Understanding Your Audience: Leveraging Data and Social Listening

Hello and welcome back as we continue along in section two of the Instagram Bootcamp. Let's focus on the targeted audience. If your brand image is the overall perception customers have of your brand, then the more you understand your customers' wants and needs, the better you will be able to refine your brand image to be most compelling to your targeted audience.

And since consumers don't make decisions within a vacuum, but they compare your brand to alternatives, then it's very important that you understand as much as you can about your key competitors as well, so you can distinguish your brand and its image from your competitors in a meaningful way, meaningful to your targeted audience. So, how do we find out about our targeted audience? Well, a great initial source is your own company data. If you've been in business for any length of time, you will have accumulated some information on your customers, their purchase patterns, perhaps some basic information, and demographic information such as their gender and their location.

And since you have a relationship with them, a communication avenue with them, you can augment that with simple surveys, surveys that could be emailed using third-party tools like SurveyMonkey. For example, we can email them a short survey at various touch points, or even on your customer services call, have a short survey at the end of the call with their permission, and you can get some additional information, either demographic or as well as a better understanding of the factors that influence their purchase decision or their level of satisfaction with your brand and service, et cetera. But there are other sources as well, of course.

One such is Google Analytics, right? The platform that tracks all of the activity on your website also derives information about the audience who's on your website, and from a demographic standpoint, including gender, age, location, country, state, and city. Another basic piece of information, you can begin to build a profile of at least who's coming to your website, who's interacting with your content. Similarly, each of the social media platforms, from the meta platforms, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, et cetera, has an ad manager tool or a Business Manager tool that will provide a similar type of information on the audience on that platform that's interacting with your content, right? But on all of these social platforms as well, particularly if you are promoting content or creating content on these platforms, you can do what is known as social listening.

You simply review your social media posts, the social media posts of your competitors, particularly the ones that have larger social media followings, and listen to what people are talking about, what they're commenting about on that platform, what type of content they're liking, whether it be a product released by one of your competitors or feedback they're given about a particular product, service, brand, their concerns that they have as consumers, right? 

You can also track that, analyze that, and gain a deeper understanding of what your audience cares about, what they're interested in, right? And there are tools called social listening tools, and I'll show you a few examples of that. If you do a simple Google search on social listening, you'll find brands such as Brandwatch, Sprout Social, BuzzSumo, Brand24, Hootsuite, and they're paid platforms, but what they will provide for you is an analysis of all the brand mentions, all the social media references, all the references to a brand or an industry that's taking place on any social media platform, and they're called brand mentions. Anytime a particular brand, your brand, your competitors is mentioned on a social media platform, written about in a blog, referenced in an article, all of that could be tracked and analyzed, and you will get reports and see how your mentions are going up or down, but not just that, your competitors' mentions, but also what topic customers are concerned about, are talking about, what issues are coming up, right? What are the bloggers writing about within their industry? 

Now, all of this can help you better understand a number of things, including the customer's impression or your targeted audience's impression of your brand versus competing brands, which brands they may look to most positively, because in addition to tracking these mentions, these social listing platforms can also do something known as sentiment analysis, where they can analyze, based upon the language used, what the sentiment, overall sentiment, that the audience has about particular brands or issues within a particular industry, positive, negative, neutral, right? So all this analysis can be done, so that might make sense in the initial stages of developing your brand image, to invest in one of these programs, at least in the short term, and do some social listening.

All right, we're gonna talk a little bit more on how to research competition on the next slide, but the key goal of this type of analysis is to have a better understanding of your customers from a demographic standpoint, right? Their ages, genders, married versus not married, children, whether they have children or not, all that type of demographic information can flesh out a profile, but that's just part of the equation. You also wanna gain more insight into what makes them tick, right? Their wants, goals, aspirations, on one hand, and on the other hand, the challenges, the things that are preventing them from reaching those goals, achieving the objectives they wanna achieve, and their behavior. What are their online behaviors? What websites do they interact with? Where do they get information from? 

As well as their pastimes, what they do at home, what they do when they're not at home for leisure, and the more you have, the more complete picture you will form of your audience, and not only will you be able to focus on the things that are most important to them in your marketing, communications, et cetera, but you also will know where to reach them based upon their demographic profile and their online behaviors, which platforms you should reach them at, what type of content can you advertise in, and they'll likely be engaging with that content, and what type of content should you post about and write about, right? So that information will help you refine your product services to best meet their needs, refine your communications, and your targeting strategies to know where to reach them when you wanna market to them.

Now, let us, and it's another source that is a great source, and should not be neglected, where you can truly find out what your customers feel about you or your competition, is, of course, customer reviews, right? When customers fill out a review, particularly a positive review, you're gonna get a sense of the positive things about your brand, right? When we talked about understanding your brand's strengths, that's a great source for understanding the good things about your brand, and also let you understand your weaknesses, because those one-star, two-star reviews are gonna point out your weaknesses, and not just yours, but your customers. And you can review, you know, the Google reviews, Yelp, TrustAdvisor, or you can simply go to a platform like ChatGPT and ask AI for a summary of my brand reviews or my competitor reviews, and it will look at all those sources and come up with an overall summary and overall assessment of it. We wanna use these tools when we can for that level of insight.