 Fy enw i, i'n fwyaf, ac rwy'n bwynt i'w sr dryf yn ysgrif iawn webinarnau cyffredinol. Rwy'n meddwl gosedd iddyn nhw'n ffordd i'w ishbell yn Y Clwyd. Fy enw'r ysgrif iawn i'w meddwl i'w ishyddol o'r gyfer y bach o'r mewn cyffredinol. Fy enw'r ysgrif iawn i'w webcam i'w ishyddol, sy'n bywch yn ddechrau i'w ysgrif iawn i'w fflawn i'w llwy, pwysig y pwyllfa, i'r ysgrif iawn i'w ishyddol. I am Isabel McLeod, Head of Research and Insights at Hydrogen. We are Scotland's largest specialised social media agency. We are also part of the PA media group, which you might know as the Crest Association. Research from Sprout Social has found that 69% of business leaders say that social media data and insights are underutilised in their companies at the moment. What we are going to talk through in the next half hour is how to make sure that you are not one of these 69% and that you do know how to use data. So, let's start with what actually are insights. Insights help you understand who your audience are, what they need, what they want and how you can help to actually meet these needs. All insights are based on data. Data is the raw material. It's been very useful, but you need to be able to actually build it on something to really make what it is you need. So, this is an analogy that I absolutely love to use when I'm talking about taking data into insights. The LEGO analogy. You start off by data gathering. You collect the data. It can be in a variety of forms. It tends to be a bit for jumble and it can sometimes get underfoot. In this form, data could include things like people's email addresses, how many likes a post got on social media. And although you might not be able to tell much from it at this stage, it's still the building block and you cannot do anything else without it. Once you have the data gathered, you begin to sort it. You organise it by function, by colour, by size. For example, a list of all the engagements you have per social media posts or all the landing pages on your website. At this point, you start to see things emerge. You can see what's bigger, where there's less. You start to see some things come out, but it's only when you begin the actual data visualisation that you can see this in a clearer way. So this is turning it into something like a pie chart or a bar chart. You can begin to spot nuggets of what's working and what's not working. From here, you begin data analysis. When you start gathering data, you might have what you want to build in mind. You might have some pieces that you're thinking about, but it's only when you actually see the data visualisation and start the analysis, you can see what you really have to work with. And it's building different parts and bringing them together. So, for example, your Google Analytics learning might be the tree, or your social media learnings might be the car. And the house is information about the customers. And it's only when you look at those and then you bring them all together, you get the final piece, you get the insights, you get the knowledge. You assemble everything in one big thing and you can see all the context. It's from here you can make informed decisions and take action. Now, if you're not a foreign of the Lego analogy, then here is another way you can look at it. It's data, which leads you to the information from which you can gain knowledge, find insights and create wisdom. So to give an example of this, imagine that you're head of marketing for a shoot-up. And you want to know if social media drives awareness for you, if it leads to consideration, and if it gets conversions. You start off with the data. It's the raw, unprocessed numbers, like your social media impressions, your engagements, what you can see from Google Analytics, such as what pages of people landing on, and what do they do when they've arrived on your website. And finally, using your sales system, such as Shopify, see what people are buying and what process they go to. Once you've got this, you gain information and this is by adding context. You look at the who, the what, the when and the where. So this could include things like what are the most frequently bought products or what is the click through rate. Looking at those metrics and starting to understand what's going on. It's from here that you then gain knowledge by analysing this, the how. It's starting to see the patterns that are emerging. How does your current sales campaign compare to a previous sales campaign you've run? Is there something month on month that's changing what shoes people are buying or how they're looking at things? And this brings you to the why, the understanding, learning how those patterns you've spotted actually works and looking at if there any seasonality, for example. So in your shoe store, you might notice that every April, you begin to see that there's an increase in people looking at and buying trainers. And this could be related to London marathon. People are seeing all these people doing London marathon and are thinking, do you know what I'd quite like to get into running? Or maybe you see a spike in January with people looking at their New Year's resolutions. It's then you take these insights and decide how you're going to use them going forward using wisdom. So see, you did see that every April there was a spike in people looking at and buying trainers. And this came from social media from your website and from sales. Using this, you might decide, OK, let's create a campaign. Let's focus on trainers in April. We'll have blogs on what to do if you're starting running or how to do distance running. You'll showcase certain trainers that do this well. So it's using all the data, how it's worked, how this ties into previous campaigns to gain the wisdom. You might see the last bit at the end of this slide is conspiracy theory. So what do I mean by a conspiracy theory in terms of data? Well, this is not your usual conspiracy theory. It's what happens when you do not use the insight and the wisdom. So fun fact cows are 300 times more likely to kill you than coyotes. Now, as a standalone fact, that makes it seem that cows are more dangerous. But when you actually consider this, you consider what's going into it, you realise that's misrepresentation of data. So going back to our shoe shop analogy. Imagine you work in your shoe shop, your head of marketing, you're looking at all the results, and you're seeing that people are buying two pairs of trainers at a time. The conspiracy theory here might be that people who run have four feet, and this is why they have to buy two pairs of trainers. However, if you look at this along with other pieces of data, what's going on in the wider market, you might find out that runners buy two pairs of shoes so they can alternate between them. This means that they're running 16 miles one day and they want to go for a run the next day. They can go to their fresh pair, which has more bounce, it's got cushioning. And this allows both pairs time to live longer, it lets your shoes live longer, it's more comfortable for your feet. So that's the difference between using data for wisdom and using data for conspiracy theories. But now you might wonder what it is you can actually measure using insights and data. So there's a lot of places you can find data and there's a lot of things that you can actually measure. So first you need to know what you have, what you can track and what you want to track. There are a lot of different types and so what you decide to track will depend on what's important to you and your company. I've broken it down into five main categories here. Customer database, marketing data, conversions data, internal, external, market data and consumer research. When I'm talking through these over the next few slides, I am using it more with a social media angle in mind. However, this can be used for any type of marketing. First up is customer data. This is information on your actual customers. So for example, their demographics, like their age, their gender, where is their base? What are their needs as well? What are their wants? What's the pain points that mean they need you? And what do they value? What's interesting to them? This can be some of the hardest data to collect as it relies on them actually providing it to you. That could be things like filling in a form when they're buying a product or signing up to an email. It could be through filling in a customer survey after they bought something or it could be some third party data. So cookies or maybe they can sign into your website through a social media site and therefore you get data through that. Whatever you use, it's important to make sure that it is GDPR compliance when you're using it. I won't go into too much details on that, but you can also look up online. But this is the one that you do need to worry about for GDPR. And while this data can be the most difficult to collect, it's also some of the most useful. You can really find out who it is that are buying your product, how you can target them, what their needs actually are and get to the heart of that. You can use it to confirm the right tone of voice you should be using to speak to these people. Help decide what key marketing messages will really resonate with them. And also discover who your core audiences are and what matters. Next you have marketing data. If someone says to you, marketing insights, this is probably the thing that will come to mind. It's the social media data from your own outputs. So your impressions, your engagements, your click-throughs. And if you're using organic or paid social media, this can be quite easy to find. So the platforms itself, whether it's Neta, whether it's YouTube, whether it's X, they will all provide you with information close by cost on all these engagements. This is the same for if you're using PPC or email. You can also use social listening. This allows you to track mentions of your brand, what people are saying about you and the competitors. And this can be really useful to find out if there's anything you know that you should be doing. Using marketing data is incredibly useful for you to see what's working. Are there any key messages that really help resonate with your audience that you should be using more of? Are there any platforms that drive better engagement for you or better sales? And are there any days or months there's spikes? So we mentioned before with the London marathon. Is there anything similar to that that you can see with your marketing? For example, at Hydrogen, our performance team, which is our ad team, they check on at least a weekly basis to see how the ads are running. Is there anything they can improve upon? What can they learn from what's happened so far? And how can they use that to improve ROI for our clients? It's the same with organic social. We look monthly to see what's going on, what we can improve, how things are going. Next, you have conversion data. And what you describe as a conversion might be different from someone else. It's all based on your company, who you are and what you do. For example, it might be a sale. Or if you're a charity, it might be someone making a monthly donation or signing up to an email newsletter. Or if you're in a B2D company, it might be a lead is what's also classed a conversion to you. And you might have several different conversion points throughout your marketing funnel. You just need to know what it is you call a conversion and how you can measure that. Things like Google Analytics or a similar web analytics system can be really useful. Maybe you have a sales system you use. Or if you're using ads, you might use UTM tracking, which helps you see what results come from what ads. And using conversion data can help you see what communications and also what customers are bringing you the most revenue to help you drive that ROI. And it helps you understand what's going on behind the scenes. One thing to actually note about conversion data is that a lack of sales might not mean that that piece of content isn't working. So consider what it was you wanted everything to achieve. If it was an awareness post, you might not get sales straight away. So consider what it was you wanted and how that's working down the full attribution funnel. Systems like Google Analytics can let you see if people maybe come to your website from social media, go away, think about it and come back again and make a sale through a different form. So keeping an eye on this and not just deleting or removing anything that doesn't instantly get a sale is important. Next you have internal and external market data. And this is about looking a little bit wider at your target market. So if you've worked on a strategy before and you know the pesto factors, it includes that, it includes looking at what's the new technology, are there things like cost of living or economical issues that might play an effect on if people are buying and what they're buying. It also includes looking at other parts of the business outside of marketing. What are people seeing to the sales team? Is there something that your company is working on building or that maybe you know competitors are building that might have an impact on you? This can help you see how wide your actual marketplace is, what might prevent them from buying from you or what might prevent them from buying at all right now and generally just look outside the marketing sphere. Then finally, you have consumer research and this is wider qualitative and quantitative marketing. This is looking at potentially surveys and focus groups that you do yourself or potentially some external surveys. So looking at YouGov or GWI for example, see what people are thinking about. For example, you might see that more people are interested in sustainability and sustainable products. So you'd want to think, is there something we were talking about in our marketing? Is it something we should be talking about and consider from there? A lot of this might not be about your own industry and maybe more general wider trends but it can really help you see what you should be doing and what makes people tick. In terms of social media, you can use things like Pinterest predicts or TikTok trend discovery to see what people are talking about on social media if it's conversations you should join in on and how you can do that. So those are the main types of insights and as you can see, there is a lot of different things you can learn. So depending on what you want to find and which of these five types you use there might be different data sources. Obviously, I work in social media. So things like Meta and LinkedIn are the main ones for us. However, we use a lot more brand watch for social listening, rival IQ for compressor benchmarking, GWI for doing pulse checks and so on. And these are the data from our funnel before. Moving on to the information and knowledge, you can use again a variety of tools. Some people might like Excel or Google Sheets to get all the data in one place. Other people might prefer a sort of dashboard approach and they look at looker studios or Power BI or Tableau. There's also certain systems that let you create their own dashboards. So for example HubSpot or Hootsuite, you can create dashboards in there. You'll have noticed that I've said the word dashboards quite a lot and to show you why you like dashboards instead of just using it in a sheet. Here is an example. You can see here that it makes it look a lot more visual. It's so much easier to see at a glance what's working and how it's improved month on month. You can see the changes, you can see the spikes just at a glance. For example, you can see here there's one post that's done incredibly well. So it's worth looking at is that post the only reason that everything is up this month or are there other reasons? Has everything performed better? What can we tell? What's worked? What's not worked? Is it anything that we can draw upon in use for future? So dashboards just make it easier to see at a glance and get that knowledge. Once you have that knowledge, you need to get the insight and wisdom and I personally believe that the best way to do that is through brain power, it's through people, it's through you. Some people might suggest AI and while it can help, I don't believe it's there yet for getting insight and wisdom. It can be very useful at getting the data and even turning that into information but because you need all of these different areas, it's very difficult to get AI to do that at the moment in a way that is meaningful. It might be that this does happen in the future but one thing you would need to be aware at that stage is again GDPR issues and if there's anything you can not put in because it's confidential information. So those are all the different data sources you can use and now you might be wondering, okay, there's so much data there but what should I track and when should I track it? Well, it all depends on your company, your goals and your objectives and what stage of the funnel you're at. If you're wanting awareness and attention, you might be focusing on different things and if you're wanting conversions. These are obviously not a full list of everything you can track or the page would be much, much fuller but it's just important to have an idea of what you want to track from the start going forward and it might be that your version looks different from this. For example, although impressions isn't technically a conversion metric, I like to track it throughout just because I think it's something that's good to know. Whatever you do decide to track, it's important that you know that from the start and continue. This is because it can be very difficult to backdate some of this data so knowing and tracking from the start just makes it a little bit easier for you. To finish up today, I'm going to chat through some campaigns. The first ones are ones that use data and insights to actually improve on themselves and to get a better ROI. First up, Databricks. This is based on marketing data. They wanted to drive sign-ups for their virtual conference and to do this, they used LinkedIn messaging apps. The A, B tested copy variants. Two of these began with questions and were a little bit longer and then the third one gave the event details and a link to sign-up right at the start of the message. When they A, B tested those and looked at the results, they found out that the third one, the one that had the link right at the start, performed best and it had a two times higher conversion rate. So off the back of that, they realised that putting the information first worked best for them. It meant people didn't have to scroll to read. It got their attention instantly. So they used this, ended up with over 70% open rate and like I said, a higher conversion rate. So that just goes to show that A, B testing, looking at what's working, what's not and improving on that can really help. A brand which did similar is Duolingo. So you may know Duolingo as being the unhinged TikTok, but they weren't always. It used to be longer form videos with people talking, explaining things about language and how to learn language. However, when they were looking at their monthly reports, they found out that the post that had the old mascot in it performed best. So from that, they began to use the mascot more and more. In the end, it took 39 videos before they found out what actually made a hit, which was for them unhinged. And this led to huge growth as soon as they cracked this. We've grown over 7 million followers. And they've actually noticed that every time a video goes viral for them, they see an uptick in people signing up to and using Duolingo. So that shows that it's not just a funny TikTok. It actually had a bottom line effect on them. Next, let's take a look at some campaigns that are actually based on data and insights. These don't improve with data. They use data to start with. First off is Spotify. This is one that probably everyone will know. It's based on customer data. Spotify Rats, it relies on customer info and personalisation. People will share their data unwillingly. How often can you say that about brands? And it's more than just social posts. In 2016, they started a billboard campaign calling out some strange stats. So, for example, someone who started listening to Christmas music in June or there was a person who was listening to a Alone Forever playlist for four hours on Valentine's Day. So it's calling out some of the fun stats. And as a reminder, low public awareness notice here, Spotify rat data collection ends on the end of October. So, if you are slightly worried about what your top song is and if your playlist might be making one of these ads right now, you've got about two weeks to choose your final song. Monzo actually does something a little bit similar with this in using public data. They're called it the big data thing of the year. And that recently found out that London is the only place in the UK where people go to Britain Monge more than they go to Greggs. It's not very often that you can actually use people's data in a way that they are happy with and are willing to share where these companies have done it. Next, Oatspice. So if you know me, you'll know this is one of my very favourite campaigns. It includes external market data, consumer research and market data. So it covers three of the five elements here. This all came from the insight that 60% of body wash purchases come from women, not men. So this came out at a time when Oatspice was mainly targeted at older men. It wasn't really a cool product. So the agency, Woodland and Kennedy, made an ad targeted at women called the man your man could smell like. And you probably remember this ad. And off the back of this, they then created 185 short video clips. These were all answering questions that came out on TikTok, on Reddit, on Facebook. These 185 videos are all still available on YouTube if you are bored this afternoon. But on the back of this, it gained a huge amount of interest. It had 1.4 billion impressions in six months. And it also saw a 107% increase in sales of Oatspice, showing that this really worked in looking at this evidence and this insight gained a fresh perspective on the market. Now, you are bounty like this final campaign is all about social listening. This bounty and celebrations campaign came off the social listening element that is potentially the most divisive chocolate. So a few years ago in the celebrations advent calendar, bounty was the first chocolate. Behind door number one was a bounty. And people were very angry about this and they were very angry on social media. Some people were tweeting that it ruined Christmas, that they'd never buy celebrations again off the back of this. So their team had to think about this. Now, I did too. Take it to the next level. Last year they launched a bounty free celebrations top in Tesco. And they started a marketing campaign on social media, with the bounty feeling sorry for itself, leaving, and then a huge bring back bounty campaign. It got a lot of coverage. People were talking about it, taking different sides. It was mentioned in the media. In the end, it had a 34% increase in sales of celebrations times, but also an 176% increase in bounty sales on Amazon, which just goes to show the power that actually listening to your customers can have. Now, just in case it's been a bit too much for you, a bit too much data for a half hour period, I've got three key takeaways I'd like you to take. First off, all insights stems from data. Consider your objectives and everything you need to track, but you can't do anything without the data. Second, your consumers and your customers are key. Listen to what they tell the sales team. Listen to what they say about you on social media, what they do. It's all important. Without consumers, your company is nothing. You need consumers, so listening to them is incredibly important. And third, it takes time to gather data and to be able to build insights on it. It won't happen overnight. You need to look at things for a month, sometimes even year on year in order to see some trends emerge. So keep at it. I've just got a few little points on what you can find next. So if you're interested in finding some industry benchmarks to see where you rank, there's some links here you can look at from the PDF download. Or if you want to get in touch with me, asking any questions that you don't feel comfortable asking openly, then do feel free to drop me a line. And I'll pass you back to Pepper. Thanks Isabel. We've had some questions come in, so we'll get started with the Q&A. One of the questions that's come in has asked how often you said to how important the data is, but how often should you check on your data? Oh, that's a really good question, and it kind of depends on what the sources are. So there's some that you should check weekly at the very least. So for example, with ads, it's important to see what's happening, what people are saying and what's working. So for ads, you would want to check at least once a week. If it's the first day of a campaign, you would want to check in more often just to see that everything is working and everything is taking place okay. However, there's some things you can check left frequently. So for organic social, we tend to check once a month and just check in sporadically throughout. If it's something wider than that, so for example, consumer data, that you would want to check a little bit lower, sorry, a little bit more longer to do, once every quarter. So it really depends on what the data is, but setting yourself specific times to look in. So if it's once every Monday morning or the first Friday of a month, setting yourself set times can really be helpful to make sure that you do check in. That's great, thank you. And another question that we've actually had a couple of questions that relate to this. So I will try and kind of wrap them into probably a couple of two prongs answer. It's about insights and how you can get buy-in from management to spend time on insights. And also how you can explain or educate colleagues on the importance of insights and whether you've got any top tips on how to actually do that, how to do that education piece around insights. It can be a very difficult one and I am very lucky that I'm in a company that has a specific insights department. I know a lot of people, it's just a small part of their job and so explaining why they need time for it and why it's not just something you can pull in five minutes can be quite difficult. I think what's important is actually showing what data and insight can do and that can take some time, but it might be showing where you rank against competitors to say actually we're not doing well and we need to take time and look at these insights so we can improve at the moment we're ranked five and we need to get up here. Or social listening can also be a great way to show that you need insights, showing what people are saying about you and how you can't do that and you can't improve without looking at that. So those unfortunately do take time to do in the first place. I think as well some of the links I gave to rival IQ and Implify they're very good at showing at a glance how you're doing compared to competitors. So you can see for example if you're in the financial space you can show actually our cost per click is a lot higher than other companies. That shows we need to do something and in order to do something what's happening I think that's something that can show to bosses or to colleagues in the first place that actually it's something you need to focus on and having a small proof point can be very helpful. Really fascinating thank you and another question still possibly linked to this so what would you say are the most relatable insights to share with senior management or leadership teams is it would you argue that that's perhaps related to their industry sector or is there something that can show something that they would be able to relate to more easily whether it's engagement rates or click-throughs? Yeah I think it again it depends on what it is that's most important to them. So some sales teams and some bosses are they're just focused on the sales in which case showing how everything leads to sales can be useful what is your cost per acquisition but at the same time if they are interested in a wider picture then looking at things like follower growth can be useful it's sometimes a vanity metric but looking at it by itself can help you see things also engagement rates to show how many people are engaging as opposed to just looking at engagements by itself can be very useful because you can see what percent people are actually paying attention to you and things like web clicks are one of the most important for knowing how many people are actually then clicking through and seeing more about you so it does depend on what your key objectives are so having smart objectives sets that you can then track maybe two or three metrics back to and show those at a glance can be great and what I find particularly useful is showing how those change so saying has it gone up, has that gone down because they might not know what that means by itself but if you say we've gone up 3% that is something that's actually more tangible for them to understand right thank you and a couple of questions relating to industry sector so can insights be as useful in B2B marketing as there's less data than B2C and also how can insights help if a company doesn't perhaps have any social media presence those are really interesting questions so in terms of can it help B2B definitely I think there might not be as much you can find but when you think about it B2B you're still you might be talking to businesses but it's still people that businesses so for example the data bricks example that was a business trying to sell to other business people to get them to come to an event and they were looking at what is it that people are looking for and they found that the message that performed best for them was the one that had the link at the start and that might be because they were looking towards directors and directors are notoriously time poor so getting to the heart of the issue was important there that's why some of the consumer data in understanding their pain points can be very useful for both B2B and also for if you don't have social media presence their pain points are what is it that they're looking to solve that you can do so if it is they don't have time then you want to make sure that your marketing and your messaging help you even if you don't have time this is quick it will save you so much time and you see a lot of brands are doing that a lot of brands will focus on either people being time poor or they're wanting to save money economically so it's saying what it is that your audience are interested in and what they need and what they're struggling with and for B2B that is how insights can be very useful finding out what it is that they need and if you don't have your own social media channels and you're looking to do that then something like a survey or using tools like Yougov can be very useful to find out some external data you can also just do wider research for example marketing charts with again one of the links I had up there and I really recommend that they do have some good links for B2B in general but also just what people are looking at what they're interested in and what ads they are most likely to click through on so that can be useful to draw from external data and what other people are doing that you can then learn on even if you don't have your own baseline great thank you another question that popped in again looking at different industry sectors is social listening a valid tool for insights within charity sector I think it can be yes it would obviously depend on your charity name sometimes because there are some that are easier to track than others for example cancer research if your company was just called cancer research then that could be hard to narrow down but by looking at what people are talking about both about your charity yourself potentially using your at handle but then also about the area in general so if it was cancer or maybe Alzheimer's care or a hospice using those keywords can really help you understand what people are talking about in the industry and if there's anything that you should do so it might be they might not be mentioning your brand in particular but actually when they're talking about that particular topic there's some keywords that come up and this can teach you you might want to talk about that more are there questions that you can answer or problems that you can help with it might be there's an issue that people are facing and you learning that and seeing what people are talking about both positively and negatively can help you decide what you're going to write content on even what you do as a company or what your next project is going to be on right thank you another question we've had just come in is asking how much data would you say you need to be able to identify a trend and do you have recommendations for optimal campaign links on social media in terms of how much data you need it can depend on what kind of data it is so for example if you're looking at customer data then you would need more people if you just have three people you can't really tell a trend from that it's normally I'd say at least 100 people you'd want in order to be able to start to see what is working but obviously the more the better ideally over a thousand but I know that's not always possible sorry Pippo it was the second half of that question again and do you have recommendations for optimal campaign links on social media that will depend on what type of campaign it actually is your running and what platform it's on is trend based that will depend on what kind of trend it is is it a reactive post that you will only really have three days or is it something that's more longer to do our performance team are afraid we'll be able to give you a much better answer so if you'd like to email me I can get in touch with them and see if they can give you something more concrete but normally I would say at least a few weeks if possible for something this gives you time to really it lets systems test and learn so all systems whether that is Facebook, Instagram, TikTok they'll see what's working and begin to serve the ads to better people so and people that are more in your target audience based on what they do so giving it actually time to work helps you perform better helps you look at the insight and see what is working in order to give the most time and the most budget to the people who are really your target audience it's great thank you and I think we've probably got time for one more we've had a question what is the best way to measure brand sentiment well one of the great ways to measure brand sentiment is again through social listening so various tales allow you to see how are people talking about you when they're mentioning you are they being negative, are they being positive are they being neutral so that might just be saying oh yes CIM is a company whereas you can tell if they are being positive or if they are talking about you in a more negative or drug-stufli way this can help you see what brand sentiment is about you you can also use certain tales such as YouGuff this is better for larger companies they track brand sentiment and also brand fame so you can see how many people know you and also if they like you or dislike you this again it's only for bigger companies but it's a great way of seeing overall fame and sentiment whereas if you're smaller and so you're not on the list of who YouGuff tracks then social listening is the best way to do this thanks Isabel that's great we've had some really good questions so thank you for taking the time to answer those and go through them with us unfortunately that's all we've got time for today I would like to thank Isabel once again and also the CIM Scotland committee for organising the webinar so that just leaves me to say a final thank you for joining us today we do hope you've enjoyed the webinar take care everyone and we look forward to seeing you again soon