Thanks to the rapid technological advancements, marketing is becoming increasingly difficult. Customers now expect you to micro-target their needs with pinpoint accuracy through your content, ads, and even product offerings.
But that’s extremely tricky. In the first place, you have no idea what they are thinking of. At best, you can only get a rough sketch from their previous interactions with your brand, an approach that is obviously insufficient in this age, especially if you’re new to the space.
However, tricky does not mean impossible. Social listening can help you collect near-perfect data depicting your customers’ needs, which you can then use to refine your marketing strategy.
Let’s explore six ways it does that.
1. Identifying Customer Sentiments And Trends
Sentiments qualify how we feel, think, and perceive something or someone. In this case, it reveals how customers holistically see your brand, a product you released, your marketing style, and any other brand-related releases.
A positive customer sentiment means you have successfully met their needs satisfactorily. Anything contrary to this is negative. In some cases, audience sentiment can be neutral, meaning people do not feel positive or negative about your brand or offerings.
Neutral sentiments are detrimental to your business growth online. But the negative one? That’s an indication of a frustrated and unsatisfied customer group. If not handled well, you’ll always find it difficult to connect with your audience.
That’s why social listening is essential. Most businesses wonder why engagement dwindles and marketing fails because they’re unaware of how their customers feel.
To avoid such outcomes, use social listening tools like BrandWatch, Sprinklr, or Emplifi to keep a graph of audience and customer sentiment on all social media platforms, blogs, review sites, and even forums you choose. Analyze this graph to note where and when sentiment goes red.
Then dig deep to see why:
- Did you make a post that your audience felt was inappropriate?
- Was it because of a new collaboration?
- Was it because of some changes in your product offerings or pricing?
- Perhaps, your marketing approach was outdated, and your audience expected better.
- Was there a significant event on the days the sentiment dips?
- Are there more negative reviews about your brand online, and why?
Exhaust all questions till you know what went wrong and fix it.
“It’s also important you follow up on even the littlest negative sentiment regardless of if it happened days ago or now. Knowing how your audience feels and proactively fixing it even before it gets worse is a way of telling your customers that they are valued. This elevates brand authority and helps them see you as a leader in the industry”, says Derek Pankaew, Founder of Listening.
Some social media listening tools like SocialSprout can analyze and gauge how people will react to your content draft before it goes live. They do this by benchmarking your topic against the current trend in your industry and existing sentiments around such topics. So, you know when to push a post ahead or remove it—a highly needed cheat feature for an efficient social media content marketing strategy.
2. Understanding Audience Preferences And Behaviors
Jonathan Feniak, General Counsel at LLC Attorney, says, “Marketing in our current World is all about meeting your customer’s needs right at the point and time they need it. But that’s sometimes impossible, since you literally can’t get into their heads and pull out their desires or needs.”
And if you don’t know what they need, how they need it, when it is needed, and where, your marketing strategy can only produce subpar results at most. You’ll end up doing what they call blind marketing.
The narration, however, changes if you implement social listening. The goal is to gather data about their activities online—such as public discussions, posts or content engaged online, reviews, and so on. This gives you a clear-cut insight that explains your audience's preference, even to the minute details.
- What is their favourite content type and topic?
- What are their preferred communication channels?
- What is their favourite product? A preowned Rolex or an entirely new one?
- What do they complain about most on the internet?
Likewise, the same method helps you figure out your customers’ internet and purchasing behaviours. The latter determines how you market your product and services after considering personal preferences, social influences, cultural factors, economic conditions, marketing efforts, and psychological triggers.
3. Monitoring Brand Reputation
It takes less than a day for a negative review to tank your business’s reputation. The more influential the reviewer is, the worse the impact on your business. Don’t take my word for it without checking out what happened to the Humane AI company.
This high-valued company released an AI pin that could act as a smart and mobile personal assistant for day-to-day activities. The hype was all there; Humane’s reputation rose to heights never seen before. Then, they got hit with complaints from different first adopters of the product.
But the worst of Humane's nightmare started when Marques Brownlee posted a critical review of the AI pin on YouTube. As of this writing, his video has generated 7.8 million views and close to 20,000 comments.
Source: Screenshot by User
“While you can do your best to avoid negative reviews by releasing a go-to-market product or providing awesome services, getting one or two occasionally is inevitable. In fact, the more your business grows, the more negative reviews you’ll get”, says Roman Zrazhevskiy, Founder & CEO at MIRA Safety.
Sometimes, it might not be anything like the Humane AI pin’s story. It could be a frustrated customer’s post on Twitter mentioning the ordeals they’ve gone through just because of your inefficiency.
But what if you could get a notification in the first instance if anyone mentions your brand, anywhere and anytime? Social listening helps you track your brand name and other specified keywords and notifies you immediately when someone uses them in a post or comment.
Once that happens, you get the chance to address negative mentions—comments, posts, reviews—and convince your customer to take it down immediately while you resolve their complaints accordingly. Danger averted.
“It’s not all about the bad mentions too. Sometimes, you might get a shoutout from your customers who enjoy your services or popular news outlets who find something interesting about your brand. Zoom in to each mention, appreciate the source, and build a better relationship”, John Baek, founder of JSB Digital Works, adds.
Either way, social listening lets you know if your strategy is yielding results and if your offerings are meeting people’s needs while aiding you in proactively managing your reputation. If you’re getting more negative mentions than positive ones, you need to explore and figure out why and create new measures to tackle it.
4. Tracking Competitors And Industry Movements
Axel Lavergne, founder at ReviewFlowz, says, “In marketing, there are thousands of wheels you don’t need to reinvent again. You can get ahead faster by looking for what others are doing to achieve success and how you can implement it better.”
Every industry has more than one successful brand. So, you definitely have dozens of successful competitors in the field. Successful means they are growing in customer base, reputation, and revenue.
If that’s the case, a faster shortcut to building an efficient marketing strategy is to track their steps online.
- What, how, where, and when do they post content?
- What format of content do they use to generate the most engagement?
- How do they respond to complaints and queries online?
- What is their turnaround time for resolving queries online?
- How much do they spend on paid advertisements yearly?
- How do they position their brand for optimal visibility?
Grant Aldrich, founder at Preppy, believes, “You should also track your competitors’ brand mentions—to know why and if you can leverage the moment to your advantage as well. For instance, if your competitors’ customers are complaining of a missing feature, that’s your best time to shine. Create the feature if possible, and if you have it already, create awareness around it.”
5. Enhancing Content Strategy And Customer Service
Remember we said social listening reveals a pack of information about your audience and helps you identify customer sentiment? All the valuable data you get is invariably useful in predicting what type of content you should use and how to best connect or engage with your audience.
For instance, there’s a likely possibility you focus your content on classical, industry-type topics. Most businesses do. However, that might not necessarily bring in the results you want. In this case, you listen online to the topics people want to hear or growing trends in your industry and adopt them instead of sticking rigidly to your conventional content marketing approach.
Similarly, you can use social listening to collect complaints, reviews, comments, and other feedback from customers about your brand. This gives you an upper hand in responding to these problems even before your competitors catch on, or it gains popularity, like Marque’s review of Humane’s AI pin.
6. Identifying Influencers And Brand Advocates
The social monitoring aspect of social listening does not tell you when people say something bad about your brand. We mentioned that your customers could decide to commend your services, praise your products, recommend your offerings, or just hashtag you as in User-Generated Content (UGC).
Whatever it is, it gives you a clue about customers who are advocating for your brand outside of that. Reach out and appreciate them. Simply commenting on posts or content that mentions you can also make a good impression and encourage further advocacy.
And if any of your brand influencers have a large audience or fan base, it wouldn’t hurt to partner with them for more.
Source: Shutterstock
Wrapping Up
It’s increasingly becoming more difficult to know what our customers need, but they expect us to know either way. And unless you can read minds like Merlin, you’ll need to integrate social listening into your marketing strategy.
Tracking brand mentions, customer sentiments, audience preferences, and industry trends helps you know what to target, how, and when. It also provides detailed data that can shape your content strategy while enhancing your customer delivery.
The more you know about your customers, the better you can refine your marketing strategy and produce good results.
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