United States

AI adoption is no longer the challenge—trusted context is. Most organizations have AI tools, but many still rely on disconnected, stale, or unverified data, limiting the quality and trustworthiness of AI-generated outputs. Meltwater MCP brings trusted, real-time intelligence into AI assistants.

Your Best Context is Already in the Room

Today, PR teams aren’t just tracking media coverage and share of voice. They’re also measuring how their brand shows up in AI-generated answers, search summaries, and large language models (LLMs). This new LLM visibility layer is quickly becoming a critical part of PR performance.

15 Must-Have PR KPIs and How to Track Them

See how one platform can power every decision across PR, communications, and marketing.

The Meltwater Blog

Blog Topics: Generative Engine Optimization, Media Intelligence, Media Relations, Social Listening, Consumer Intelligence, Influencer Marketing

Find out how you can leverage Facebook to boost your brand's online presence and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

Facebook Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage Instagram to boost your brand's visual appeal and gain a competitive edge. Explore our category page today!

Instagram Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage LinkedIN to grow your professional network and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

LinkedIn Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage TikTok to elevate your brand with creative content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

TikTok Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage X / Twitter to engage your audience effectively and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

X / Twitter Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage YouTube to create engaging video content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

YouTube Blog | Meltwater

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is transforming how brands show up in AI-powered search. Explore insights, strategies, and best practices to help your content rank and resonate across conversational engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

Explore insights and strategies for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to help your brand stay visible and discoverable in AI-powered search.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Blog Collection | Meltwater

Every day billions of conversations take place on social media: tweets, posts, comments, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and much more.
Learn how to use social listening to make sense of all of that data.

On our social listening category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around social listening and social media monitoring. Read more.

Social Listening Blogs | Category

Business Reputation Management: What does it take to add reputation management to your marketing strategy? More importantly, how do you keep your reputation sparkly and shiny? Here’s your all-access guide to online reputation management for the long term.

On our reputation management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around business reputation management. Read more.

Reputation Management Blogs | Category

From your brand's logo to your website, your social media presence to your customer support—these elements combined are what constitutes a brand in the minds of customers. But, there are thousands of other businesses that have a logo, website, social media presence, and website. So, how can you position your business on the market and make it stand out from the competition?
The key to success is branding & brand management!

On our brand management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around brand management. Build your strategy and reach your goals!

Brand Management Blogs | Category

Competitive intelligence and the act of collecting competitive data can be seen as growth drivers for a company. Our guide will help you understand the concept of competitive intelligence (CI) by answering questions such as: What is the definition of competitive intelligence? How is competitive intelligence useful to organizations? What is the goal of competitive intelligence? And more.

On our competitive intelligence category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around competitive intelligence. Learn how to stay ahead.

Competitive Intelligence Blogs | Category

Let’s dive into the customer journey framework and how to optimize the process by creating a customer journey map and using metrics that matter when analyzing the customer journey.

On our customer journey category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Customer Journey Blogs | Category

What Is Data Analytics?
How can I grow my business? 
How do customers interact with my newly launched product?
How do I increase the productivity of my employees?
How do I know if my marketing efforts are working?
We have just two words for you...Data analytics!

On our data analytics category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around AI and data analytics. Technical and still easy to understand.

AI & Data Analytics Blogs | Category

Public relations and media relations can add impact to any marketing strategy. It’s an opportunity for brands to grow their reach beyond traditional sales messages. PR helps to shape the image you want people to have of your brand.
So, what is PR and how do you use it? This guide shows you everything you need to know to build a strong public relations foundation.

On our public relations (PR) category page, you find all our blogs covering public relations and communications topics. Step up your PR game.

Public Relations (PR) Blogs | Category

We all know exactly what the roles of sales or accounting are in a company, right? We might even have a slight idea of what the IT guys are doing.
But there is another business discipline, that plays a crucial role in organizations, even more so during the pandemic – internal communications!
But what exactly do we mean by that, what purpose does it serve and what steps can you take to ensure you and your employees will communicate effectively?

On our internal communications category page, you find all our blogs about internal comms topics. Learn about the intranet, internal newsletters, and more.

Internal Communications Blogs | Category

As the internet has taken root in more areas of our lives — everything from entertainment to shopping to paying bills and more — traditional marketing is becoming less impactful. As any marketer knows, you need to focus on where your audience is if you want to reach them. Since the average person spends about seven hours a day online, it’s no surprise that content has maintained its hold on marketers.
Here's a closer look at what content marketing is and why it matters more than ever in our digital-first economy.

On our content marketing category page, you find blogs about content marketing topics. Learn about strategies, KPIs, tips, and more. Make your content king!

Content Marketing Blogs | Category

The rise of the influencer marketing space – today a $10 billion industry, growing 50% per year – is one of the clearest examples of how social media is transforming traditional marketing. These days having a business website, presence on social, PR coverage, and your own content isn’t enough to compete.
We'll dive into the intricacies of influencer marketing to help ensure that you're equipped with the insights needed to be successful in this space.

On our influencer marketing category page, you find blogs about influencer marketing topics. Build your strategy, find influencers, and measure results.

Influencer Marketing Blogs | Category

Have you just launched a new product or service that you want to get the word out about? Maybe you want to share with consumers why it is awesome and how it is so much better than the one your competitors offer.
Well, then, there is one thing you can't do without...Marketing!

On our marketing category page, you find blogs about marketing topics. Learn about all the different angles and types of marketing and improve your results.

Marketing Blogs | Category

In this guide, we want to give you a peek into the definition of social media management, the daily schedule of a social media manager, social media platforms to promote your business, and the do’s & don’ts of social media management.
Are you ready to begin the journey of becoming a social media superstar?

On our social media management category page, you find blogs about social media management topics. Build and manage your online community.

Social Media Management Blogs | Category

Building a following and using social media platforms to reach a wider audience requires a well-planned social media marketing strategy. In this guide, we’ll be looking at why social media marketing is so essential and how you can make it work for your business.

On our social media marketing category page, you find blogs about social media marketing topics. Learn how to get the highest paid social ROI!

Social Media Marketing Blogs | Category

In the fast-evolving realm of digital marketing and public relations, utilizing the right tools is crucial for success. Our interdisciplinary category showcases all the pertinent tools for digital marketing & PR. These tools help in enhancing your online presence and effectively reaching target groups, whether through reputation management, influencer marketing, or social media management.

On our digital marketing and PR tools category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Digital Marketing & PR Tools Blogs | Category

Media monitoring helps organizations stay informed about what’s being said across online news, print, broadcast, podcasts, and other media channels. Whether you're tracking brand mentions, measuring PR performance, monitoring competitors, or identifying emerging trends, our expert guides, best practices, and industry insights will help you build a smarter media monitoring strategy and make more informed communications decisions.

Discover expert media monitoring guides, best practices, and industry insights to track brand mentions, monitor competitors, and stay ahead of the news.

Media Monitoring: Guides, Best Practices & Industry Insights

Instagram is more than just a social network for beautiful photos and influencers. With more than one billion monthly active users, Instagram is the perfect place for brands to showcase their products, generate leads, and build their business.

The very first thing a person sees when visiting your profile is your Instagram bio. Writing a compelling Instagram bio that grabs your audience's attention should be a main focus when creating or updating your profile.

If you're looking to increase Instagram engagement and exponentially grow your Instagram followers, this guide is for you. 

At a high level, writing a good Instagram bio consists of your adding your brand's name, username, profile photo, bio, and Instagram Stories highlights. Each of these elements should verbally and visually communicate a compelling brand message.

I'll assume you have the basics of creating an Instagram business profile down, such as adding your brand's name and username. The real fun begins with the all of the other features that Instagram offers, which we'll cover below. 

With a perfectly crafted bio, you can target your ideal audience so any new visitors will be able to quickly understand what your brand does, the product you sell, and what you stand for—all in 150 characters or less.

4 Steps to Writing the Perfect Instagram Bio (with Examples)

There are unlimited possibilities when it comes to writing the perfect bio for your Instagram profile. That's why I've picked a few of my favorite brands to demonstrate several proven strategies.

This is the go-to Instagram bio strategy for millions of brands for good reason. The 150 characters provided in the Bio section is a chance to tell the world why they should care. Your mission statement is the why and it doesn't have to be over-complicated or wordy.

Fashion brand @buckmason uses 3 simple words in their Instagram bio, but it immediately highlights the products and why people should care.

The financial platform @robinhoodapp, on the other hand, uses the bio to communicate important information about their business that might be pertinent to investors (i.e., their target market). 

One practical way to use the Bio section is to include a branded hashtag. This allows your audience to discover more great branded content, while creating a strong community in the process.

Since attention, time, and space on Instagram are limited, this is a great strategy to implement while you are running a campaign or promotion using a specific hashtag. It also provides an opportunity to increase social proof by curating a collection of user-generated content for your audience to browse through.

@allmodern uses the space to promote usage of their branded hashtag #ItsAllModern while also offering the chance to be featured on their profile.

Emojis are a great way to engage with your audience using a social media publishing tool because they are visual, fun, and expressive. Using emoji in your Instagram bio helps to express a casual communication style that helps to connects with audiences of all types.

Added bonus that emoji take up less characters than words, enabling you to add extra info about your brand that the character count wouldn’t allow for with text. When using emoji, be sure to emphasize key points in your content, or use them as bullet points to break up the text. 

@alo features a few emojis that not only compliment the written text, but also their brand style and personality.

Including a simple call-to-action in your Instagram bio and inviting your audience to comment, engage, or click can have a big impact on the success of your Instagram marketing. For example, if you want profile visitors to click on a particular link, create a compelling offer in the "Bio" section and link to the offer in the "Website" URL section. 

This strategy is used by thousands of top brands every single day. And the best part is you can continue to update your "Bio" and "Website" sections to match whatever current campaign or promotion you are running.

At @meltwater, we use the Instagram "Bio" and "Website" sections to help raise awareness around product launches and important company initiatives, such as the latest Aurora Product Release.

Thoughts on the Perfect Professional Instagram Bio

As this article highlights, there are an infinite amount of creative ways to write an Instagram bio to drive results on Instagram. Each section of the bio comes together to create a fun, yet professional look and feel for your brand.

Remember, your Instagram bio shouldn't remain static. Shake it up. Experiment. Try out different emojis, formats, CTAs, links, promotions, and more.

Once your bio is in order, read up on Instagram marketing strategies in our comprehensive Instagram ebook. You'll get expert insight on how the algorithm works, how to use hashtags, and what it takes to create an Instagram-specific marketing strategy.

How to Write the Perfect Professional Instagram Bio

Classic demographics like age and gender – despite being tried and tested for years – appear to be losing their popularity among marketers as the most common form of segmentation. The shift in use of audience insights over more generic targeting options such as demographic information is happening as a result of the wealth of customer data now available.

During this article, I’ll cover the rise of audience data, why brands are ditching demographics, how they’re leveraging audience insights, and the results they’re reaping by doing so.

Demographics is the study of a population based on factors such as age, race, and sex, it also refers to socio-economic information such as employment, education, income, marriage rates, birth and death rates.

The challenge with classic demographics is they use broad characteristics to group people and such assumptions make them superficial.

Segmenting your audience based on their real (and not theoretical) behaviour is a much more precise way of targeting. Traditionally, tracking intent was difficult to do, which is why we’re used to leveraging demographics for lack of a better alternative. However, thanks to technology advancements such as the internet, social media, big data, predictive analytics and artificial intelligence, marketers can now equip themselves with the intent tools needed to track such behaviours.

When we consider the fact that the average person shares around 9 pieces of content online each day, the digital breadcrumbs left behind are vast.

Savvy brands are looking towards social media to piece the breadcrumbs together and build more reliable profiles of their target market, better predict their next move and optimise the customer journey and targeting capabilities. Consumer Insights Tools like Meltwater's consumer insights solution provide you with such data.

Examples of audience insights you can track based on social media behaviour

Personality traits e.g. their tendency to be compassionate and cooperative towards others

Affiliated companies and media e.g. the TV channels and shows that your audience show interest in

Online conversations and opinion leaders that influence decision making

Purchase influence factors, e.g. whether they prefer using credit cards for shopping or are likely to respond to targeted advertising

When the audience is most active online e.g. days and times

2019 saw a number of large companies’ holt solely using demographics in a bid to move from “wasteful” mass marketing to mass one-to-one brand building by targeting people with similar characteristics. That’s not to say demographics are dead or that psychographics will eliminate them, rather, they complement one another to create a more robust picture of consumer types and behaviour intent.

I’ve included some of the leading brands championing audience insights below, as well as the results they’ve seen by doing so.

As part of a drive to modernise its marketing spend, this year P&G announced a shift in priority: moving away from traditional mass marketing methods towards smarter audience segmentation.

CEO, David Taylor, explained how the company is using the +1 billion consumer IDs they’ve amassed globally to build audience segments and serve messages to people who have similar characteristics such as behaviours, mindsets and P&G products. P&G’s data management platform contains anonymous audience data on 90% of the population. In an analytics learning lab, the company combines the audience data with purchase data to generate granular views of consumer habits. The database also enables advanced programmatic media buying that finds people with the highest propensity to buy.

Taylor comments: We are going from generic demographic targeting, like women aged 18 to 35, to more than 350 precise smart audiences, like first-time mums, millennial professionals or first-time washing machine owners… we will get more accomplished at performance marketing to serve people messages that meet their needs.

It has been reported that P&G owned skincare brand, Olay, used smart audiences to reach 65 million high potential users, more than the generic audience of “women ages 25-54,” and spent 10% less with 20% higher sales growth by doing so.

Taylor’s aim is to create campaigns that “clear the highest bar for creative brilliance, sparking conversations, changing behaviour and sometimes defining popular culture.” He believes understanding consumers is the key to making the smart audience approach, stating, “We start with understanding consumers then creating ads that make people think, talk, laugh, cry, smile, share and, of course, buy.”

In a bid to connect more meaningfully with their audience, we also saw Danone outline a plan to park demographics in favour of social data, analytics and technology to more sharply target marketing activities. 

Instead of demographics, Chief Strategy and Insights Officer, Elaine Rodrigo, explains how Danone now starts with a data-driven approach to understand people segments, or ‘tribes’ as they refer to them, which are identified and defined by their ‘passion points’, ie behaviours and interests. “These are people with meaningful similarities” explains Rodrigo. “You identify, you create content, you measure. It’s an iterative learning process which feeds back, and then you realise that some worked, and some didn't, so then we know which of the tribes actually means something to your brand and you keep them, keep learning and going deeper.”

Danone’s water brand, Volvic, saw great success from segmenting their audience into 16 different tribes. They used data to identify important micro-moments for each tribe and then created personalised messages that resonated with their intent.

Each micro audience had their own short-form bumper ad on YouTube communicating their ‘own personal volcano’, for example, music lovers might see a “Turn Up The Volume” creative, while highlights from the week’s Premier League games were prefaced with an “Until The Final Whistle” message for football fans. By avoiding mass blasting ad campaigns and opting for precision targeting, Volvic was able to increase brand recall by a staggering 40%, further cementing the critical role of the three Ts in terms of user data and storytelling: Trends, Tribes, and Tales.

Broadband and telecommunications provider, Telefónica, previously struggled to engage a relevant audience in the Spanish and Latin American market. To overcome this challenge, they built segments of relevant social media users and then divided them by location, level of activity, keywords and how they’re likely to respond to promoted Tweets.

As a result of the strategic insights found from segmenting, they successfully served them with paid personalised messages, helping to optimise the quality of followers, as well as reduce the cost per follower. In fact, they saw an increase of 30,000 new followers, who are more active, followed, and relevant than organically reached ones.

It’s refreshing to see that Fortune 500 brands are acknowledging that the generic, unsophisticated targeting practices of yesteryear are no longer fit for purpose in an age of big data. Interested in learning more about your tribes and the moments that matter to them? Meltwater has the data and insights. FIll out the form below and we'll show you!

Why Brands Are Ditching Demographics in Favour of Audience Insights

Passionate marketing and social media strategists often find creative ways to approach their particular discipline. But many of them are looking for insightful ways to face the daily challenge of collating useful data.  

Most companies still rely on basic demographic data from platforms such as Facebook, which can offer helpful starting points. But these initial data-sets aren’t enough to make a significant impact on the success of strategy and campaign roll-out. 

The challenge here is overcoming the tendency to rely on just demographic data, and drawing premature insights from this, instead of combining that data with sociographic dimensions. 

The graphs above are a familiar sight to every social media strategist by now. It’s a quick overview of content performance on Facebook, offering basic insight into community size and growth, content reach and engagement when compared to previous time periods. 

You would also have a view into the performance of the competitors you identify and set, based on a few limiting metrics. Many companies use the business tool and other social software to gain greater insights and to automate reporting – but is that really enough to achieve something remarkable with your strategies? 

At the end of that process, what do you really know about your audience(s)? 

How are you identifying key traits and behaviours, and creating content accordingly? 

Do you see the value in rich demographic analyses and, if so, are you gathering enough insight to actually do these?

For most marketing teams, these questions begin to show huge holes in audience insight strategies and how we target content, identify competitors, stay part of the conversations about our brand and align with the right influencers and consumers. 

With so much information available to us as a community, we need to harness this in order to improve every facet of our marketing plan. 

The simple is answer: create easy-to-consume but data-rich consumer insights reports and have the right mechanisms in place to achieve this.

There are different consumer insights tools and companies that you can choose from. For example, take a look at the Meltwater consumer insights tool as well as the Meltwater consumer intelligence platform.

Meltwater’s Audience Insight Reports go further in that they

Segment the total audience based on the communities who follow each other.

Pull up information about the parent companies.

Do comparative analyses, look at common personality traits, online habits, commonalities in interests and keywords. 

Identify the influencers who these different segments follow. 

Understand the content users are engaging with to help you resonate with different segments and advertising platforms and speak to the different segments. 

Identify brands that can influence that segment and find partnership opportunities. Which brands have the closest affinities with certain segments? If, for example, you are the Manchester United Football Club and you’re starting a partnership with Adidas, you can see which of your players are most followed by people who also follow Adidas. 

Help you find a direct tie-in to these individuals on Twitter. Understand the content that’s resonating with these users.

Give you the chance to create tailored content for each segment.

Export all of these different segments and then use them in Sysomos to do some audience-centric social listening and understand them beyond keywords.

You can listen in on the conversation and get a sense of what they’re talking about and understand where you can contribute to the conversation. 

Essentially, audience profiling is crucial to the discovery process. By creating a socio-affinity “portrait” of your audiences you can begin to combine their socio-demographics behaviours, and gain insights from their interactions. While the science of segmenting an audience is never a perfect one, it can go a long way in expanding our understanding as marketers. In fact, 80% of marketing professionals say that audience profiling is a challenge, which shows that understanding consumers can be a stumbling block.

Profiling tools are crucial to the success of your campaigns

A profiling tool can help give you insight into various audience segments. With the Meltwater software, you can get an idea of how an audience is profiled.

From the example above, if we look at Spiderman fans worldwide, we can quickly establish where they are located, what languages they predominantly speak and what other interests, competencies and demographics they share, in a single view. There is also the opportunity to dive deeper into the data.

Looking at a more centralised dashboard, we can also see socio-graphic information, influencers and brands followed, interests, media preferences, content tracked and personality and behavioural traits.

We are also aware of more intricate details, like the type of device used, favourite social media platforms, publication preferences, days and hours of activity, types of content consumed, participation in events and more about the navigational behaviour of our audiences.

From a market research perspective, we can actually work with the target demographic and understand what those people are talking about. We can also understand the audiences of your competitors. Are they more successful than you at marketing to a certain gender or age range? You can find out where there are opportunities for competitive intrusion and take some of that market share back. 

So, Audience Insight Reports are crucial to any marketing discovery because you can easily see the reach of monthly publications as well as your social audience.

Collate audience insights and put them to good use

This is a particularly useful approach for those of us who have the room to create experimental marketing strategies and execute them on the data we collect. 

Each group is going to have a specific group of influencers who influence that segment

Find the influencers followed by the most people in that segment – “affinities”

Understand from a uniqueness standpoint (which are most unique to each segment). This can help you identify micro-influencers who might be more cost-effective but still powerful.

It’s also a perfect fit for search and paid media professionals who want to profile very specific users and target paid media and search campaigns to a very specific demographic or persona. 

There is a plugin that allows you to segment audiences and advertise directly to those people on Twitter with promoted tweets. This is a great way to cut through the noise and show them content that only they see. 

PR and communications professionals can use audience insights to find publications and personalities, and to create specific angles geared towards a target demographic. It’s also an important mechanism in terms of finding fitting influencers. 

Content curation is best when you can understand which content really resonates with people in different segments. See what people liked on Twitter, and get insights into the personality of these personas. You can even see purchasing habits and the social channels they are most active on. 

This allows you to craft a very tailored strategy, and allows you to identify all the people going after your brand so you can engage and respond to them.

Anyone who needs to understand the audiences who are talking about your brand and products should have some form of comprehensive audience insight. 

Most brands have multiple target segments. If, for example, you run basic insights on Budweiser Light, you will see three people who have mentioned the brand. One comes from the vantage point of the LGBTQ community, one association with Nascar and one with Game of Thrones. If you wanted to appeal to these three different people or connect with them, you’d need to identify these mentions and then speak to these individuals. 

It’s extremely time-consuming and labour intensive to manually connect with your audience. Go beyond the basics and really tap into the minds and behaviour of your consumers. Identify opportunities for better marketing strategies and empower your team to create more meaningful insight and data-driven campaigns, by prioritising insight.

Tip: Watch our free webinar about How to improve marketing with data-driven audience analysis to learn more.

Get in touch with us to learn more about gaining invaluable audience insights by filling out the form below! 

The Power of Audience Insights

COVID-19 has catalyzed vast changes in how we do business. Today, consumer behavior and activity has shifted almost completely to the digital space. eCommerce is up over 100%, social media usage has increased from pre-COVID levels on average 20% across channels, and nearly half of consumers believe that the changes in how they shop will sustain into the future. 

While COVID-19 certainly accelerated this “new normal”, these changes had been coming upon us before 2020, which suggests to those watching the trends that the new normal is here to stay, even as the world begins to ease lockdown restrictions.  

While budgets have been either preemptively or reactively reduced, and worried consumer bases consciously slowing their spending, marketers have been forced to quickly adapt to an unprecedented challenge with fewer resources. Fortunately, as the above stats show, people are creating and sharing content across social platforms at record numbers, and it’s these candid and intimate brand experiences - commonly referred to as user-generated content (UGC) - that consumers want and trust.

The trust consumers place in UGC is considerable - 90% of consumers reported that UGC has more influence over their decision making process than other forms of marketing, including search engine results. 

Looking ahead to a post-COVID-19 world, brands will also need to work harder than ever to earn and fortify consumer trust and the number one way to generate trust with consumers is through common, real experiences. Most customers will need validation that a larger base has re-engaged with a brands’ products or services before they physically step back into stores themselves, whether that means traveling, dining out, or enrolling in Universities. Authentic UGC can be a sustainable, cost-effective, and persuasive source of content that brands will need to help build trust, increase revenue, and strengthen their relationships with existing and would-be customers.

At the very least, COVID has afforded us a glimpse into each other’s lives. We see news reporters speaking from their home offices, we take zoom meetings with VPs at their kitchen tables, and this frankness and candor has allowed us all to communicate more directly, honestly, and openly, with each other and with customers. Marketers, through UGC, can leverage this shift in perspective and online behaviour through the content that their customers are already generating (at historically higher rates). This will not only reduce marketing costs but can also help to facilitate human connection, and will measurably increase conversions.

Meltwater has recently partnered with TINT, a UGC Management Platform to help brands humanize their marketing to build trust and increase conversions along every step of the customer journey.  With this partnership, Meltwater can now offer clients the option to publish UGC into any channel including websites, apps, screens, emails, or ads. Brands can now combine owned and earned in a curated way to display publicly across social channels, ads and other media types. Meltwater clients can source authentic user generated content across social media to generate new commercial opportunities and seamlessly handle rights management. And with Meltwater’s award winning AI and social analytics tools, brands can eliminate guesswork and manual processes by using image recognition and audience insights to surface highly engaging content curated to your brand that is most meaningful to your audience. 

If you’d like to learn more about incentivizing your customer base to create UGC that you can leverage for your brand, you can register for our upcoming webinar here. 

Leveraging UGC In a Post-COVID World

How Has Covid-19 Changed the Future of Marketing? 7 Expert Opinions

It’s no secret that we live in an increasingly digital world, but the COIVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this trend exponentially. According to Social Media Today, people have spent 20% more time in apps during this pandemic than they did during the same time period last year.

A similar study by DataReportal revealed that 4.57 billion people now use the internet, a 7% YoY increase. 

In addition to spending more time online and in apps, consumers’ online attitudes, behaviors, and purchasing habits have changed. According to Accenture, one of the new buying behaviors that has developed during this  “new normal” is that people are spending more online. 

So, what do these shifts in consumer behavior and attention mean for us marketers? How do we adapt in the long term? What changes need to be made to marketing strategies in the short term? And, how do you join the online conversation in an appropriate way? 

In this blog, we will hear seven industry experts’ answers to these questions as we explore how this pandemic has affected the future of the marketing industry.

Jenn Herman, Social Media and Instagram Marketing Expert, JennsTrends

Kate Adams, Vice President of Marketing, Drift

Connor Cirillo, Head of Conversational Marketing, HubSpot

Mark Kilens, Vice President of Content and Community, Drift

Lilach Bullock, Content Marketing and Social Media Expert

Michelle Garrett, Founder of Garrett Public Relations

Let’s take a look at what they had to say...

Jenn Herman, Social Media and Instagram Marketing Expert, JennsTrends 

Q: Will brands need to re-adjust their marketing strategy over the long-term in addition to the short-term changes we’re currently seeing? 

Jenn Herman: Some brands may and others may not. What COVID has taught many companies is that you have to be online to have those communications with your audience. And the longer this stretches out, the more this online and virtual connection becomes a part of our normal means of communicating. We'll likely see more companies offering online tutorials or virtual trainings or saving money on expensive live events in lieu of an online broadcast. For those companies that were already using social media strategically and consistently to connect with their audiences, they won't have to evolve very much to meet this demand and shift. But, for those brands that weren't relying on social media as a consistent means of communication, they are definitely going to have to examine their social media strategies to determine how they can be more effective. 

Q: What does this pandemic mean for your social media strategy?   

Jenn Herman: If your strategy has been casual at best, or if you didn't even have one, you're definitely going to want to change that. You'll need to determine WHY you really want to use social media first of all. Are you looking for brand awareness? Are you looking to build relationships and conversations? Are you looking to increase sales? Your goals may be one or more of these but until you know what you want to achieve with social media efforts, nothing you do will get you there. Once you know your "why", you can start figuring out your "how". If your goal is to increase online sales, that's great. But that doesn't mean every post is a sales promotion. Far from it. You'll need a mix of content that offers value to the audience (tutorials and tips). You'll need some fun "fluff" content meant purely to keep engagement (likes, etc.) up. You'll need trust-building content with stories about your brand, your employees, your product choices, etc. And then you can throw in the sales pitch. But if you don't have all the different pieces of content that keep your engagement up and serve your audience, they'll never see nor take action on those promotional posts you keep forcing out there. 

Q: What does this mean for the marketing industry as a whole?  

Jenn Herman: Marketers have to stop "marketing" and start talking. We've all seen how every commercial on tv right now is a generic intro of soft music followed by "in these unprecedented times" and "we're here for you" in some slight variation. But they're all the same. And people are over it. The brands that come out on social media and talk real and honest are those that are most likely to survive. The ones celebrating moms who are doing everything they did before and now 10 times more work—they're content is getting praise and getting shared. The more that brands can embrace the reality of what their audience is experiencing and create content and ads that speak to that reality, the more success they'll have overall, especially on social media. 

Kate Adams, Vice President of Marketing, Drift 

Q: How has COVID-19 changed the future of events?

Kate Adams: One thing I am trying to do now is create a bulletproof plan so that we don’t have to go through a giant revision in the future. There won’t be any in-person events planned for the rest of the year and beyond. 

When talking about the number of events, it’s a paradigm of quality and quantity. Event exhaustion happens in these giant five-day webinars. You have to figure out how to make it different to get attention. Why do I have to be here or listen to the on-demand version? 

The Meltwater Blog

How to Write the Perfect Professional Instagram Bio

Why Brands Are Ditching Demographics in Favour of Audience Insights

The Power of Audience Insights

Leveraging UGC In a Post-COVID World

How Has Covid-19 Changed the Future of Marketing? 7 Expert Opinions

The Daily Life of a Social Media Manager

How to Use Meltwater As a Research Tool

What Is Purpose-Driven Marketing?

5 Questions to Ask Before Your Brand Joins a Conversation

How to Ensure You Never Miss a Media Mention

Transforming PR Campaign Management

Artificial Intelligence in PR: Where We Are and Where We're Headed