Socialbakers
A Leading Partner in the Social Media Marketing Realm

Digital customer engagement has never been more critical than it is today. With the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the entire consumer world has become digitally grounded. Customers want to get in touch with brands the same way they would with friends and family. So brands need to be present on the channels that consumers prefer. Most consumers today prefer online channels for product discovery and product purchase, with the fastest growth coming from social media channels. However, there is a new expectation around digital engagement beyond the transaction that continues to post-sales support, service, and conversational experiences. As consumers demand more from brands, the lines between marketing, customer care, and experience have become increasingly blurred, presenting real business challenges. For instance, take a look at the marketing and customer care departments today; the number of customer touchpoints they manage across both owned and earned media is vast and overwhelmed with complexity. This can often lead to a disparity between what people expect from interacting with the brand (marketing, product, customer service, or anything else) versus what they get, essentially, an “expectation gap.” From the business perspective, this challenge of delivering an outstanding customer experience is operational. It stems from the growing complexity of cross-departmental business functions that lead to inconsistencies in the customer experience they provide.

While brands look for ways to bridge the gap between customer expectation and delivery, Socialbakers, a renowned social media analytics partner, emerges as a helping-hand through its cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered social media marketing suite.

Back in September this year, Socialbakers was acquired by Astute Inc, a customer engagement solution provider headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. The rationale for combining the Astute and Socialbakers business was simple: Brands need a unified customer experience platform to help them connect the dots between customer care, customer experience, and marketing. “By combining the market-leading social media marketing capabilities of Socialbakers with Astute’s engagement suite, our vision is to offer brands an end-to-end customer engagement platform that the Chief Customer Officer needs to succeed,” states Yuval Ben-Itzhak, President at Socialbakers.

The Power of AI in Marketing

In today’s digital world, marketers who smartly deploy marketing technologies will continue to be one step ahead of those who rely on a do-it-yourself approach. The company’s AI-based platform’s ultimate objective is to enable customers to build, scale, and optimize outstanding marketing campaigns. The Socialbakers platform also allows marketers to understand their online communities better, to target the right audience demographics, to predict users’ behaviour, and to react to any issues quickly.

One of the reasons Socialbakers has become the go-to customer engagement and experience platform for brands and businesses is because of its ability to manage the sheer volume of data. Overall the data processed and analyzed within the Socialbakers Suite helps brands develop strategies, sharpen decision-making, get better product insights, and facilitate the creation of perfectly personalized campaigns. Without access to data, marketers would be building their campaigns in the dark. Socialbakers AI, specifically, uses both supervised and unsupervised learning processes along with algorithms fed with structured and unstructured data to create an agile, industry-leading system. It analyzes patterns and provides recommendations on large amounts of data, which allows marketers to make fast and strategic decisions throughout the entire content strategy lifecycle.

Socialbakers enables marketers to be successful in understanding their audiences, to personalize content creation better and to engage and grow their customer base. By using Socialbakers’ marketing suite, brands can generate personalized content, publish content at the time when their audience is most active, compare their content strategy, and make smarter advertisement decisions to improve campaigns against industry benchmarks. In Socialbakers’ platform, these personas are auto-generated by AI to deliver audience segmentation in the form of easy-to-read profiles, interests, and affinities.

Marketing personas provided by Socialbakers are precise. Going beyond data given by analytics, allowing brands to tell inspiring, human-centric stories. With quality insights, marketers across all industries can not only create unique, relevant content, target posts precisely, and even select the most trustworthy influencers to deliver an integrated brand experience. Unlike the traditional method, which involves manually searching influencers by hashtag or analysis of user-generated content can be complicated in terms of the sheer volume, with little payoff or guarantee. Socialbakers AI recognizes more than 27 million micro and macro influencers, providing users with a data-driven look at influencer interests, country, follower count, content, languages, brand mentions, and performance across social channels – all in one place.

For additional influencer insights into private metrics like reach and impressions, Socialbakers also provides a direct and transparent data sharing function, right in the platform. With fully customizable dashboards, the Socialbakers solution monitors and reports the impact of marketer’s social media activities on their community and business. Socialbakers makes it easier for marketers to share reports with stakeholders seamlessly by providing out-of-the-box reporting solutions.

Analyze Content Performance on a Larger Scale

Socialbakers helps businesses firstly from the point of view of benchmarking the brand’s performance against themselves, their competitors, their industry overall and even their region. Socialbakers AI uses content grades from A+ to D to make the analysis straightforward and user-friendly. Based on historical data analysis, every organic post is assigned a grade by the algorithm. The evaluation is based on the post’s potential performance, decided by learned patterns and AI.

To further strengthen their solutions, in November, Socialbakers announced the integration of conversational AI Chatbot technology into the Socialbakers Suite. Today more than ever, customers are online, and they expect brands to be there too, responding to their questions and providing feedback without delay. To meet the expectations of customers, brands are turning to Conversational AI chatbots to help them instantly flag unanswered queries and respond to the most frequently asked questions immediately, so their agents can focus on more complex, personalized conversations. Not only do chatbots take care of the repetitive questions, regardless of the volume, time of day or the language, they also act as the conduit for quickly escalating more critical conversions to agents.

So, what’s next? For the road ahead, the company’s mission is to provide a unified platform for customer experience management and intelligence, across social and digital channels. Without going into too much detail about the future product, Ben-Itzhak reveals, “The upcoming platform will support workflows related to omni-channel research, listening, measurement, content, care, chatbots and voice-of-the-customer, to deliver the best-in-class experience across the entire customer journey.” With such a product development plan in the pipeline, Socialbakers future looks bright. In conclusion, Ben-Itzhak says “Stay tuned - 2021 is going to be an exciting year!”