Over the last decade, social media has become an intrinsic part of people’s lives. It has a role in social networking, from connecting people to becoming the people’s press. Social media platforms have also provided an opportunity for consumers to interact directly with brands. especially when raising complaints or reviewing products and services.
As brands, we must pay attention to our consumers’ demands and reviews. It is necessary to adapt to changing circumstances to succeed in this fiercely competitive market. And that’s where digital listening comes into play!
Digital listening helps us understand audience sentiment, or the online “mood,” expressed online. According to 84% of customers, being regarded as an individual and not a number is what attracts them to a brand.
Brands must keep track of their mentions and other pertinent chatter proactively. We must remember that a few unfavorable reviews or comments on social media may seriously damage our reputation.
What is digital listening?
Digital listening means gathering and analyzing customer feedback on our products or services on the internet using different tools. Given the availability of numerous channels, marketers can engage with customers in productive ways.
As a result, it is ideal for digital listening to occur across a variety of channels. It will give marketers access to a comprehensive brand analysis.
So, what is it all about, and how can it be helpful for our brands? Let’s take a closer look!
Understanding digital listening
The objective of digital marketing is to connect with customers at the precise moment that they are prepared to make a purchase. The new goal is to make decisions based on reality.
As a result, our brands must utilize cutting-edge new technologies. Maintaining a leading position in emerging digital technologies can create or destroy a company’s future.
One of these emerging technologies is digital listening.
These algorithms, which use proprietary algorithms to cover 98% of the internet’s backbone, identify when new clients are interested in a particular good or service and retarget them with real-time marketing strategies with a comparable or rival offer.
How does digital listening work?
Utilizing technology, digital listening tracks and analyzes the numerous conversations and interactions on social media platforms and forums. Social listening software uses scrapers to gather various metrics and mentions of targeted keywords from social media platforms and other online sources. It helps identify significant patterns and trends in social listening streams.
It can reveal insightful data for brands about their campaigns, clients, market, and rivals. Although the terms “digital listening” and “social listening” are frequently used interchangeably, social listening only refers to social media sites (such as Twitter and Facebook), whereas “digital listening” includes monitoring across the internet.
Read Also – What Is the Importance of Social Listening in Social Media Success?
However, at present, most internet users are on social media. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that social media accounts for a significant portion of digital listening. Digital listening also emphasizes our online visibility, particularly on the first page of Google search results. This is a crucial component of our online presence.
Around 91% of web users find the information they want on the first page of search results, according to Backlinko research. Only 44% of searchers click through to the second page. Thus, it’s essential to understand how those top organic results function, what they say about us, and whether or not we can update that information.
Why is digital listening important?
As a brand, it is our responsibility to engage, inform, and communicate with our audience through marketing, right? Yes, but it goes deeper than that. As marketers, listening is a big part of what we do.
The prosperity of every organization or business depends on its ability to listen to an audience effectively. Building rapport, fostering relationships, increasing loyalty, and improving direct development contribute to a robust, longer-lasting company. This makes digital listening quite important for us. Here are a few top reasons:
1. Better listening leads to better marketing efforts.
Those who are best at listening are also best at marketing. Such marketers understand that human emotions accompany people’s words. They use this knowledge to create products that people adore. They advertise in a way that addresses their audience’s hopes, concerns, and desires.
We can grasp what is being discussed by the people in the target market of our brands through digital listening. According to their online reactions, we can determine what they believe, how they feel, and what content they want to see.
2. It helps understand customer sentiments.
What opportunities does digital listening offer? Digital listening does more than just link consumers and digital marketers. It also enables us to concentrate on content personalization by locating the best publications to pitch on behalf of our clients.
For instance, a digital PR strategist can monitor keywords on subjects related to their customers’ brands and future collections. They can see what trends are most popular in the media and on social media.
3. It boosts online brand image.
Digital listening lets us observe what the general public and influencers have been sharing about our brands or products.
Digital PR strategists and social media experts might find opportunities with the media after analyzing the dialogues through analytics and reporting. Brands use influencers to share, react to, and enhance their content and brand narratives. Using digital listening techniques also makes it possible to improve brand messaging and customer service.
In short, it can assist us in better managing our digital image. It presents reactive PR opportunities and trends that are pertinent to the brand and highlights our industry expertise.
What are the benefits of digital listening for improving the customer experience?
The first step in creating a reliable customer experience plan is understanding the audience. Numerous techniques, such as big data, transaction data, audience analysis, buyer personas, CRM, and digital listening, can help.
We might learn consumer analytics better as we focus on more sources to gather such data and as the data becomes firmly connected. Well, not every brand can afford this level of knowledge acquisition.
In that instance, emphasizing the gathering and analysis of customer opinions might assist our organizations in enhancing the customer experience. Companies may consider post-purchase surveys and feedback collection, but many companies are increasingly relying on digital listening.
Read Also – 12 Companies With Great Social Listening Strategies
So, how does digital listening help improve our customer experience? Let’s take a look.
1. It provides audience insights.
We can track online mentions in various ways, such as direct mentions (where the brand or product is named by the people online), indirect mentions (when people don’t identify the brand), and mentions over the brand’s social handles (these mentions are easy to find).
As a result of digital listening, mentions can yield insightful data that we can use to enhance our products or services. Indirect mentions can be used to spot business possibilities and identify consumers who would be most interested in seeing advertisements for a specific good or service.
Brands can foresee the needs and desires of people by talking to them about a product or service they might be interested in. They further provide their customers with free trials, samples, or additional information.
2. It can help detect influencers and potential brand ambassadors.
Consumers get influenced by an influencer when they start to prefer a particular brand after speaking with a single peer. When customers defend a brand because the customer experience surpasses their expectations, they act as brand ambassadors.
According to research on Twitter by Annalect, 40% of users admit to having bought anything based on influencer interactions. The secret to raising brand affinity is identifying these influencers and brand ambassadors. We can find them by including keywords in a digital listening inquiry focused on admiration and love for the company.
Furthermore, evaluating each influencer’s follower count and influence is crucial. It helps select those who can make a meaningful difference as their highest priority. Once identified, we can reach out to them personally, work with them, and provide them with custom products, free trials, and product codes that they can share with their followers.
3. It boosts social customer service.
Customer service engagements on Twitter have grown by 250% in the past two years. Consumers are becoming more demanding and socially connected. They consequently have higher expectations for the online shopping experience.
Brands need a social media monitoring solution that can enable their social customer support team to keep track of pertinent mentions in reality. Brands should take the initiative and pay attention to direct and indirect brand references.
We can build real connections with our audience by paying attention to them, which will help our business in many ways. It first aids in improving customer retention and loyalty for our company.
According to reports, 64% of respondents consider the customer experience more significant than the price when making a purchase or investment. If we pay attention to their suggestions and give them a relationship and experience that they value, our audience may stick with our company.
4. It helps build a solid online reputation.
Building a connection with our audience that results in favorable recommendations is another advantage of listening to them. Customers are not reluctant to talk to friends, relatives, and strangers about their business experiences.
A customer’s experience never goes forgotten with social media and the internet’s limitless reach. According to Extole,83% of customers are willing to recommend a brand after having a good experience.
Our clients will appreciate their relationship with our company more if we pay close attention to what they say. As a result, they will be more inclined to recommend our services or goods to others.
Likewise, using digital listening and monitoring techniques, brands can be warned about any possible hazards to their online reputation. These alerts are connected to specific terms that are connected to unfavorable emotions. With digital listening, brands can prepare in advance by establishing a transparent communications strategy for crisis management.
5. It provides insights into competitors.
Digital listening can assist us in learning whatever we ought to know about our rivals. Every brand has competition in the market, and none can afford to ignore what people say about their competitors.
As a result, it’s critical to pay close attention to competing brands. Following their social media accounts, we may learn about their strengths and shortcomings. We can also obtain insight into how our brand stacks up against them.
Brands can better understand their competitors’ offerings and learn from their mistakes. They can improve their customer service by keeping an eye on how the public perceives their rivals.
Top five digital listening tools
Utilizing digital listening tools helps us monitor the digital landscape. We become aware of any discussion that might be taking place about our brand and our rivals.
Let’s look at the five best digital listening tools we can use.
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite gives businesses access to a clear dashboard. Here, we can view and reply to our messages, comments, and brand mentions from various social media networks. This specific LOL allows us to keep tabs on mentions, check term usage, and follow influencer accounts. We can stay aware of conversations in our industry and engage as needed.
2. Zoho Social
Another potent digital listening tool that gives businesses the chance to keep tabs on customer interactions is Zoho Social. Businesses have real-time access to the tool. It gives them flexibility in reacting to comments and working with followers to create content.
We can use Zoho Social to establish listening columns to keep tabs on keyword mentions and brand reviews. We can also collect information that is pertinent to our company, goods, and services. This way, we can learn of the hottest topics and conversations taking place on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
3. Google Alerts
The biggest feature of Google Alerts is the extent of its coverage. It keeps track of all web content to look for the search terms we specify, including news items, scientific research, blogs, web pages, and much more.
Another advantage is that we can create alerts for any term we want. It lets us keep tabs on any search we desire, including keywords, competitors, brand mentions, and products and services. We can also control how frequently we will receive email alerts. We can keep a close eye on what people are saying about our brand.
4. Tweetdeck
The official Twitter account management tool is Tweetdeck. It is a social network dashboard that typically displays Tweets from users we follow, trending Tweets, and direct messages from our account. Tweetdeck not only compiles everything into a single dashboard, but it also enables us to schedule Tweets.
Additionally, we can build up several fields to track the keywords and hashtags of our choice. On behalf of any of the Twitter accounts we link to the app, we can respond to mentions.
5. Konnect Insights
An all-in-one tool for listening, analytics, social CRM, and publishing, Konnect Insights is a social and digital listening and analytics platform. Some of Konnect Insights’ primary advantages include simplicity, excellent coverage from sources, seamless dashboards, and real-time data.
It is a comprehensive platform that integrates data science, marketing, analytics, and customer experience. It guarantees accurate brand projection and imaging.
It is industry-specific but still gives a business the freedom to customize it to meet its needs. It ensures that its marketing and customer service efforts are top-notch while incorporating the power of big data.
Final Words
Identifying the audience is the first step in developing a plan for the customer experience. Various methods can be employed to obtain and convey this knowledge. They are big data, customer profiles, surveys, CRM, transaction data, and digital listening.
Using a digital listening approach is crucial in today’s business! A customer-focused social listening strategy is developed in several steps, the first of which is digital listening. We are passing up a plethora of opportunities if we aren’t paying attention to what our customers have to say.
We must continually anticipate the requirements and desires of our audience to stay one step ahead of our rivals and develop brand affinity!
