Customer intelligence is essential to effective social media marketing, yet many marketers tend to overlook its importance.
Your customers are the lifeblood of your business, so it’s imperative to meet their interests and needs constantly. In other words, you must strive to deliver a personalized and targeted customer experience.
However, creating a personalized customer experience is only possible when you have accurate insights into your customers’ backgrounds, demographics, and behaviors.
This is where customer intelligence comes in—a systematic approach to understanding your customers that guides your marketing and business decisions.
In this article, we’ll provide a comprehensive guide to help you leverage customer intelligence to elevate your social media marketing and business operations.
Customer Intelligence: An Overview
Customer intelligence is a “get to know your customer” process. You gather data from your previous, current, and potential customers and analyze them to understand their interests, preferences, and behaviors.
In the context of social media marketing, customer intelligence involves collecting data from followers and users who interact with your business account.
For instance, activities on your social media content, such as likes, comments, reposts, or shares, can serve as data points for social media customer intelligence. These insights will unravel customers’ perceptions and sentiments of your online presence, products, and services.
Types of Customer Intelligence Data
The term "customer data" is broad, and it’s unrealistic to collect all of it at once. Instead, focus on the types of data that are most relevant and useful for making informed business decisions, such as:
- Customer demographic data: This includes your customers’ age, gender, location, and occupation. An overview of your customers’ demographics lets you segment them for more effective, targeted social media marketing.
- Customer behavioral data: In social media marketing, behavioral data pertains to how customers interact with your account. This includes your customers’ engagement activities (e.g., likes, reposts, comments), impressions, and link clicks. These data will enable you to tailor future content based on customers’ interests and preferences.
- Customer social data: This includes information about your customers' social media interactions, such as the conversations, groups, or accounts they engage with.
- Customer transactional data: This refers to information about customers’ transactions with your business, such as their purchase history, purchase frequency, average order value, and payment method.
- Customer psychographic data: This data type covers your customers’ lifestyles, views, and attitudes. When combined with behavioral data, psychographic insights can help drive your content creation and marketing decisions.
Best Customer Intelligence Metrics
Metrics are numerical summaries of customer data. Since they are purely statistics, you can rely on their precise representation of specific aspects of your business performance.
Correct usage and interpretation of these metrics can be useful for customer intelligence.
Business Metrics
Let’s start with the metrics that are tied to core business operations.
Customer Satisfaction Rate (CSAT)
This one’s a classic and is used by nearly every company.
CSAT measures how happy your customers are with your products or services. It reflects your customers’ current perceptions of your business.
Surveys are often used to determine CSAT, where customers rate their experience with your business (usually on a scale of 1 to 5).
CSAT is straightforward to calculate. It’s simply the ratio of positive responses (or customers who rate you a 5 or 4) to the total number of responses. A high CSAT means a favorable customer perception.
CSAT = (No. of Positive Responses) / (Total No. of Responses)
Yet, there’s one hard truth about CSAT—many customers ignore surveys, so the CSAT response rate is typically low.
Unfortunately, even with a high CSAT, it’s still inconclusive whether your customers are happy or not if you have a low CSAT response rate. To obtain a “precise” CSAT, strive to reach at least a 25% response rate. The more customers answer your survey, the better you can tap into customers’ actual perceptions.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
As with CSAT, NPS is collected using surveys that prompt customers to rate (usually 1 to 5) how likely they’ll recommend your products or services to others. Hence, NPS reflects your current customers’ loyalty and satisfaction.
Customer Retention Rate (CRR)
CRR shows the percentage of customers who continue to use your products or services over time. To compute CRR, subtract the number of customers at the start of a specific period from the number at the end of that period and then divide by the starting number.
Your CRR can provide valuable customer intelligence. For instance, if your CRR falls for a particular month, chances are you implemented a strategy that does not fit your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Social Media Metrics
Social media is now integral to modern marketing. So, it’s essential to understand deeply your customers (or followers) on your social networks. Here are some metrics to consider.
Engagement Rates
The actions customers perform on your post are called engagements. This includes likes, comments, reposts, and reactions. There’s an individual metric dedicated to each engagement type, but it’s helpful to tie them together to see a bigger picture of your customers’ social activities.
Say you have two types of posts—one with high-quality visuals with text while the other one is purely text. You notice that the engagement rates are higher with the visual posts compared to the others. From here, you can infer that your followers prefer visual-based posts like images or videos to text-based posts like blogs or articles.
You can try Highperformr’s social media engagement analytics to obtain insightful customer intelligence from your social networks.
Follower Growth
Follower growth is a measure of the net increase in your follower count over time. This metric can inform you what strategies work for your target audience.
For example, if your recent carousel post led to an influx of new followers, you can analyze the demographic information of these followers to tailor your future content to their preferences.
Highperformr’s data analytics comes with a Followers Gained & Lost report to help you assess your real-time follower growth with ease.
Audience Sentiment
This metric evaluates people’s tone and emotions when they talk about your brand on social media. Sentiment can be positive, neutral, or negative; whatever result you find must guide your communication style.
A common approach for gauging accurate audience sentiment is through social listening or constant monitoring of conversations about your business.
Best Customer Intelligence Tools
Did you know that 86% of customers are willing to spend more on a business that delivers a top-notch customer experience? Achieving a first-rate experience requires high-quality customer intelligence, which requires using the right tools and strategies.
Here are some customer intelligence tools worth considering:
1. Google Analytics
If your website drives your digital marketing efforts, Google Analytics can be a powerful CI tool. It provides valuable insights into your site visitors’ behavior and demographics, along with real-time updates of your site traffic.
2. Qualtrics
This platform specializes in creating survey and feedback forms, which are crucial for customer intelligence. Their ready-made survey templates let you implement concept tests to determine which products or services will work best for your customers.
ActionQ
ActionQ is a customer data platform designed to collect, store, and analyze data for customer intelligence. It enables seamless integration of multiple data sources and warehouses to quickly identify and segment customer profiles.
You can also leverage its predictive analytics, which utilizes machine learning to forecast customers’ trends and behaviors.
Highperformr
Highperformr is a leading social media management solution with competent customer data analytics features.
You can easily obtain detailed insights into your audience, including their basic info (name, title, location), social interaction, and engagement details. Based on this information, Highperformr can send you a “signal” if a follower or user fits your ideal customer profile.
More impressively, Highperformr comes with intuitive customer intelligence metrics, such as media engagement data, growth funnel data, and follower growth data.
You'll receive real-time performance data for your recent posts, including engagement rates and impressions, to keep you on top of your game.
Proper Your Team’s Performance With Actionable Customer Intelligence
Customer-centric businesses are approximately 60% more profitable than their competitors. This is more than enough reason to prioritize customer intelligence within your team.
With the right metrics and tools, customer intelligence becomes an easy endeavor that can drive long-term growth for your business. If you know your customers, you can serve them better—tailor your services and campaigns to meet their specific needs, enhancing their experience and increasing loyalty.
However, customer intelligence is a precise art that demands sophisticated tools. That’s where Highperformr comes in.
This platform offers robust customer intelligence features that help you capture essential customer data. With Highperformr, you can easily analyze social engagement data, demographics, and social activity, all within an intuitive dashboard.
And the best part? Highperformr is free, and signing up takes less than 5 minutes. Visit our site and drive better social media ROI today.
