Let’s say you got invited to a social event where you will have the opportunity to meet many people. Some of which could eventually be potential clients to your company. Would you decline the invitation? Never! You would go, converse with people and listen to what they have to say.
Basically, using a social listening tool is similar to attending social events, however, you can do it from the comfort of your home or office! With such a tool, you’ll get insights on the overall sentiment customers are experiencing during touchpoints with your brand. What’s even better is that you can filter the conversation you would like to listen too. No need to hear about your great aunt’s adventures to the supermarket or a CEO complaining about his tax dues.
To look deeper into the whys of setting up a social listening tool, three main benefits should be tackled:
Listen To Your Audience
Your target audience is the core of your brand’s success. Having the right products at the right place isn’t enough to satisfy them anymore. Nowadays, in a highly competitive market, people usually choose a brand over another for one reason: it listens to them. From their needs to their fears, brands must keep their customers’ insights in mind. Let me ask you this: would it be beneficial for your brand to keep on posting about the look of its wallets when people clearly need it to be more functional? From comments to posts and tweets, having access to their insights can save your brand the trouble of guessing its next marketing step.
To go even deeper into understanding your audience, you can look at what they talk about and start a conversation. This will ensure three things:
- Your brand will be top-of-mind to those people
- With social efforts comes engagements and involvement.
- You will be able to discuss the latest trends.
Furthermore, listening to your audience might also save your brand from a social crisis! As they say: “A happy customer tells a friend; an unhappy customer tells the world”. This is specifically true in the Digital Age where information circulates faster than light. Listen to complaints, track what your customers dislike, and comment back! Doing so will consequently win your customers’ trust back. It might seem like a hassle but the Community Managers at Brain Space are more than happy to help!
Look At What Your Competitors Do
Taking a closer look into your competitors’ activities, you will learn that doing a simple competitive analysis is like looking at the tip of the iceberg: insufficient and irrelevant. Without having proper insights, your brand won’t have enough data to lean on. In fact, listening to your audience’s feedback and sentiment about your competitors will help you better understand the market. By adding your competitors’ name, products and branded hashtags to your social listening tool, you will be able to identify their strengths and weaknesses. Not only will this help you pinpoint the success of their strategies, but it’ll also help you avoid their mistakes. When using a social listening tool, you will have access to:
- A cloud of words that revolves around the specific hashtag you are tracking for your brand and your competitors’.
- The type of content your competitors post about and its overall impact on the audience.
- Enough information to discover new business opportunities. Sometimes, the most innovative ideas come from listening!
To sum it up, the universal and undeniable truth is the following: beat your competitors to be number one. Look at how people respond to your competitors’ activity and draw a line between what works and what doesn’t. This will only ensure the successful growth of your brand.
Find New Marketing Strategies
Social listening will help you learn a lot about your audience, your competitors and finally, your brand! Put your brand’s name at the center of your dashboard and learn to translate the data you collect. Surely, looking at the overall impact your brand has online will help you find new horizons to focus on. I mean, who knows, you might find an influential advocate for your brand, seize the opportunity and activate new marketing campaigns!
Moreover, measuring and tracking KPIs can be done more effectively while listening to consumers’ feedback. With social listening, you will be able to understand how you achieved your KPIs or, on the contrary, why you were far from reaching your goals. With an effective listening tool, understand your fan growth and put meaning into the engagement rates of your content. It’ll help you overview your performance growth over a certain period of time. Also, you will be able to amend your marketing strategies according to the results you analyze.
To Sum It Up
Social listening offers an added value to your brand. While listening, you will be able to assess people’s sentiment towards your brand. Furthermore, you’ll be able to keep up with the most trending topics, look at how your hashtags are being used and get insightful information about how people perceive your competitors. All this to successfully strategize your next marketing step and grow your online and offline community.
