How social listening can revolutionize your marketing strategy
There’s no denying the transformative power of building and nurturing social media for business success.
With 5.07 billion users worldwide, it allows you to reach a wide range of audiences, which can translate to customer engagement, lead generation, and sales conversions.
However, it’s crucial to listen to what your potential and existing customers say about your brand and their needs. That way, you can employ marketing strategies that meet these needs. That’s where social listening comes into play.
This article covers what you need to know about social listening. Read on to learn how it can revolutionize your marketing strategy, and get some practical tips below.
What is social listening?
Social listening entails gathering and analyzing online conversations about your brand and the products or services on social media. It seeks to get customer insights and understand consumers, whether potential or existing customers. The ultimate goal is to meet consumer needs and achieve customer satisfaction for business growth and success.
How does social listening work?
When it comes to implementing social listening for marketing campaigns, here are the steps to follow:
- Social monitoring: Look for direct brand mentions as well as product/service discussions on social media using specific keywords, topics, competitors, or industries. The goal is to gather and collect customer insights and feedback.
- Data analysis: Invest in digital tools designed to analyze customer data to uncover a goldmine of valuable insights. AI-powered social listening analytics can aid you in data analysis for business forecasting and decision-making.
- Marketing action: Based on gathered and analyzed customer insights, you can now plan your marketing campaigns. Capitalize on this data to optimize your marketing strategies, whether social media management, email outreach, or content marketing.
It’s best to leverage social media for business growth and success. However, social listening should be part of your overall marketing equation.
In fact, companies and organizations are implementing social data analysis initiatives. Over 45% of them are investing in social data technologies, while over 43% focus on staff training and development.
As a brand, it’s best to prioritize social listening for your business. In the next section, learn how it benefits your marketing campaign.
Key benefits of social listening for your marketing strategy
The power of social media is apparent in today’s business landscape. It’s easy to see companies taking up space on social media channels for brand exposure, customer engagement, and business transactions.
In fact, the five most important data sources for social media are the following:
- TikTok
Social listening is one of the most important social media trends. Why? It’s crucial to hear and understand what your prospects and customers have to say on these channels. Their words can have a huge impact on your overall marketing campaigns.
That said, here’s how social listening proves beneficial for your marketing strategies:
1) Better customer understanding
Social listening allows you to gain customer insights on social media platforms for your marketing campaigns. What do people think about your brand and feel about your products or services? Through social listening, you’ll get insightful answers to these critical questions.
Thomas Medlin, Co-founder at JumpMD, underscores the importance of social listening for understanding customers. “Your customers are the very reasons your business exists. They are the ones who will patronize your brand and avail of your products or services. Therefore, it makes sense to listen to what they need.”
Medlin believes that social listening helps you understand consumer needs, specifically their:
- Pain points: What problems, challenges, or issues do people have that your business can solve?
- Purchase goals: What products or services do your customers need that your business can offer?
- Buying motivations: What compels your prospective and regular customers to buy your products or hire your services?
- Personal preferences: What types of products or services do consumers in your industry prefer, and what unique value propositions (UVP) can you offer?
- Customer lifestyle: How can your brand meet the diverse lifestyle needs of your target market?
2) Improved brand perceptions
Social listening lets you unravel how people perceive your business for marketing. How do customers think about your brand and feel about the products or services you offer? These brand perceptions are crucial to your brand reputation and crisis management.
Tom Golubovich, Head of Marketing and Media Relations at Ninja Transfers, cites the value of social listening for improved brand perceptions: “Use these gathered insights to develop a compelling brand identity and establish a positive brand image. Likewise, leverage these to improve your products and services.”
Based on customer insights, Golubovich recommends the following marketing tactics:
- Develop a better brand image. This goes beyond creating a brand name, slogan, and other identifiers; it’s demonstrating your organization’s vision and mission.
- Improve brand reputation. This step should be a part of your crisis management strategy in case of negative brand perceptions.
- Demonstrate value proposition. This move entails highlighting your UVP as part of your marketing strategies.
- Create compelling brand narratives. Harnessing the power of storytelling lets you achieve such narratives that resonate with your target audience.
- Establish business core values. This step includes showcasing your ideals and philosophies as an organization.
3) Targeted marketing strategies
Social listening provides you with valuable customer insights for your marketing campaigns. These insights help you better understand target customers and guide you in interacting with them. So, the key here is to align your marketing tactics with consumer needs and interests!
Sergey Taver, Marketing Manager of Precision Watches, recommends performing social listening before implementing marketing campaigns. “First, you must understand your customer needs and their brand perceptions. Then, you can implement marketing strategies that will help you meet consumer needs and achieve your business goals.”
After conducting social listening, Taver suggests employing the following marketing strategies:
- Social media management entails introducing your brand, promoting your products or services, and engaging with customers on Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
- Content marketing involves producing and publishing pieces of content, such as how-to articles, product photos, or promotional video clips, to connect with your target audience.
- Email outreach is simply emailing potential and existing customers to promote your brand and offer your products or services.
- Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website, publishing relevant content, and building backlinks to rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERP).
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising entails creating and displaying ads on SERPs but requires paying for every successful click. Like SEO, it can boost your online visibility and website traffic.
4) Enhanced customer experience
Social listening offers a goldmine of customer insights that will help you improve the customer experience (CX). Nine out of ten companies make CX their primary focus because three-quarters of customers say CX is their number one factor for buying a product from a company.
Jerry Han, CMO at PrizeRebel, suggests investing in social listening to improve CX. “How can you improve the customer experience if you don’t understand their pain points, wants, and needs? Sure, listening to what they have to say can make a world of difference. However, nothing beats taking action on what you’ve heard.”
Han explains how social listening can go a long way in enhancing CX:
- Improve customer engagement. Social media allows you to promote inclusivity and create a community by interacting with a wide range of audiences who can be your customers.
- Get customer support. Engaged customers on social media platforms are more likely to patronize your brand and buy your products or hire your services.
- Achieve customer satisfaction. Social listening lets you improve the customer experience, which significantly boosts CSAT.
- Gain customer loyalty. Implementing social listening as part of your marketing campaign helps you improve your offers and CX, allowing you to gain loyalty in time!
5) Increased business profitability
Social listening is the first step to increasing your company’s bottom line. Of course, your ultimate goal is to make money and grow your business. To achieve this, you have to enhance CX and achieve CSAT which all start with social listening.
Jesse Galanis, Content Manager at Tech Lockdown, highlights the value of social listening for business profitability. “The rule of thumb is simple: Listen to what customers need and meet their needs. And that can ultimately turn prospects into customers or leads into sales. That’s simple and easy!”
However, Galanis understands that employing social listening for marketing is no easy feat. He suggests setting the following key performance indicators (KPIs) and tracking your progress:
- Engagement metrics: These KPIs include reach, impressions, and social media metrics, such as the number of likes, shares, and comments. They measure how well your brand interacts with your target customers.
- Brand awareness metrics: KPIs, such as brand mentions and share of voice (SOV), measure whether consumers know your brand and how they perceive your business and offerings.
- Customer satisfaction: CSAT is the most critical KPI in business. It measures whether or not customers are happy with your products and the services they receive.
- Conversion rate: This key metric is the most important in business since it shows whether you convert sales or at least generate leads on social media.
- Customer retention: This KPI measures customer loyalty to see if customers continue to buy your products or use your services. On the other hand, the churn rate shows if your customers have stopped doing business with you.
In the next section, get some practical tips on how to employ social listening for marketing.
Top social listening tips for your marketing strategies
At this point, you now know how social listening can benefit your business. It’s time to capitalize on it to optimize your marketing tactics.
Brooke Webber, Head of Marketing at Ninja Patches, highlights the value of social listening in marketing campaigns. “Aligning your marketing strategies with consumer needs can make a world of difference in your business. It takes listening to what your target customers say to take proactive action and provide concrete solutions.”
Webber shares the following best practices:
- Conduct market research and analysis. These processes allow you to identify your target customer and understand their needs. Listen to what consumers demand in your industry!
- Develop your customer or buyer persona. This persona represents your ideal customers based on demographics, psychographics, and other key factors. Understand your prospective customers’ needs and interests!
- Create a social media feedback loop. This loop enables you to collect customer feedback on social media channels like Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. Listen to both their praises and complaints!
- Optimize your marketing strategies. Social listening offers valuable customer insights into marketing tactics such as SEO, PPC, and social media management. This can help you align your strategies with your business goals and consumer needs!
- Monitor and measure your performance. After implementing your data-driven marketing campaigns, track your progress, measure key metrics, and identify areas for improvement!
- Leverage digital tools and technologies. Modern technologies like automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and data analytics can aid in social listening. Some of the popular social listening tools are HubSpot, Lately, Sprout Social, Digimind, and Hootsuite.
Social listening is crucial for marketing
Social listening is crucial to your overall marketing campaign. It allows you to get customer insights and unravel consumer needs. That way, you can align your marketing strategies with their interests and needs.
Consider the practical social listening tips shared above and implement them for your marketing tactics. By doing so, you will understand your customers better, improve your brand perceptions, and target your marketing strategies effectively.
Ultimately, all these tips and steps will help you enhance the customer experience and increase your business profitability!
