Top 5 Reasons You Should Be Using Social Listening
Social listening can be extremely valuable to every business. With a social listening program in place you can discover and track online conversations in an effort to gather insights about your customers, prospects, products, and competitors. Listening to and analyzing conversations allows you to find patterns and trends that you can use to your advantage for strategy, marketing, audience targeting, and product/service innovation.
Do you have a social media campaign in place? Social media marketing success is built around engaging with the right people at the right time with the most engaging content. For the greatest success you need to have a social listening program in place so you aren’t guessing about your marketing strategy, but developing a plan based on real insights from your customers and prospects.
Even if you aren’t doing any social media marketing yet, a social listening program can provide valuable insights for your overall business strategy.
Here are 5 reasons why you should be running a social listening program for your company:
1. Create New Business Opportunities and Attract New Customers
You can set up a social listening program that looks at the keywords and key phrases people use when researching a product or service they need that relates to your products and services. By listening to these you can respond directly with suggestions and with links to your solutions. In addition, you can analyze social industry trends that could open up new opportunities for your brand for both engagement and sales.
You could also search for conversations around problems and frustrations users have with similar products and services, including your own. Analyzing audience segmentation will identify potential markets and groups to target. Insights you should look at include audience engagement times, sentiment, reach and marketing impact.
2. Build Brand Reputation and Improve Customer Care
Over 43% of consumers interact with brands on social media looking for customer service responses to problems and questions. Social listening allows you to identify both positive and negative conversations about your products and services. By engaging at the optimum time, you can turn negative feedback into a positive outcome and opportunity. Standing out with customers could very likely create a viral effect. Even if it doesn’t go viral, the word-of-mouth accolades spread across the social stratosphere are well worth it.
If you have a crisis, you can use social listening to craft a thoughtful response appropriate to the gravity of the situation. Social listening will also provide insight as to the severity of the crisis and the specific reasons why people are angry. Then you’ll have the insights to provide a targeted solution.
3. Feedback on Your Products and Services
One of the best benefits of social listening is that you’re able to view customer feedback on your products and services. Social feedback may be even more valuable than feedback from focus groups. Analyze social feedback to discover valuable insights. Then you can adjust your business strategy to fit their needs for greater returns. This can also assist you with being proactive to any issues that may come up. Show the human side of your company by responding to issues, providing transparency. Often times, when you engage users who are critical of your products and services, they provide the best feedback, allowing you to upgrade your products and services with the features returning the highest sales and ROI.
Case In Point: For a pharmaceutical company, after tracking conversations around one of their products, we uncovered a trend of patients discussing weight gain while on their drug. This insight was surprising to the company as one of the side effects of their drug is actually weight loss! Taking an even deeper dive into the conversations revealed that patients were discussing competitor drugs and other treatments with each other to use in its place. This would be disastrous to any brand. Before social listening, they had no idea they were losing sales due to misinformation. Learn how we can help our company.
4. Gather Competitive Intelligence
One of the biggest advantages of social listening is gathering competitive intelligence. Track competitor keywords, social handles, brand terms, and product names and listen to what’s being said about your competitors. This allows you to track their marketing campaigns, messaging, complaints, and what consumers like over your products and services. Often conversations are around comparing brands prior to purchasing. Understanding where customers are can give you a major sales advantage. It also gives you an opportunity to engage within these conversations.
You can also track general conversations about your Industry as a whole. This will help you uncover trends including customer satisfaction, service and product needs and wants, and what topics are most talked about, in addition to, their sentiment. You can gain direct customer feedback by engaging and joining the conversation providing valuable data and analysis for developing your company’s business strategies.
5. Performance Measurement
Even if you aren’t yet running social media campaigns, you can use social listening to measure and evaluate performance for your other marketing channels. There are various metrics you can analyze including volume of conversations, sentiment, and topics of discussions in addition to others that will yield insights. Metrics should be analyzed before, during, and after campaigns. This will help you optimize campaigns based on how effective your content and messaging was throughout the campaign lifecycle.
Benchmarking conversations against your competitors will also reveal your social media performance. Often, the brand with the most mentions and positive sentiment is the one that attracts the most clients. Think about when you are making a purchase on Amazon - do you look for products with he most reviews or the least?
Go Beyond Monitoring Mentions
As you can see, social listening goes way beyond simply tracking mentions, allowing you to analyze and understand what people are taking about - your company, your brand, and your products and services. If you’re only monitoring mentions, you are missing out on over 30% of the possible engagement opportunities as many users neglect to use your company’s or brand’s handle. You will also miss other insights from conversations where your brand isn’t mentioned, but would impact your company.
Have you heard enough? Complete our contact form here or call us at 732-804-1472 to book an initial social listening consultation for your company today. The consultation is Free and for a limited time, Save a Cool Grand* on the set up fee when you sign up for our annual social listening program!
Need to learn more? Bonus Content: Click here to learn some additional reasons why you should be running a social listening program for your company and brand.
*Savings of $1,000 is applied to the setup fee for an annual social listening program. All social listening programs include an initial consultation, program setup with keyword and key phrase analysis, social listening platform set up to listen to over 5B social sites, monthly program management and reporting of program insights complete with recommendations based on your business and brand goals. Contact us today to learn more.
