99 ways social media data can help you deliver your best

This article is based on Colin Day’s brilliant presentation at Product Marketing Off-Piste. Check out the complete recording here.

Today, I'd like to share some ways that social media can help product marketers deliver their best. We'll explore three key areas:

1. How social data can help you develop more accurate buyer personas.
2. Why social data can and should be used to influence your go-to-market strategies.
3. How you can leverage social data to inform and empower your content strategies.

That's a lot to cover, so let's buckle our seatbelts and hit the gas. 

Why is social media data important?

Before we dive in, let's take a moment to consider why social data is important.

As you’ve likely noticed, social media plays a major role in engaging clients, prospects, employees, and potential hires. Statistically, social media is the third-largest engagement channel after your corporate website and email. 

However, social media isn't for the faint of heart. It takes bright people with diverse skill sets to battle some of the most mysterious algorithms on the planet.

Social media is relatively new for B2B organizations. Many are just dipping their toes into using it for branding and customer service. Organizations in regulated industries are probably the biggest laggards I encounter daily.

Upskilling your product, marketing, sales, HR, and customer support teams in social media is wise, but whose responsibility is it? And who’s responsible for upskilling leadership?

Buyer personas: What we know without social media

As product marketers, we guide our products from cradle to grave – from development to launch, through all stages of the product life cycle. 

We consider positioning, pricing, and the competition. We make sure we understand our total addressable markets. We create problem statements, then determine if the problem is pervasive, solvable and if the market is ready to solve it. 

That's Product Marketing 101 – but what does any of this have to do with social media? 

Everything.

Every day we use personas to aid in all the tasks I just outlined. As we build persona profiles, we form a caricature of the customers and end-users in our ecosystem.

We look at their goals and why solving the identified problem is important. We identify job titles, industries, countries, age, academic credentials, gender, and time in their role. It’s simple stuff, relatively easy to hypothesize given an existing customer base.

But what about understanding where these customers go for information? We can't forget we live in a hyper-connected world where the B2B buyer gets 70% through their buying journey before speaking to a sales associate. In fact, Gartner says the B2B buyer spends only 17% of the buying cycle meeting potential suppliers.

Some other interesting stats: We live in a world of about 8 billion people. 67% are unique mobile users, 66% are internet users, and 62% – nearly 5 billion – are active social media users. 

According to research from Global Web Index, a typical internet user spends almost seven hours per day on connected devices with over one-third of that time on social media platforms – around two and a half hours per day. We spend so much of our lives online and leave a huge digital footprint. 

So, as product marketers, how do we utilize this wealth of social data and glean insights into social patterns and interests – great information to feed back into our persona profiles?

Buyer personas: What social data can add to the mix

Throughout my career in financial services, fintech, and more recently martech, I've found that the personas created by product marketers are living, breathing things. 

They support problem statements and launch strategies. Sometimes they’re used by sales execs and sales engineers for product demos. Our colleagues in digital marketing pick them up to help direct website content. The personas you create can and should touch colleagues across your business. 

As the use of personas extends, so do knowledge requirements. You need insights on everything from persona interests to the keywords and hashtags they use and follow on social media. 

Putting your customer at the heart of everything you do is the difference between being a good product marketer and a great one. You could have the best product in the world, but if you don't know who you're targeting, what their problems are, and if they're willing to pay for it, I'd argue product marketing has failed. Wouldn't you? 

Social media provides all kinds of invaluable information about our audience – age, location, gender, job title, interests, and even the devices they use. Plus, following industry influencers and monitoring social engagement helps you identify buyer pain points and sentiment.

How to enrich your buyer personas with social data

Buyer personas provide tremendous structure and insight, allowing us to focus and guide product development while aligning across the enterprise. Put another way, we use the buyer personas we create to place bets and make investments that will see our products and companies grow and succeed – or wither and die. 

Look at your website and your product and marketing collateral. Many companies proudly talk about what they do, not about what customers need. This puts them at odds with their buyers.

When making purchasing decisions, people naturally gravitate towards brands they know and companies they trust. There's no better way to build that trust than by demonstrating you understand and genuinely care about the customer's needs.

Your company probably has some kind of corporate social strategy – publishing content through social channels, either natively on the networks themselves or using third-party vendors. Additionally, you and your colleagues might share or engage with this corporate content across our own social accounts, whether through a formal or informal employee advocacy program.

It stands to reason that as content is shared through these routes, people will sometimes engage – a retweet, a like, or a comment, for example. 

As a product marketer, if you can access this data via your marketing automation platform or CRM, you can take the relevant bits and add these insights back into your persona profiles.

Social data for a successful GTM strategy

Social data can and should influence your go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Social media is no longer just for connecting with family, friends, and colleagues. It's a stepping stone on the path to purchase in every industry. The good news is it's easy to develop a strategy to collect and collate data that will guide your GTM.

Somewhere on social media, somebody is talking about a feature they wish your product offered. Someone else is making negative comments about your company. 

These people aren’t tagging your brand or writing on your page, but thousands are reading and absorbing the message. These posts shape opinions about your brand and articulate exactly what the audience wants – but you'll never know unless you employ social listening as part of your product marketing strategy. You can't afford to be blind or deaf to these data points.

For all types of businesses, social listening is the first step in gathering social data. It's critical to the process of adjusting to turbulent market conditions. Buyers are shifting to digital to both ingest and produce business-related content. Businesses that listen and adapt are finding new ways to maintain and even grow their business in this chaotic world.

When it comes time to go to market with a product, a data-first strategy is critical. Social media is a great place to look for that data, but you need the tools to quickly gather and analyze the relevant social data across different networks. 

Social listening is a valuable source of business intelligence for your whole organization, and it can be leveraged as such. But given the volume of conversations on social media, it's important that you have the right tools in place.

How social data can inform your content strategy

A content strategy should be designed with engagement in mind. For me, it boils down to figuring out what content will help your target audience and inspire them to take the actions that ultimately lead to conversion and a closed-won deal. 

Doing this successfully requires you to bring together several moving parts, including researching your audience and mapping out how your buyers engage and interact with your content.

The content strategies we create as product marketers, in conjunction with colleagues across the organization, are unique to each of our respective organizations and situations. There's no magic wand, no pixie dust we can scatter, no model we can cookie-cut to quadruple our revenue. 

That being said, there are a few things you can do to ensure you're on the right path: 

• Study your audience
• Look at what content is consumed and by whom
• Snoop on – I mean research – your customers
• Map your buyer journeys
• Conduct a gap analysis
• Develop a distribution strategy
• Build a content calendar

A huge mistake people often make is relying too heavily on gut instinct. Don't get me wrong – gut instinct has a role to play, but it mustn't go unchecked. Data-led organizations that build strategies based on fact rather than instinct – these are the types of organizations more likely to succeed.

Companies spend huge amounts of time and money creating content. Our content marketing colleagues can develop it faster than customers can consume it. Did you know that 60-70% of all B2B marketing content goes unused, according to industry analysts? That's a huge chunk of the marketing budget that could be better used driving more revenue-focused activities.

So before spending a penny on new content, lay out what your audience wants and compare that to what you’re already providing. Understand the gap there, because that gap is your sweet spot for content creation. 

The issue with traditional data sources is they have many blind spots. By integrating the power of social media into your content strategy, you can shine a light on these data blind spots, surfacing additional data points to better inform the strategy.

Measuring how your product content performs on social and exploring how many engagements, completions, and conversions each generates provides great intelligence that can inform your audience studies, and help you map buyer journeys and understand content gaps.

It'd be remiss of me not to mention personalization. Social data allows companies to personalize customer journeys – what content to get in front of them, what channel and device they want to consume it on, and what day and time is best. Providing B2B customers with personalized experiences has been proven to be much more effective than impersonal, branded content. 

Closing thoughts

There are many ways to leverage social data in product marketing. It's time to explore how the use of social data and technology can build better customer experiences – getting insights into buyer journeys, enhancing ROI, and bridging the data gap across marketing silos.

Thank you for investing your time with me today. I hope you found this article insightful.