Social media platforms are a very important arena for consumers to speak about brands that affect their lives. That’s why Haleon assembled an in-house team to own social media for his or her many over-the-counter products.
Haleon was created last 12 months out of a three way partnership between GSK’s and Pfizer’s consumer products, which include Advil, Excedrin, Robitussin, Tums and other household brands.
The company assembled an in-house team to make use of social media intelligence, or “social intelligence” — tools and techniques to know what customers are saying about brands and leverage that intelligence to spice up marketing efforts.
Dig deeper: Social media marketing guide for brands
First, Haleon needed to define social media intelligence. It can mean various things in numerous organizations, so it’s vital for every business to ascertain goals and advantages derived from social intelligence operations.
“Social intelligence is folding in all these different data sources and really attempting to determine what this data is definitely going to do and what [it] tell us,” said Danny Gardner, analytics manager U.S. and North America social intelligence lead for Haleon, at The MarTech Conference.
Gardner and his team consider social intelligence as a more sophisticated version of social media monitoring and listening. Instead of just tracking different topics that customers are talking about on social platforms, social intelligence draws insights from this data and ties the insights to marketing actions.
“Why does the business need to have social intelligence?” Gardner asked. “At its core, it’s insights. We’re capable of act on this data and get to insights faster than another team in the corporate.”
Brands that gather social intelligence have access to consumer opinions about their very own products and likewise the competition. They also gain feedback about marketing campaigns and might learn more about their audience.
Another good thing about social media intelligence is checking out where consumers say they’re purchasing products. For Haleon, knowing if customers are talking about buying Advil at a Costco or through a web based retailer helps the corporate develop an ecommerce strategy.
If consumers are speaking negatively a couple of brand on social, knowing this will help the brand execute a crisis management strategy, said Gardner.
Four social media intelligence categories
Social media is an unlimited space, and listening to it intelligently means having clear categories or “buckets” for the information.
Gardner and his team established 4 important buckets of information they wanted to collect through social channels. They wanted to investigate and gain insights from social conversions that related to their very own portfolio of brands, competitor brands, broader topics related to using these products, and “macro and cultural” trends.
“There are numerous trends that go on and things that occur in society that we’ve realized our consumers care loads more about than our brands, and rightfully so,” said Gardner. “And so we took it upon ourselves years ago to construct this into our remit.”
Building and scaling social media
Although Haleon only went live as a corporation in 2022, their marketing strategy, including their approach to social intelligence, has been years within the making.
Here’s a timeline of the steps they took to implementing social intelligence tools and techniques.
“There was this massive discovery phase around what data is out there, how can we get to it, what does data mining seem like, what vendors exist and what are their capabilities,” Gardner explained. “It was actually a pair years before I used to be hired that they began constructing the case that, hey, we actually think we’d give you the chance to do that in-house.”
Haleon also debated the professionals and cons of constructing versus buying their solution, and eventually wound up deciding on a collection of social intelligence tools developed by Meltwater.
Piloting social media intelligence in the course of the pandemic
Just as Haleon was able to test pilot a few of their social media intelligence capabilities, the world modified. During the primary years of the COVID-19 pandemic, many consumers upped their use of digital channels to buy products and self-educate.
“We got here out of our 12 month pilot, and at the top of the tunnel was COVID-19,” said Gardner. “And so this definitely accelerated the demand and interest for what social listening was and really catapulted us into the limelight…Social media was sort of the go-to for questions [consumers] didn’t have answers to.”
He added, “So on the time this is definitely what inspired this macro trend tracking capability and we now know we will do this gorgeous well around our brands.”
As a result, Haleon has a greater understanding of how consumers feel about their roster of brands. And they’ll join the conversation on larger issues in a way that’s relevant to their customers.
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