar.
The fact is, not all of your content is going to be great and catchy. Nor does all your content have to be around current events. That’s where trending topics strategically help you improve engagement.
Believe it or not, content around trending topics can help you accumulate traffic and links for months after you publish your content. Consider the numbers in the below graph:
Having a social listening strategy can help you stay abreast with trending topics in different audience segments. Trend research can help you uncover topics that your target audience is interested in and talking about.
For example, you could collect information about what your target audience is talking about on different social media platforms, what kind of conversations they are having around your brand or industry, etc.
You can create content around trending topics and combine it with your content strategy and calendar to see instant results.
Here are a few ways in which you can utilize information about the trends you uncover:
Identify topics that are most relevant and interesting to your target audience
Create useful and engaging content around the topics and trends
Identify the best channels to share and promote your content
Identify keywords and hashtags used by your target audience and incorporate those in your content
2. Identify what your audience ‘cares’ about
Imagine you publish a video and it goes viral. It’s getting a lot of shares and comments. But here’s the thing – just because it’s getting traction doesn’t mean it’s always good news. It’s possible that your video is getting negative comments.
Sentiment analysis helps gain a deeper understanding of how people ‘feel’ about your content. Are they appreciating it, criticizing it, talking about it in a positive way, etc.
Sentiment analysis helps you:
Understand what your audience cares about
Spot a crisis and make amends early on
Understand where you stand in your niche
Know the overall perception of your content/ brand
Sentiment analysis is especially helpful when your content success depends on audience sentiment. For example, when running political campaigns or content around a sensitive topic.
In short, to dig deeper into your audience, you need to raise your emotional quotient. And sentiment analysis can help you do that.
3. Join relevant conversations
Social media is a sea of possibilities. Your target audience might be spread across this sea – on different platforms, in different niche groups, etc.
And a key part of getting readership is to identify conversations where you can plug your content.
Whether it’s a Twitter thread, a question on Quora, a conversation on Reddit, a niche group on Facebook, etc., social listening strategy can help you find where conversations relevant to your brand are taking place.
Then, based on your discoveries, you can plug your content on these platforms and in specific conversations to get more readers.
Social listening can help you plug content in real-time, as conversations happen. For example, you can monitor:
Direct mentions of your brand/ content
Conversations between your customers
Questions asked about your brand/ content
In conversations where your competitors’ are mentioned
4. Find influencers
Influencers are people who have a strong following on social media platforms. They promote other brands and help them grow their (other brands) followers as well.
Studies show that 89% of marketers say the ROI from influencer marketing is better than other forms of marketing.
Influencers can help you reach more people and build better readerships.
But finding the right influencers is critical. Not just that, as a publisher, you should also consistently find new influencers to increase their readership. If you collaborate with the same influencer, your readership growth rate would become slow after a point.
But finding the right influencer is often the most difficult part of running an influencer campaign. So how exactly should you find these influencers?
Social listening can help you find influencers.
You can identify key influencers relevant to your industry, brand, or content with the help of a well planned social listening strategy. Here’s how:
Use social listening to look for people who are already talking about your brand/ content. These could be your brand ambassadors. These people already like your content and are talking about it. So why not bring them onboard as influencers? Their audience is definitely different from yours. This means you can expand into new markets.
Listen to brand mentions. You can set alerts for your site name, your brand name, and other branded keywords. Now, not all mentions would be positive. So here’s what you can do – when you find mentions with negative comments, address those concerns publicly. And when you find positive comments, it’s an opportunity for you to find new influencers. Look for people who have a good enough following and collaborate with them.
Another way to find relevant influencers is by listening to your competitors’ mentions on social platforms. It’s possible that influencers don’t know about your brand but they do know your competitors. And that they’re simply interested in your niche or industry. Reach out to these influencers for collaboration.
5. Find new markets
Readership can get exhausted and saturated after a certain point. To overcome this saturation, publishers need to expand their geographic markets.
One of the best ways to do so is through social listening. Here’s how it works:
To find new markets, it’s important for you to know where people are talking about you.
For example, if you publish in Germany and find people are talking about you in India, on Indian sites, you could explore the Indian market for publishing.
You could adapt your content, language, advertising and SEO efforts to cater to the Indian market where people are already talking about you.
Another way you can find new markets is by listening to topics and themes that are trending.
For example, say you’re publishing in the US. There’s a new topic that’s trending there. You could find countries where there’s demand for that topic but lack of content and start publishing in those countries.
6. Respond to your readers
As we know by now, social listening, for publishers, is an excellent tool to spot any conversation that mentions you. To keep your audience engaged, it’s important to respond to them when they mention your name, tag you, talk about you, ask questions to you on social platforms, etc.
And there are many ways to respond to them and engage them. Here are some ways:
Like their posts and comments that mention you
Share their posts and comments that talk about you
If it’s a positive comment, thank them
If it’s a negative comment, address their concern
Cross-share readers’ opinions and comments from one platform onto the other
Here’s an example of how one brand responded to their audience through social listening:
Starface is a beauty brand. Through social listening, they came across a customer who had posted a TikTok video of herself using their product. But the customer hadn’t tagged Starface.
Starface reposted her video on Instagram. In this case, it’s possible that the girl shared the reshared post on Instagram with her friends and Starface got new followers and likes on their content.
If you are a publisher, it’s time to use social listening!
Online content is nothing less than a universe. It keeps getting crazier and more complex day by day. And there’s no playbook that you as a publisher can follow because of the rate at which it keeps evolving.
No matter your industry type or the platforms you use to publish, social listening can help you stay ahead in the game – cut through the noise; reach your audience; give them what they care about; at the right time; on the right channel.
In an age when people are particularly vocal regarding their thoughts on the internet, it is essential to keep your brand’s health in sight at all times in order to make a meaningful impact in the industry.
Whether it is electronic, print, or even other media, your branding should be stable and sustainable. In this article, we will discuss what brand health is, 17 important brand health metrics and how to measure it, and why it is an important factor to take into consideration in this digital age.
What is brand health?
Brand health is a set of measures that indicates how effective your advertising is at helping you achieve your objectives. Each statistic has a distinct purpose, yet they all come together to make your business a valuable asset.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to brand health. Based on the company’s organizational objectives, brand health research might cover a variety of factors. All of them, nevertheless, are dependent on the customer’s experience with your goods and services and the reactions they evoke.
Brand health is defined in a variety of ways. Each has its own set of criteria and methodologies but they all converge to the very same conclusion. With that in mind, many businesses choose to analyze a few critical features when performing brand health research:
Brand Recall
Brand Positioning
Brand Awareness
Brand Loyalty
Why is brand health important?
You should not depend completely on consumer data to make decisions, and you should not depend exclusively on revenue figures to see what is successful and what is not.
A brand health survey will provide you with a wave of different data and insightful information that will enable you to expand your business, innovate, and compare your performance to your competition. In other terms, the wellness of your brand is important to the achievement of your business.
Measuring brand health can provide you with valuable marketing information. For example, you consider greater brand recognition to be a positive sign. Brand awareness, on the other hand, can be both beneficial and undesirable. Brand health identifies your company’s resources and flaws.
Establishing an all-encompassing picture of an organization or label, allowing it to make wise, lucrative informed decisions is the goal of brand health tracking. You will determine the strengths and weaknesses of your company.
Examine your brand health to see what is effective and what is not and for your branding plan. You may assess your brand’s overall quality. Discovering the state of your company’s health also allows you to evaluate its overall effectiveness.
Brand health tracking identifies what is keeping the brand from realizing its full potential. Apart from that, it also helps in creating a great opportunity to figure out where you stand in the market, see who your opponents are, and respond to your potential and existing consumers.
Additionally, a brand health check is a great method to figure out why consumers select you over your competition.
The 17 brand health metrics you should be measuring
Each statistic has its own significance and reflects a unique facet of brand health. It’s possible that your brand recognition is high, but your buy impulse is low. It’s possible that your consumers adore your business, but its overall reputation isn’t great.
You’ll never understand what’s harming and helping your revenue when it relates to marketing unless you look at each statistic attentively and compute the figures behind abstract ideas like “brand awareness” and “brand repute.”
1. Search Intent
The reason for a search query is known as search intent. To put it another way, why did those people conduct this search?
Do they wish to gain knowledge? Are they planning to buy something? Is it possible that they are seeking a certain website? The task entails determining what the consumer’s “intent” was while conducting each search.
2. Brand Association
A company’s mental association between your company and a notion, picture, sentiment, experience, individual, passion, or engagement is known as a brand association. This link can be instantly beneficial or unfavorable, and it also has a significant impact on purchasing choices.
Consider this: if your intended audience has a negative perception of your brand, there is a slight possibility they will choose it over your opponents. So, tracking this and taking an active effort to develop a positive brand association is crucial to your success.
3. Brand Preference
Brand preference refers to how likely a consumer chooses a certain brand’s goods over a rival company, and it plays an important role in brand equity. It is critical for organizations to monitor and review their preferred brand on a regular basis because it represents their promotion.
Brand preference is important for businesses wanting to gain repeat clients from their target demographic since it raises knowledge and helps them build a good image.
4. NPS
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric for determining a business’ customer loyalty, contentment, and excitement. It is derived by asking consumers one question: On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to suggest this product or company to a partner or friend?
Average NPS scores assist businesses in improving the quality of service, service and support, deliveries, and other aspects of their operations in order to boost brand loyalty.
5. Prompted Brand Record
The percentage of people who report having seen something (e.g., a company or an advertisement) after being presented with some type of stimulus substance is called Prompted Awareness (also known as Aided Awareness). Therefore, if the purpose is to identify existing brand and product awareness, stimulation is not being used.
6. Purchase Behavior
Consumer Buying Behavior describes the activities performed by customers before purchasing goods or services (both online and offline). This may entail using search engines, responding to social media comments, or taking a multitude of other steps.
Understanding this approach is beneficial to organizations because it allows them to customize and organize their advertising strategies to previous marketing initiatives, which have effectively encouraged people to consume.
7. Unprompted Brand Recall
When pushed to think about your sector, unprompted brand recall is a metric of how many folks think about your company. For the most well-known brands, unprompted brand recall is a good measurement. Even if you are a long way off now, it is worthwhile aiming for unprompted brand recall.
8. Brand Recognition
Brand awareness refers to how well your target demographic recognizes and is familiar with the company. ‘Going viral,’ ‘headline grabbing,’ or simply ‘popular’ are terms used to describe businesses with a high level of brand recognition. When it comes to selling and branding your company’s products and services, particularly in the early phases of a firm, having a strong brand is crucial.
9. Time Spent on the Website
Isn’t it always exciting to see an increase in website visitors caused by social recommendations or a fresh SEO upgrade? However, until those new customers stay on your webpage for an extended period of time, it isn’t that fantastic. The industry norm for a roughly estimated engagement length is 2 to 3 minutes.
10. Brand Score
This measure may be unfamiliar to most new marketers or brand owners, but it is a crucial one to measure. Your brand score will be determined by the brand tracking systems you employ and will be a numerical expression of your company’s health.
Nevertheless, not all brand monitoring systems are created equal, and the methods for calculating scores range from one tool to the next. Anyhow, these rankings are helpful in determining the total health of your business.
11. Social Listening
The technique of finding and analyzing what has been said about a business, people, commodity, or branding on the web is known as social listening (sometimes known as social media listening).
Huge quantities of unorganized data are generated by internet discussions. Customers want to publicize the companies they appreciate, so you can be sure that people who really like your items will likely communicate their enthusiasm on social media sites like Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
To stay on top of your social listening strategy, it is crucial to make use of a tool like Radarr to track the data and gain organized insights that you can use to nurture your brand on the path to success.
12. Brand Consideration
Even if a buyer is familiar with the company, there is no assurance that they will buy something exclusively from you. And that is where brand awareness comes into play.
Customers do not buy from all of the companies they are familiar with. They may buy some while consciously avoiding others.
As a result, evaluation investigates whether people may consider buying a product they are familiar with. A subgroup of those who are familiar with a brand is evaluated as those who would decide to purchase it.
13. Brand Loyalty
Customers’ positive correlations with a company or service are referred to as brand loyalty. Consumers that show brand loyalty are committed to goods or services, as seen by their repurchase intention despite attempts by rivals to entice them away.
14. Volatility
You will know from first-hand experience that people’s perceptions change all the time. This does, nevertheless, imply that customers ’ perceptions of your brand may develop over time. But do not fret; this is something that could be directly measured.
The best way to do this is to stay on top of the opinions surrounding your brand on public platforms. In case you start getting wind of a negative tone, proactively work on it and work on bettering the customer’s experience.
15. Return Visitors
Return visitors are vital for any web page since they indicate how effective your marketing techniques are, who your regular consumers are, and how dominant your business is. Consumers who return are also more inclined to make transactions.
First-time customers are not always ready to make a purchase; they are just looking to learn more about your company. If they like what they see, they should come back at a later time to buy a product.
16. Brand Delivery
This involves giving consumers exactly what they want. Reliability is among the most crucial aspects of brand delivery. Make frequent references to your business principles and objectives to ensure that you are conveying them correctly each time. You will form an emotional connection and devotion with your consumers if your brand has a distinct personality and a largely consistent set of qualities.
17. Share of Voice
Share of voice is calculated by comparing your brand’s social media buzz to other competing brands. To calculate the share of voice, all you need to do is set up an alert in Radarr and choose what you wish to track. Once the data is collected and analyzed, it’ll show you how many conversations there were during a specific time and who performed better.
Each statistic has its own significance and reflects a unique facet of brand health. It is possible that your brand recognition is high, but your buy impulse is low. It is also possible that your consumers adore your business, but its overall reputation is not great. You will never understand what’s harming and helping your revenue when it relates to marketing unless you look at each statistic attentively and analyze the figures behind abstract ideas like “brand awareness” and “brand repute”.
Final Thoughts
A good reputation is an essential component of a successful brand or business. The power of your identity and its potential to develop loyalty in the conversations of your customers is more important than the revenue your brand starts making initially.
Failure to develop a solid, healthy brand can hinder a company’s ability to sell, attract and hire great employees, and grow their customer base. Measuring brand health takes into account a lot of aspects, as mentioned above. To trace each one of them manually is next to impossible. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done!
Most marketers today have realized that running ads on social media is a failsafe way to gain brand visibility with Instagram alone accounting for a potential reach of 1.48 billion people. Since this statistic is only increasing along with the year-on-year ad spending, it has led to a lot of competition for consumer attention.
Not only is holding people’s attention becoming increasingly difficult, but the ever-changing algorithm can be unforgiving to marketers and advertisers across the globe.
So if your return on ad spend has been decreasing over time, we have some tips that will teach you how to increase ROAS and ad optimization tips.
What is social media ads ROAS?
When you are working on launching a new ad campaign, it is essential to be able to measure its success. One way to do this is by looking at the key performance indicators or KPIs. Commonly used KPIs of marketing and advertising campaigns are conversion rate, click-through rate CTR, and cost per conversion (CPC).
These metrics paint part of the picture but do not give you much perspective on the overall campaign success. This is where the return on ad spend (or ROAS) comes into the picture. ROAS is a vital metric used by digital marketers that measures the revenue generated per every dollar spent on an advertising campaign.
It takes into account not just the efficiency and quantity of results but also the holistic monetary impact it has making it an effective method within your campaign evaluation process.
So, how to calculate ROAS? Here is the formula:
ROAS = Revenue generated / Cost of the campaign
The value you derive from this formula will be expressed in the form of a ratio. For example, if you spend $2,000 per month on your ad campaigns and generate a revenue of $12,000 per month due to clicks on the ad, your ROAS will be 12,000 / 2,000 or 6:1.
So, what is a good ratio?
A good ratio will depend on factors like your industry, campaign, platform and intent. However, it is generally assumed that getting a ratio of 4:1 means that the campaign is successful.
Tips on how to increase your social media ads ROAS
Looking for ad optimization tips? Here are some tips to consider when trying to improve your campaign’s Return on Ad Spend:
1. Track campaigns in real-time
Most marketers run ad campaigns on multiple platforms. However, to stay on top of the investments going into the campaign and assess its performance, you need to track the data in real-time. Unfortunately, logging into and switching platforms often to measure each can be tough and you may miss out on crucial data points.
To combat this difficulty and more, a tool like Radarr will bring in much-needed efficiency to your ad tracking as it monitors all insights and data on a single dashboard. This way you can focus your efforts on social media optimization strategies to get more mileage.
2. Get more strategic about data segmentation
A common mistake marketers may make is over segmenting their audience. The problem with it is that it provides limited data and can make the results less reliable due to inconsistent performance.
Start your campaigns by removing filters that over-segment your audience and narrow your reach. This is mostly because the initial stage is all about testing your campaign and you won’t drive hard data by targeting super specific audiences.
In case your ad needs to have a limited focus, combine audiences to get more usable data and drive higher conversions.
3. Catch the outliers
A common mistake many marketers might find in an audit of their marketing strategies is that once something is launched, the targeting does not get tweaked. You can improve performance by making some strategic changes.
For example, if your campaign performed better on one platform versus another, try testing only using that channel to maximize your dollar spend. If targeting options become too granular, it’s sometimes worth it to trim back by merging an ad set with another to see which delivers the best results.
4. Try differing objectives
When reassessing your goals, you may want to consider testing new objectives. Brand campaigns often experiment with a combination of different types of campaign objectives, like dynamic remarketing or static remarketing.
While one brand may see higher success using dynamic methods by using custom tagging and optimizing for ROI, another may be more successful using static methods to boost their conversion rate.
5. Experiment with bid strategies
While most marketers enjoy complete control over their campaigns, it may not always be the best route. By manually doing your bidding strategy and setting a cap on costs, you are limiting the audience you are reaching and end up receiving an unsatisfactory ROAS.
While this strategy may work for some businesses, Facebook tends to favor volume for better bidding. Opt for a low-cost bidding wherein you can let Facebook know the goal of your campaign and the algorithm will set out to help you achieve those results.
Of course, you won’t have as much control if you use this method and you will also have to place your trust in the algorithm but you may see great results. If you are still wary of this method, it is best to start out with a small budget.
In other instances, you may even opt for a bidding based on value where you define your goal with a value. The Facebook algorithm tries to help you reach your ROAS goal by helping you reach a larger volume of accounts.
6. Use different creatives
Creatives are at the center of Facebook advertising. If a specific target audience isn’t resonating with your ad, it could be that the creative seems irrelevant or unappealing to them. Create a pool of different creatives and test various formats on such an audience where you can gauge if the creative resonates with it or not.
Another reason for working with multiple creatives is that most audiences view your ads a handful of times. If they see the same visuals multiple times, they may get bored of it and not take the action you are expecting them to. So, to break the monotony of higher frequency ads, you must refresh the creatives.
You can deploy different creative assets into different placements based on where your target audience spends their time-consuming content. Don’t forget to create multiple versions of your ads if you have the resources to do so. This will help boost visibility and credibility among unfamiliar prospects faster; so they may start engaging earlier on than anticipated.
Since a major chunk of traffic your ads will get will be through their smartphones, it is extremely important to optimize all your marketing efforts to be mobile-friendly.
You can do this by following the steps below:
Keep your copy short yet punchy
Use optimized media (i.e., smaller file size, visible text, subtitles for videos, etc)
If the user has to click on a web address, be sure to optimize that page for mobile too
Include a clearly placed call-to-action (CTA)
Use easy to remember URLs or go for URL shorteners
Bookend with your brand
Most importantly, if your campaign’s end goal is for a viewer to purchase from you, ensure that the page speed for mobile is fast and there are fewer clicks involved to make the purchase since this is where most people can drop off the marketing funnel.
8. Focus on reducing friction
This is one of the best ad optimization tips to follow. You can reduce friction in your campaigns by creating systems that nurture potential customers and existing customers to a higher funnel. This reduces your costs greatly and can even ensure return clients if executed well.
An example of this is turning people towards your email marketing efforts where they can take the desired action at a lower cost. You may get the best results if you do this in conjunction with retargeting. So, if someone adds items to their cart due to your ads but doesn’t checkout, you can gently nudge them to do so with retargeting or emailing them about the same.
9. Analyze journeys for cost-effectiveness
When trying to find ways to save money on your marketing campaigns, it’s important to test against different customer journey types and optimize the campaign based on real-time results rather than tweaking based simply on assumptions.
By mapping out possible journeys, you can see how people might interact with your ads differently due to how they found the ad, when they saw it, where they saw it or even who they are.
No matter what the length of a customer journey is, you have many unique paths a prospect can take during their research and interaction process before converting or showing interest in your company and its products.
So instead of optimizing solely for cost-effectiveness or conversions only, try using heatmap software that provides insight as to which ones are the high-performing assets on your website as well as which assets should be updated for optimal engagement.
10. Try out new audiences
Even if you’ve had a disappointing return from an ad campaign, remarketing can help increase the effectiveness of your next campaign.
You can even reach new potential customers who are similar to those most likely to already be interested through custom audience retargeting by making use of Facebook’s ‘lookalike audience’ feature. This makes sure your ads are more effective overall and lower both the frequency and cost per click.
11. Do a sentiment analysis
When you’re using tools to assess the results of your social media ad campaigns, it is also important to regularly analyze the sentiment behind your marketing efforts. By doing so, you can learn more specific information about how people are feeling about what you are sharing on online platforms.
To offer a complete analysis, try combining qualitative and quantitative information. You can do this by using tools to measure emotion since they will allow you to spot trends that are occurring underneath the surface and provide insight into what is really going on with your efforts.
In closing – Time to improve your social media ads ROAS
If you want to make educated decisions about where to spend ad money on social media and what the potential ROAS could be, you need hard data. These numbers help marketers control the expenditure on campaigns, tweak them as they go and even stay ahead of competing brands.
Hopefully, the above ROAS tips prove to be helpful and insightful. There are always ways to improve your ad spend and the way you measure it.
As you continue to experiment with new approaches, keep an eye on the ROAS ratio and monitor how they change. This will help to validate your efforts while demonstrating their effectiveness over time.
Ready to explore how social listening and media monitoring can help improve your social media ad performance?
Struggling to capture audience interest on social media? Here’s how to use marketing psychology.
Today, every business has a social media presence. And they all are trying hard to outperform the other.
With so much competition and noise, social media performance for many businesses is dropping.
To put things in perspective, engagement of organic social media posts on Facebook is just 0.07%. And it’s going to go from bad to worse.
But there’s one way to hook your target audience and drive desired actions from your target audience – use marketing psychology – understand how your audience actually thinks and makes decisions.
Why use marketing psychology on social media?
Everyday, there are:
350 million photos uploaded to Facebook
500 million tweets on Twitter
85 million videos and photos uploaded to Instagram
The above numbers show the potential social media has for brands. And bringing together strategy and marketing psychology can help. Here’s how:
Psychology helps you gain deeper insights on customers
It can help bring better ROI, faster
Marketing psychology principles you can use for social media marketing
Deep-diving into how leading brands and businesses use social media and their marketing strategies, we found them leveraging the following marketing psychology often:
Reciprocity psychology
One of the most influential psychologies is the psychology of reciprocity. It means when someone does something good for us, we feel obliged to give back as good as we got. The basic idea behind it is relationship building.
Say for example, one of your customers tagged your brand in their post. As a brand that listens to its customers, you could reciprocate in a few ways – like the post, comment on the post with a ‘thank you’, or share the post on your page. Some brands even offer discounts and freebies.
However, your reciprocity strategy shouldn’t end with your customers only. You could also interact with other brands and businesses that you may be collaborating with or simply like the brand and feel the need to return a favor the brand did to you.
Here’s an example of a brand that reshared their customer’s post that had a mention of their brand name.
Psychology of scarcity
Scarcity psychology is all about bringing out FOMO – fear of missing out. When we feel as though we’re going to miss out on something, we feel distress. This feeling of anxiety leads us into taking actions.
Take a look at these statistics to understand the impact of scarcity psychology:
56% of people are afraid of missing out on news, events, updates, if they do not keep an eye on social networks
60% of people make purchases after experiencing FOMO
So, how do brands use scarcity marketing psychology on social media?
Ever seen posts that shout ‘Hurry, only 3 left’, or ‘Offer closes in 2 hours’? These are ways in which brands can let their audience know that they have a limited amount of something and build a sense of FOMO around it.
Here’s an example of scarcity strategy on social media:
Anchoring
The psychology of anchoring works on the principle that people make decisions based on an anchor or starting point they have in mind. This anchor is some sort of information.
For example, if a customer’s buying a coffee machine they had been eyeing for a while, they’d have an idea about its price. So, when the same coffee machine is offered to them at a lesser price, they’d immediately recall the anchor price. Compare the offer price to the original price. And this would make it easier for them to make a purchase decision.
There are many ways in which you can use the psychology of anchoring in social media posts and ads.
If you’re running a sale, show ‘Was’ and ‘Is’ price next to each other
If you’re a beauty brand, show ‘Before’ and ‘After’ images
When launching new versions of products/ service, mention old features and new features
Here’s an example:
Decoy effect psychology
Decoy effect is a commonly used marketing psychology. Decoy effect works when customers are shown two options, along with a third option (a decoy), to influence their purchase decision.
The principle on which the decoy effect works is – when we choose between two options, the addition of a third, less attractive option can influence our perception of the remaining two options.
Here’s an example to help you understand the decoy effect better.
From the below three options, which option do you think customers are most likely not to pick? The Digital only option. Because why would anyone choose it if they can get Digital + Weekend for the same price, right?
Social proof
The definition of social proof reads, “It is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation.
Psychologist Robert Cialdini explains it – when we see other people take an action, we feel more confident in doing the same. It helps reduce uncertainty about what we should do in the same or similar situation.
This concept is used quite commonly in marketing – “400 people have already bought this product”, “20 people are looking at this product right now”, “258 reviews for this product”, etc. When we are shown how a number of people have bought a product, we perceive the product as a good choice.
There are many ways to show social proof on social media platforms:
To begin with, the number of followers on your social accounts itself is social proof
The number of likes, comments, and shares to your posts is social proof
You can show social proof through your posts and stories
Customer reviews are another type of social proof
Here’s an example:
The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
Also known as ‘frequency illusion’, the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is when something you recently got to know about keeps appearing repeatedly in front of you. Well, seemingly. The fact is, it was already there before. It’s just that now you’re noticing it more often.
For example, while shopping, you liked a red jacket. It’s more likely that you’ll notice all the red clothes and jackets around after that.
So, how can you apply this principle of human behavior in social media marketing strategies? Here are some ways you could try:
When a viewer shows initial interest in something, nurture their interest by showing that thing to them often. Just like how algorithms work on social media and ensure we keep seeing a thing repeatedly.
Apply this psychological principle across your social media channels. For example, if a viewer likes a product post on Facebook, show them the same products in different posts on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and other social platforms that you use.
Here’s an example from Tissot’s Instagram page showing the same product in many different posts repeatedly.
Verbatim effect
The average human attention span is less than 8 seconds. Do you recall what you read in the newspaper today? Most probably only the headlines. We tend to remember only the gist and not the entire article.
In psychology, this cognitive bias is called verbatim effect – to remember the gist of information, or the general meaning, and not the exact form or details in which information was presented to us.
You can use the verbatim effect in social media, too, to help your audience remember your content better.
Here’s how you can use the verbatim effect as your social media marketing psychology:
Focus on creating impactful headlines
Create attractive images for your posts
Write short copy
Create video – it is more impactful compared to text and still image
Keep it accurate, avoid ambiguity
Here’s an example:
Loss aversion
Psychology studies have shown that humans have a tendency to not want to miss out on things. In other words, we put more emphasis on avoiding loss than gaining something.
That’s the psychology of loss aversion.
When we lose something, we experience feelings of sadness, anxiety, and guilt, and hence, we want to avoid loss.
You can use sentiment analysis to determine how your viewers feel about something and apply loss aversion tactics.
Here’s how to play around with loss aversion tactics in social media posts:
Attach a time frame to an offer and promote it on social media
Let your viewers know there’s limited number of something
Add a visual timer or show that time is ticking away. Create urgency
Use this technique sparingly. Repeated use of it can put off viewers
Here’s an example:
Clustering
We humans can only remember a limited amount of information. Unless we use tactics. One such tactic is clustering.
The human brain is wired to remember and recall information more easily when a few similar things are clustered together. For example, a list of different types of things is easier to remember when we group/ cluster them by subject matter. Say for example, birds, animals, colors, fruits, etc.
Clustering psychology works well for social media marketing as well. For example, say you’re organizing an event. You share one post about it on your social media platforms. Or you could share 10 posts over 10 days. What do you think would be more effective?
Posting 10 posts has the potential to reach more people compared to one post. Besides, when we see something repeatedly, we’re more likely to remember it.
Here are a few ways and use cases:
Create content and design in clusters
Post content in clusters
Post similar designs together
Cluster similar themes or topics together
Instagram highlights is one good way to use clustering psychology, as seen in this example:
How do you bring together strategy and marketing on social media?
Understanding the principles of marketing psychology and social media marketing is just the beginning. You need to continually tune into what your audience is saying, what they care about and their sentiments.
With the race to win the social media marketing getting tougher day-by-day, it’s time to ace your marketing psychology.
And that’s where Radarr comes in. Radarr is a powerful social listening tool to help you listen to your target audience and understand them better with the help of sentiment analysis, which forms the base of leveraging marketing psychology.
