Social media platforms contain a wealth of audience opinions. Ultimately, the key to a brand’s success is listening and gathering all the data necessary to make itself more appealing to the target audience.
There is fierce competition. If we don’t listen and fulfill our target audience’s preferences, there is a good chance that one of our competitors will.
Social listening is helpful for the marketing strategies of your brand because –
- It helps us understand more about our audience, allowing us to reach out to them more effectively.
- Through social listening, we can determine our competitors’ strategies.
- Using the right tools, we can monitor our brand name to take advantage of all noteworthy mentions.
- Social listening provides opportunities for lead generation and helps uncover opportunities.
- As we all know, content is king, so optimizing our content marketing strategy requires discovering the type of content that works and aligns well with the audience’s interests.
- It helps us identify top social influencers that the target audience admires, follows, and engages with regularly.
Consumers want to be heard. Engaging with them is always a good idea for any brand, as we are all ultimately creating content or offering flagship services for the same audience.
Their opinions matter a lot. By transforming their viewpoints into actionable data, we can make better decisions that align better with our target audience.
Online video consumption statistics show that 29.2 percent of global internet users watch tutorials or how-to videos.
As an example, let’s say we sell modular furniture online. In this case, shouldn’t it be better to provide users with an installation tutorial video instead of leaving them to rely on others?
Whenever someone from a target audience creates a tutorial video and many others from the same target audience consume it, it may indicate that we should have provided them with proper installation support in the first place.
Audiences are talking about brands in their online world, and we need to understand their sentiments and thoughts to help them, and that’s what social listening is all about.
Isn’t it preferable to create content or offer a product or service that our target audience genuinely wants and that checks all of their boxes?
Social listening solutions can help accomplish that.
Read on to discover how social listening can help formulate more effective marketing strategies.
9 Ways Social Listening Can Help Your Marketing Strategies
1. Using social listening to monitor a brand’s mentions
A brand’s reputation is crucial. A positive reputation is essential for a brand to build customer loyalty and gain their trust. Social media listening helps brands manage their online reputations by tracking the mention of business names, hashtags, product names, or any other keywords related to the brand.
One of the most significant aspects of social listening is monitoring mentions of our brand name across social media and the internet. A successful digital marketing strategy relies on monitoring and analyzing brand mentions to take proactive measures.
People may mention our brand’s name anywhere across the web. Apart from social media, they can be on Quora, Reddit, and other discussion boards.
According to Instagram, 90 percent of its users follow businesses. Two out of three people in the survey indicated that Instagram helps them connect with brands.
There is a tendency for consumers to post content about their experiences with brands. They often express their opinions, likes, and dislikes, and in many cases, the subset of the target audience engages with similar user-generated content.
Therefore, it is crucial to keep track of consumer experiences to fill any possible gaps and maintain a competitive edge in the digital world. Analysis of mentions across channels and prompt responses to queries can help us build a reputation.
Read Also – 13 Tips To Improve Your Social Listening Strategy
2. Creating Content That Engages the Target Audience Using Social Listening
When it comes to content marketing, there is fierce competition. According to CMI, 93 percent of B2B marketers incorporate content marketing into their strategies. Furthermore, as per eMarketer, 60 percent of marketers produce at least one piece of content daily.
As a result of the high level of competition in this space, attracting the target audience’s attention is undoubtedly one of the most challenging tasks. And therefore, 78 percent of CMOs believe personalized content is the future of marketing.
To create relevant content, don’t we need to find and explore the interests of our target audience? Social listening involves observing the emotions of the target audience.
A positive relationship with the audience begins with addressing their individual needs. Social listening helps identify the target audience’s likes and dislikes so that content can be tailored to their needs.
A key element to creating highly engaging content is identifying the formats and topics that are most relevant to the audience, as well as the headlines that engage them and encourage them to share the content on social media. Fortunately, it is possible to accomplish these with the help of a reliable customer experience management system.
3. Boosting social selling by using social listening
Social listening provides us with the opportunity to engage in social selling. Social selling involves connecting with prospects through social media channels and converting leads.
It is common for consumers to use social media to search for products and services. As per DataReportal, 75 percent of internet users conduct product research through social media.
Social media and online forums are places where users express their opinions about our brand, competitors, or the particular niche we are targeting.
Social media enables users to explore alternatives for their current products and services. On a social network, individuals are likely to discuss problems they are experiencing with their products or services. There is a possibility that our product or service will provide them with an advantageous alternative.
By monitoring specific keywords and mentions of our brands’ names and competition, we can identify consumers having issues with their current provider, enabling us to reach out to them with alternative solutions.
4. Learning From Competitors by Observing What Works for Them
Keeping an eye on our competitors’ online presence can give us an insight into their digital marketing strategies.
The goal shouldn’t be to copy the competition since every brand has its own unique style and voice. The purpose is to track what audiences think of them and how the competition responds.
Standing out in a competitive market requires differentiating ourselves from our competitors. To differentiate ourselves, we need to identify what audiences like about our competitors so we can do better than them. However, we also need to monitor what our competition does not do well so we can avoid making the same mistakes.
Monitoring the competition also enables us to know where their audience engages with them. It can also help us understand what type of content works for them. Considering that we are targeting the same audience as our competitors, this data can help us plan content more effectively. As a result, we can better understand our target audience and their sentiments and preferences.
5. Finding Aspiring Brand Ambassadors and Social Influencers Through Social Listening
No social media platform would exist without the millions of creators and influencers who provide us with the content we love.
Linktree estimates that 200 million people around the globe are part of the “creator economy.”
A social media influencer plays a significant role in influencing the purchase of a new product or service. As per Think With Google, 90 percent of survey respondents discovered new products or brands through YouTube.
Audiences tend to connect better with social media influencers due to their relatability. Followers often draw inspiration from the opinions expressed by influencers.
The purpose of digital listening is to uncover trends, so it is no surprise that it will also help identify the top influencers among the target audience.
Social listening tools include influencer marketing features, enabling us to identify the top influencers relevant to our business. Moreover, social listening tools track mentions and social media shares, allowing us to identify emerging influencers.
With the help of influencers, a message can be presented to a broader target audience more effectively, enabling more sales or leads and improving brand awareness.
6. Knowing the audience better by using social listening
Every successful marketing campaign begins with a good understanding of the target audience. A lack of such insights makes it tricky to produce content that will appeal to them.
The right social listening tools can help us understand our target audience more deeply. We can use them to discover where our target audience spends the most time online and what platforms they use.
Conversations occur not only on social media platforms but also on forums, which makes it crucial to determine the channels where we should be active.
Online discussions about our brand could take place nearly anywhere. It is crucial to find out what they discuss online, what they are reading and sharing, what challenges they face, and what interests them most.
With the right tools, we can see our brand from our audience’s viewpoint, resulting in a more thorough understanding of the audience. The overall consumer sentiment map can help us strategize our marketing campaigns more effectively and increase ROI.
7. Using social listening to manage crises
A crisis can have a detrimental effect on our brand’s reputation. No brand is immune to challenges, regardless of size, location, or industry. And that’s where crisis management comes to the rescue.
Crisis or reputation management involves influencing online information about a person or organization to influence public perceptions.
As a brand, we can decide which information we want to share online. However, we have little control over what people say about our products, services, and brand overall.
As social networks have rapidly expanded in recent years, power has shifted from brands to customers, giving them an array of opportunities to voice their opinions.
In today’s digital environment, where information spreads instantly, organizations face an enormous challenge when dealing with crises.
However, by using customer experience management tools, brands have been able to excel in online customer service and reputation management by separating facts from rumors promptly, determining the situation, and responding as necessary.
Crisis management is challenging, and most crises are difficult to predict. Fortunately, social listening tools enable brands to stay on top of emerging negative perceptions, thus allowing them to respond quickly and effectively online.
The social listening tool provides a comprehensive overview of all mentions about the brand and competitors, making it easy to identify possible crises by analyzing the increase in negative conversations or sudden negative sentiments.
8. Getting Valuable Insights From Social Listening Tools
One of the top benefits of social listening tools is that they offer valuable insights that we can turn into brand perception or use to drive future strategy.
Social listening tools assist us in finding and fixing gaps in customer service. Through social listening, we can identify problems with the experience—whether they pertain to customers, employees, or the brand and product.
For example, it might be a one-to-one issue, such as late delivery, or a broader issue, such as repeated product or service issues. With real-time information, our organization can work with the relevant teams and departments to solve these issues as soon as possible.
Furthermore, we can analyze a campaign to determine if a new ad campaign is effective with existing and new audiences, allowing us to strategize it accordingly. Similarly, sentiment analysis can provide insight into the audience’s emotions.
Therefore, social listening tools can provide valuable insights to help us decide where to go next for optimal outcomes.
9. Lead Generation Using Social Listening
Everyone loves to use digital marketing strategies to generate more leads. And many of us believe that social listening is the best way to generate leads through social media. After all, the success of our content strategy largely depends on our ability to deliver relevant and valuable content to our target audience.
In a world where our target audiences and ideal buyers maintain a constant state of change, social listening becomes increasingly important to help us learn from their behavior.
As a result, we can identify changing demographics, interests, and preferences among buyers across multiple channels. Optimizing our marketing strategies will help us better understand our customers and generate more leads.
Also, social media isn’t just for running campaigns; it’s also a great way to help potential customers.
Promptly offering help and assistance to interested consumers is the best way to bring them in as potential clients.
For example, through social listening, we can discover questions, comments, and complaints related to our company, competitors, or a topic relevant to our services.
Additionally, if users are engaged in an ongoing conversation about any issues, we can provide them with assistance without asking for anything in return. Remember, the power of reciprocity wins hearts.
Frequently asked questions
- Is social listening a marketing tool?
A social listening tool allows us to analyze the conversations and trends within and around our brand and industry, enabling us to make better marketing decisions. - Why is social monitoring important for marketers?
With a social listening strategy, marketers can better understand the sentiments and preferences of their target audiences, enabling them to strategize better marketing campaigns. - What do social listening tools do?
A social media listening tool is software that analyzes and monitors online discussions regarding a brand, industry competitors, or any other topic relevant to the business. - How can social listening help a marketer?
Social listening allows us to collect extensive information about how our brand is perceived. Furthermore, we can use this data to gain a deeper understanding of our customers, industry, and competitors, allowing us to make more informed marketing decisions in the future.
Conclusion
Using social listening, brands can make themselves more appealing to consumers. As a result, brands can improve their competitiveness, surpass customer expectations, and generate more sales and revenues.
At Konnect Insights, we help brands achieve their targets using the right social listening tools and strategies. With the right tools, we help brands monitor conversations, which helps them determine consumers’ sentiments, facilitating an efficient brand management process.
Connect with us today to learn more.
