Shows like CSI and its many spinoffs and copycats helped to introduce the concept of forensic science to mainstream American culture. We know that anything can be tested, prodded, enhanced, and analyzed until it yields the results we desire. In the end, it’s all about the scientific method.
In the world of social media marketing, there’s no better way to the true benefits than to apply the same principles as forensics. You’re given information and data. You can establish a hypothesis and test it in your ‘lab.” Then, you can improve on your testing and enhance your results. That’s forensic social media in a nutshell.
Here’s how it plays out in the world of social media marketing:
Use the Data
Facebook and Twitter offer incredible targeting data. You know where people live, how much money they likely make, in which direction their political opinions lean, how they prefer to shop, and what they’re most likely to buy. This gives you a basis for creating multiple data sets for targeting.
You can take it a step further by creating custom audiences on Facebook based upon other data that you have at your fingertips. For example, you can take an email list that you’ve built over time or purchased and cross-reference those email addresses to identify targeted Facebook or Twitter users. This is extremely useful in creating custom campaigns that go after specific individuals within a group.
Finally, you can enhance it all even further through retargeting. By taking your website visitors and putting a message in front of them that is compelling. Since they’ve already been on your website, you will want to put a different type of message in front of them instead of a message that would draw the in for the first time.
Establish Your Hypothesis
Once you know who to target, it’s time to put the data to work. Your various hypotheses should be based upon your knowledge of your industry and product and then guided to fit the individual campaigns to target your specified audiences. The reason we’re calling them hypothetical campaigns at this point is because we don’t know if they’re going to be effective or not based upon what we know right now. Once you get done with the next step, you’ll have established campaigns that work. If there’s one thing we’ve learned doing social media marketing for so long, it’s that campaigns rarely perform the way we expect them to initially.
Let’s say you’re a car dealer wanting to run a retargeting campaign on Facebook. It’s easy to think that you want to put specials in front of them, but we’ve found that it’s not always the best way to convert them into leads and sales. Instead, we’ve seen success retargeting people to visit a page on the website that calls for a direct action. In other words, rather than convincing them to do business because of price or anything else, it’s a matter of convincing them that you’re the right dealership to work with for other reasons. You’re the nicer dealership. You deliver the best experience. You care for your customers beyond the initial sale. They’ve probably visited several dealer websites during their car buying journey. Now it’s time to stand out.
Enhance Results
Sometimes, you’ll find that your initial instincts were correct. Other times, you’ll go through several iterations of different campaigns before finding the ones that perform the best. Trust your gut to start but trust the data to finish.
Thankfully, testing and improving on social media is not a long process. Depending on your budget, a couple of weeks of data is often enough to get a feel for whether a campaign is working well or not. Try multiple images. Change the wording. Try different landing pages. Do whatever you can to mix and match.
The most important thing to remember is that wholesale changes are the biggest mistake that people make when testing different hypothetical campaigns. If something is working a little but not at its best level, don’t change the whole thing. Change one thing at a time and see how that changes performance. If you change more than one thing, you won’t know which change had the effect you desired. In fact, one change could be negative while the other is positive. This could yield a wash. When you test changes one at a time, you’ll be able to see which individual changes had the most benefit.
The art and science of forensic social media might seem like something that requires a lot of time. It isn’t. Once you get going, you’ll find that your process improves and becomes more efficient over time. In the end, you’ll have the best possible campaigns based upon data rather than relying solely on your gut instincts.
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