Data Organization Tips To Optimize Your Next Social Media Marketing Campaign

Data is the backbone of any effective marketing campaign, these data organization tips will help keep you from choking on too much data. 

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Effective social media strategies are data-driven. The downside of data is that it can be overwhelming.

Data can help you reach a new audience, set new marketing goals, and tailor your content to improve your reach and engagement. Data can be collected in real-time too, so you can see exactly what your target audience is thinking at any given moment. 

However, many marketing departments collect too much data and are seized by analysis paralysis. If you find yourself routinely bogged down by metrics like bounce rate and cost per acquisition (CPA), then you may need a new data organization strategy. 

An effective data organization strategy can help you identify trends quicker than your competitors. You’ll also gain a better understanding of your target audience, as you won’t have to sift through dead or unqualified leads that clog up your CRM. 

Fortunately, optimizing your data organization is relatively straightforward. Parse out the unqualified leads, and strive to create databases that inspire clarity, rather than confusion. 

How Can Data Organization Help?

Let’s not beat around the bush: re-organizing your data will be time-consuming and require a great amount of effort. Depending on the size of your business, reorganizing all of your data could take days or weeks. 

However, taking the time to optimize your data will greatly improve the efficiency of your social media marketing campaigns and give you a greater ROI on all future marketing efforts. 

Currently, poorly organized data costs US businesses an average of an average $12.9 million per year. Without realizing it, poorly organized data is costing you leads and reducing your revenue. Confusing or unwieldy data means that you’re the last to respond to trends, and can’t benefit from first-mover advantages. 

Optimized data sets, on the other hand, gives you a leg up on the competition. You’ll be able to track your KPIs more accurately, too, meaning your operational efficiency will skyrocket in the weeks and months to come. 

You’ll also be able to reduce your costs and channel more funds toward your most effective social media strategies. Optimizing your data allows you to compare the effectiveness of the influencers you work with, so you can choose who to keep on and who to move away from next quarter. 

Where and When to Collect Data

Effective data organization starts long before a single “like” or “comment” is left on your page. You need to create a clear plan for data collection that aligns with your KPIs, social media strategy, and long-term marketing goals. This plan will help you decide where and when to collect data and improve the quality of the data sets that you chose to store. 

The Fundamentals

Start by collecting basic data across all of your social channels. At a minimum, collect freely available data like: 

• Reach and engagement; 
• Impressions and views;
• Follower growth;
• Demographic data of followers.

These basic data sets are a good indicator of the overall health of your social media pages. They don’t take long to record either, and can quickly bolster your understanding of the market. 

Data Collection That Gives You the Edge

Fundamental data sets like follower growth and impressions are great ways to measure the overall efficacy of your marketing campaigns. 

However, if you want to beat the competition, you’ll need to collect more complex data sets, too. 

Start with key metrics like Social Share of Voice (SSoV). SSoV measures your brand’s presence compared to competitors. It can be used to improve your visibility and help you gather a portion of the total market share.

When collecting data for SSoV, consider turning away data from sources that you know to be unreliable. For example, if you have a large Facebook following, but find that Facebook routinely produces underqualified leads, then exclude Facebook from your SSoV calculations. Instead, collect data from platforms that produce more qualified leads like Instagram or TikTok. 

You’ll also need to respond to the latest social media trends. 

Collecting from traditional venues like Instagram and Facebook is fine, but many influencers are turning to short-form venues like Youtube Shorts or TikTok. Likewise, some of today’s biggest influencers now live stream or produce their own podcasts. Stay up to date with the latest trends to reach new audiences and connect with influencers that competitors may overlook. 

Parsing Out Data

We’ve all been guilty of collecting more data than we can actually use. It’s always tempting to store every insight possible, just in case it can be of use in the future. However, hoarding too much data will slow down your operations and reduce the efficacy of your marketing efforts.

You can overcome analysis paralysis by parsing out data as it arrives in your CRM. Use your goals to pick out useful data from useless data. Your goals will guide your analysis and will give you a clear direction when considering which data to keep and which to set aside. 

Similarly, there’s no use in gathering dirty data. Dirty data refers to data that is incomplete, incorrect, duplicated, or outdated. Most CRMs have inbuilt notifications that are designed to help you spot dirty data and prevent you from storing it. Consider switching programs if your CRM isn’t actively helping you reduce the amount of dirty data you collect. 

Data Mining Existing Sets

Data mining helps you identify historic trends and cleans up the data you have on file. You can mine your own data, but many marketing professionals choose to bring in third-party data consultants or use data management software to help speed up the process. 

Audit Your Data

Start by auditing existing data. Mining unreliable or dirty data will yield inaccurate results and render your efforts all but pointless. 

If you aren’t a data analysis expert, bring in an external auditor who is trained to spot issues with data sets. They’ll be able to identify issues like: 

• Repeated data;
• Incomplete data;
• Anomalous data;
• Organizational issues.

A great auditor will also be able to present data in new, insightful ways. This can help you break down your analysis and glean valuable insights. 

Using Clean Data 

Once you have “clean” data, decide how you want to break it down. 

Consider which insights are most valuable to you and your next social media marketing campaign. Are there some data sets that are the most likely to impact your bottom line? 

Consider starting with metrics like: 

• Click-through rate;
• Conversion rate;
• Reach, engagement, and growth;
• Cost-per-click.

These metrics are useful when analyzing historical data, as some metrics — like virality rate — change over time due to a shifting social media landscape. 

Try to pair these historic insights with the campaign that was running at the time, but be aware that market trends will likely dictate the efficacy of future marketing campaigns. 

Re-Organizing Your CRM

Cleaning up your historic data is a large undertaking. You don’t want to make the same mistakes going forward, and should actively re-organize your CRM to optimize your figures and minimize the amount of dirty or useless data you store. 

Optimize your organization process by: 

• Minimize the amount of labor required to create/pull up leads;
• Add tags to new leads before they are stored on your CRM;
• Use AI programs that automatically analyze data points based on the tags you use;
• Remove filters that don’t help you achieve your goals.

Consider reaching out to other departments if you’re looking for new ways to store and present CRM data. Other departments may have unique, useful ways to store data that can benefit your next social media marketing campaign. 

Spreadsheets for Integrated Insights

Some marketers love nothing more than a clean, well-organized spreadsheet; others couldn’t imagine anything worse than spending an afternoon creating pie charts or inputting calculations into cells. 

However, as a marketing professional, you will need to store some insights on spreadsheet programs like Excel or Google Sheets. Optimize the process by: 

• Use your strategic goals to determine which data is useful; 
• Remove any data that doesn’t align with your long term goals;
• Utilize cloud storage if you’re worried about deleting data that could be useful in the future;
• Use spreadsheets to track data that doesn’t exist on your CRM (project timelines, budgets, market share, etc).

Storing data on spreadsheet software can help you achieve your goals and see the “big picture” of your performance. 

Spreadsheets are also useful tools when you need to present data to stakeholders. As a marketing manager, you have to justify your strategy and should use data to do so. Presenting the data you gather in user-friendly charts gives users the ability to assess your performance and green-light future campaigns.

Social Listening and Data Integration

A squeaky-clean data set can speed up your decision-making and help you assess the effectiveness of your current social media campaigns. But how, exactly, should you use your newly optimized data? 

Optimized consumer data is already a powerful standalone tool. However, you can maximize the effectiveness of your data by comparing the social figures you gather with a robust social listening program. 

Social listening programs go beyond the usual metrics and allow you to proactively respond to market trends. 

Social listening allows you to “hear” the conversation that is happening about your brand, competitors, or the industry you are in. This gives you a better understanding of your target audience and allows you to make decisions based on prediction rather than reaction. 

You can pair your social listening program with optimized data by “listening” for relevant keywords and hashtags. 

Use your existing data to identify the metrics that are most important for your business. Additionally, look out for mentions of your handle, as well as campaign names or the buzzwords that are most used in your industry.

Data Organization on a Budget

If you work for a smaller business, you may find that paying for a CRM or transferring data to spreadsheets isn’t a justifiable use of capital or time. Fortunately, you can use the analytic tools that are built into sites like Instagram and TikTok.

• Utilize TikTok’s “Trend Discovery” page to identify popular sounds and hashtags when creating new posts.
• Become an active user on social media sites like TikTok to get a deeper understanding of audience expectations.
• Use Meta’s social analytics suite to identify posts that perform well. 
• Use your best-performing posts as a template for future content.
• Break down your follower demographic and create posts that align with your audience’s motivations.

Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have free, user-friendly analytic suites that help you gather useful insights. 

These analytic suites are useful, but you should still download and store the insights you gather. This ensures you have access to historic data that may be useful as your business grows. 

Conclusion

Every marketing department worth its salt uses data to make strategic decisions and assess the effectiveness of its campaigns. However, most data sets quickly become muddled with “dirty” data and poor-quality leads. 

You can optimize your data by auditing historic figures and cleaning up your current data collection practices. Parse out any useless data before it hits your CRM and add useful tags to the data that you want to use. 

Pair your newly optimized data with a social listening program to track user preferences and improve your ability to predict market trends. 

If you’re working on a limited budget, scale down your operations by using inbuilt features that effectively organize basic social analytics.