Maximize Social Media
Effectiveness with Data Science
An Insurance Industry White Paper from Saama Technologies, Inc.
February 2014
Table of Contents
Executive Summary1
Social Media for Insurance2
Effective Usage of Social Media Data
2
The Ideal Social Media Solution4
Social Media Analytics in Saama’s Fluid Analytics Engine
5
Customer Engagement
6
Campaign Sentiment Analysis7
Topic Distributions9
Performance10
Maximizing Social Media Campaigns11
Conclusions
Learn More
Executive Summary
Social media campaigns can be used as an effective means to promote an insurer’s
brand and increase customer engagement. A common challenge for insurance carriers
is measuring the effectiveness and maximizing the ROI from such channels. In addition,
insurers need to consider how best to integrate social media as part of a larger marketing campaign. As the usage of social media continues to rise, insurance carriers need to
understand how best to leverage its power for their competitive advantage.
Saama Fluid Analytics Engine™ helps insurance carriers mine social media data and
provide contextual and prescriptive analytics vis-à-vis marketing campaign business
metrics.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Challenges in social media marketing
• Integrating social media campaign with traditional marketing campaigns
(direct & digital)
• Saama Fluid Analytics Engine-based» social media analytics & ROI model
1
Social Media for Insurance
Social media is no longer just used merely for connecting with friends and family. It has
become a powerful medium for reaching potential customers, influencing the market,
extending your brand and “listening” for informal feedback. In fact, it can be a very
powerful two-way communication tool. The increased usage of social media presents
unique opportunities and challenges for the insurance industry., which is still learning
how to best utilize social media.
To improve social media performance, insurance companies must assess their current
level of social media monitoring maturity and determine the technologies and
techniques that will best help them optimize their social media marketing strategy.
Effective Usage of Social Media Data
Among all the insurance carriers that are using social media channels, only 12% feel that
they are using them effectively. A large percentage of organizations have shown interest
in the use of social media, but have difficulty measuring the value and impact of social
media for advancing their business.
2
Businesses are looking to social media data to find
answers to these questions:
•
How are customers responding to the latest
advertising campaign in our market? How does
our campaign stack up against the competitor?
•
What are the valued service attributes in our
category?
•
Which messages are our competitors delivering in
the marketplace?
•
What are the comments that our public relations
team should address?
How accurately does the comment reflect upon
our brand?
•
How do we measure the added value of brand
reputation through our business partners?
•
What is the social media sentiment toward
the company?
3
Gartner’s 2013 U.S.
Digital Marketing
Spending Survey
found that
investments in
content creation and
social marketing
totaled 21% of digital
marketing budgets.
Forty-seven percent
of survey respondents
see content creation
and curation as the
top role of their social
marketing teams.
The Ideal Social Media Solution
A robust social media analytics solution should be capable of:
•
Measuring customer opinions and sentiments to identify positive and negative
aspects of the most discussed topics
•
Measuring social media engagement effectiveness based on customer sentiment
•
Identifying weaknesses and strengths to optimize and improve marketing
campaigns
•
Measuring conversational buzz and volume
•
Offering better customer insights to anticipate and prepare for customer needs,
wants and satisfaction
•
Combining data collection, text analytics, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and
dashboards into a single comprehensive solution
4
Social Media Analytics in Saama’s Fluid Analytics Engine
Saama’s Fluid Analytics Engine helps businesses synthesize, analyze and gain actionable
insights based on diverse data sources such as social media, syndicated data and other
unstructured data, as well as a company’s in-house data. Saama’s social media analytics
have the capability to identify the current state of a brand in social media and provide
actionable insights to business issues. The ability to discover customer sentiments,
uncover hidden trends and envision future opportunities is fundamental for insurers to
establish a successful social media strategy. To determine the type of analytics capabilities needed, insurers need to be aware of the technologies that are involved in the
complex areas of social media and analytics. Unlike standard business intelligence and
reporting, the integration of social media analytics opens up a wealth of data insights.
Gartner has observed many companies lacking social media strategies or
starting to build these strategies in 2012. To help with this, Gartner provides
these best practices to help companies avoid risks around social media and
drive greater returns from their social media initiatives.
Your strategy should:
• Stipulate how social media will be used
• Designate who is responsible for content creation
• Establish who will monitor the content
5
Customer Engagement
Millions of customer interactions are taking place daily in social media, which is
emerging as the next frontier for customer engagement and interaction. To benefit
from a competitive advantage, it is crucial for insurance companies to fully utilize their
collective social media data. Saama helps you investigate customer engagement by
measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns through tracking changes in
the volume and buzz of social media conversations. Our solution effectively uncovers
customer engagement insights by comparing the conversational volume and buzz
between campaign periods to support campaign engagement optimization.
6
Campaign Sentiment Analysis
To thoroughly grasp social media activity and impact,
insurance companies must have the capability to
listen to all the relevant social media channels. Saama’s
expertise in text analytics and natural language
processing can assist insurance companies with data
quality and organization into an appropriate structure
for analysis.
Customer sentiments are typically distributed in three
categories: Positive, neutral and negative. Customer
sentiments can be further represented by the following
emotions: Anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise.
The customer sentiment analysis can be combined
with internal data to produce additional insights into
customer and prospect behavior.
Saama’s analytics
solution is capable of
handling Big Data,
aggregating and
analyzing data from
multiple sources.
Off the shelf tools or
applications are
simply not able to
provide the same
quality of insights.
Net Promoter Score and Social Sentiment
Studies have shown that the use of social computing can have a positive effect on
customer loyalty, customer experience, customer satisfaction, positive recommendations
and sales.
7
Net Promoter Score (NPS), a common customer sentiment index, is based on a simple
survey that asks consumers to rate their customer service experience on a scale from
0-10. It measures the loyalty between a consumer and provider and helps answer how
likely it is that a consumer would recommend a company to a friend or colleague.
Based on their responses, customers can be classified into three groups: detractors,
passives and promoters:
detractors
rating = 0-6
passives
promoters
rating: 7-8
rating: 9-10
nps = % promoters – % detractors
Prior to the emergence of the social web, NPS was the best way to capture online
customer sentiment.
You can discover the true sentiment of your page by analyzing the frequency of positive
and negative comments, classifying them into social sentiments and looking into actual
comments for more insights. This analysis provides a more comprehensive measurement than traditional NPS for indicating how a company is performing with regards to
customer satisfaction. Tracking this over time allows you to more accurately measure the
effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and initiatives.
8
Topic Distributions
In addition to sentiment analysis, the ability to perform campaign topic distributions
for individual campaigns is a fundamental aspect of identifying areas that were well
received, as well as those areas needing improvement. Saama pinpoints the commonly
discussed topics in social media conversations by the frequency of keywords observed.
Our social media analytics system then determines and allocates the topics captured
via comments/tweets. Our analytics approach further classifies the result from topic
distribution and sentiment analysis to enhance the relevance of this information.
For example, the diagram below shows customers are satisfied with the way a company
currently handles policy, management, price and coverage. However, the areas of claim,
service and promotion mainly consist of negative sentiments.
9
Performance
Social media analytics becomes more robust when combining the analysis with internal
customer data. Our data integration capability can gather information from social media
and combine that information with internal customer data for analysis.
For example, performance changes for key metrics such as new customer rate, new
contacted rate, new quote rate, page visit rate, renewal rate and total sales during a
campaign period can be compared to information acquired through social media
analysis. A campaign that shows high conversation volume and positive sentiment with
a significant increase in performance (page views) for the campaign period will serve as a
conceivable prediction of that campaign’s success.
10
Maximizing Social Media Campaigns
Social Media Campaign ROI
Most businesses will be reluctant adopt new marketing strategies unless they have a
general idea of the ROI associated with it. However, in the case of social media, companies
are jumping on the bandwagon and using it for marketing purposes without having
appropriate ways to measure the performance and ROI. The social media campaign ROI
model enables marketing professionals to examine the profitability of underlying social
media marketing strategy.
The following metrics are needed for computation:
•
Total number of visitors reaching the goal page
•
Total product revenue
•
Total number of social media visitors reaching the goal page
•
Cost of social media campaign
Note: The goal page is driven by business and is based on customer buying patterns.
Revenue per
Goal Page
Social Media
Revenue
Social Media
Profit
Social Media
ROI
[(
ROI =
Revenue per Goal Page =
Target Product Revenue
Total Visitors Reached Goal Page
Revenue = Revenue Per Goal Page X Social Media Visitors
Profit = Revenue – Marketing Cost
ROI =
Profit
Marketing Cost
Total Product Revenue
Total Visitors Reached Goal Page
(
X
Marketing Cost
11
[
Social Media Visitors – Marketing Cost
Conclusions
Saama Fluid Analytics Engine enables businesses to understand the correlation between
diverse data sources such as social media, syndicated data and other unstructured data
and a company’s in-house data. It uses machine learning and data science methods to
combine three core pillars: Business Strategy, Domain and Data – all solving a given business problem and enabling fact-based intuition for businesses. Questions that
cannot be answered by traditional analytics and BI systems are solved iteratively by
Saama Fluid Analytics Engine, giving new actionable insights to build disruptive business
models that can transform your organization.
Learn More
For more details about this project, or to learn more about Saama’s solutions for the
insurance industry, contact us at [email protected] or visit us online at
www.saama.com/industries/insurance/
Connect with Saama Technologies
Web: http://www.saama.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/saamatechinc
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/saamatechnologies
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/saama-technologies
Authors
Abhishek Peraka
Wen Yi Zhang
Saroja Yalamarthi
Jyostna Shiramshetty
Sherry Huang
A White Paper from Saama Technologies, Inc.
900 East Hamilton Avenue · Campbell · California · 95008 www.saama.com
© 2014 Saama Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved.