Marketers’ jobs have expanded quite a bit. No longer simply the muscle behind promoting brand messaging, marketers now must attend to sourcing creative, assessing and authentically responding to consumers’ needs, cultivating influencers, tracking social trends, and more. Thank goodness for converged media.
Social listening’s watershed moment
Scott Goodson, author and founder of ad agency StrawberryFrog, called convergence “the future of marketing.” He was right – at least as far as social media marketing based on social listening is concerned.
Marketers thus far have needed multiple tools applied with a lot of manual effort to piece together a full picture of social progress. This is because data on Owned, Earned and Partnered media channels is usually siloed and unorganized. Even with expending that manual effort, some insights are lost to technical limitations of their analytics software.
The option to view converged media enables marketers to see each of these three distinct and crucial media types at once – to understand how they are collectively working across the social landscape.
Why does this matter?
Any manual process that becomes automatic saves time and effort – which also saves money. This is how social media intelligence became “a thing” in the first place – to automate the data streams available on social media into coherent insights that could be applied to marketing strategies.
Now social listening has an even deeper role as a window into the behaviors and passions of consumers. With this evolution the volume of data has increased from simple mentions, retweets, and likes to topic data that reveals the personal characteristics driving your audience.
With so much to consider to keep brands on top, the ability to view data across multiple channels simultaneously is a revelation.
This comprehensive view means you can identify the content driving brand conversations, and where those conversations are occurring, then focus efforts on the highest performing content, and eliminate or tweak anything that’s not working.
Instead of comparing data from varying channels after the fact and applying those lessons to future campaigns, you can see instant data visualizations across all channels and course correct in real-time. This maximizes marketing campaigns while letting you more effectively monitor brand health on social.
You can also view content and engagement metrics – likes, shares, retweets, etc. – in conjunction with social topic data, to more easily identify viral content.
How influential are your influencers?
One of the greatest advantages of converged media is the ability to see the exact impact influencers are having on brand engagement – not only whether Partnered content is succeeding over Owned and Earned media in general, but which influencers/sponsors are most effectively driving engagement of your audience.
This information lets you decide whether to craft a formal agreement with an exceptional influencer, or to offer better content for underperforming influencers to leverage.
All brand decisions become easier when you can see the entire marketing landscape at a glance as engagement is happening. Recognizing the most powerful influencers allows you to choose campaigns that play to their strengths. Knowing which channels and content bring the highest engagement provides a road map for your marketing team to follow.
And all of this informs broader decisions as well – like where to elicit consumer opinions on new products, and where to source clues about upcoming trends. Instead of having a single snapshot of one corner of social media, you can see everything in context, and make better decisions for your brand. And that’s always on trend.
Get in touch for more on our new Converged Media update!
