Social listening is a popular marketing buzzword that you hear a lot these days – and for a good reason. Consumer insights are at the heart of every successful marketing strategy. Thus, it is important to understand your target audience, your market, and the essence of your brand to optimise your marketing and customer engagement strategies. The most effective way to obtain these insights is through social listening.
What Is Social Listening?
Social listening is the process of tracking, analysing and learning what customers are saying and feeling about your brand, competition, industry, and other relevant topics on social media. Look for conversations about your brand and any mentions of it on social media. Then, apply those insights to your future marketing strategies to build a brand with a stronger reputation and enhanced customer experience.
Social listening and social media monitoring may seem like the same thing, but they are actually quite different. Social media monitoring is simply collecting data about metrics such as relevant hashtags, brand mentions, competitor mentions, and industry trends. On the other hand, social listening is about looking beyond these numbers to actually doing something about them.
Why Does Social Listening Matter?
Without social listening, you are missing out on a lot of valuable insights about your brand. As customer reactions are essential to digital marketing these days, social listening has become the buzzword of 2021. Here are a few ways social listening aids a brand:
Create Better Content
The best way to find out what content works well with your audience is through social listening. Find out what topics and hashtags your audience use the most. This way you know what you should talk about and which hashtags to use so as to reach as many people as possible.
Customer Engagement
Social listening gives you several opportunities to interact with your customers. If a customer has given a positive review about your brand or reached out to you on social media regarding a complaint, make sure you respond to them in a timely and effective manner. This will generate goodwill for your brand and increase brand loyalty.
Manage Crisis
Track customer sentiments in real-time. If you are getting positive feedback, figure out the reasons behind it. In case the sentiment is negative, review the feedback on social media and make the necessary changes right away. Plus, try to prevent any similar future mistakes. Through social listening, you can also prevent PR disasters before they slip out of your hand.
Identify Brand Advocates and Social Media Influencers
Closely monitoring social conversations about your brand and industry will help you in identifying who the most important influencers are. These people have a huge influence on how customers feel about your brand or your competition. , Hence, they are important to connect with. There will also be people who are already praising your brand on social media and saying wonderful things about it. Such people are called brand advocates. You should be on the lookout and collaborate with them, wherever possible.
Find Pain Points
When you monitor the conversations about your brand on social, you get loads of insights about what is working and what is not. This is like a gold mine for your sales and marketing teams. Listen to what your customers want and do not want and tweak your products exactly the way they like.
Track Competition
Using social listening, you do not just want to know what your customers are saying about you. Instead, you should also find out what they say about your competitors. This will give you a clear idea of where you stand in the marketplace. Keep a track of what your competition is doing so that you are well aware of any new opportunities or threats. Thus, you can plan accordingly.
Discover New Sales Opportunities
Social listening can assist you in establishing healthy relationships with your potential customers which you can then nurture to generate revenue. Reach out to your audience, engage with them, and share relevant content. Listen to the conversations happening online, find out potential customers to connect with, and start building a relationship with them so as to move them along the sales funnel.
Build Better Marketing Campaigns
Once you have gathered all the relevant information about your audience – the topics they discuss, the hashtags they use, the content they like to read – you are well-equipped to design successful marketing campaigns. It is critical for the success of any marketing campaign to focus on topics and content that your target audience find relevant. Social listening enables you to uncover such topics by monitoring the social conversations happening around a specific keyword or group of keywords.
Better Online Reputation Management
It is needless to state that the importance of listening to what your customers are speaking about your brand is a goldmine of information that when analysed properly will reveal facts about where your brand stands in terms of the identity it has created in the minds of the customer. Moreover, understanding the sentiment and the kind of keywords used to converse about the brand will give you insights whether your brand’s impression is positive or negative. This information is critical to create your online reputation communication and execution plan.
Conclusion
Social listening offers lots of benefits to all brands. Thus, it is the buzzword of 2021. It is important that you consider it a necessity rather than an extra growth technique. Konnect Insights is the best tool to consider when it comes to social listening and it comes with a free trial period link. Hurry up now, or else you will stay behind in the competition.