How Can Social Listening Help Improve Your Marketing Plan

Marketing is essential if you want to move the sales needle. However, your marketing plan only works when it clicks with your target audience. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools available that listen to what the customer is saying so you can tweak your marketing efforts accordingly. 

One such strategy is social listening, which can give you essential data that takes your business to the next level. Keep reading to learn how your business can energize your marketing efforts with social listening strategies. 

What is Social Listening?

Social listening is surveying social media platforms for customer feedback, mentions, and discussion about your brand. It also includes noticing conversations that use keywords specific to your brand, your industry, and your competitors.

It goes beyond monitoring data and involves discerning the online mood or social media sentiment about your brand. It’s not just counting your social media mentions, but understanding what your social media users have to say about you.

Turn Insights Into Informed Decisions

To make your marketing efforts successful, you have to give your audience what they want. Social listening helps you get data from the past, so that you may make corrections that will help you move in the right direction.

People are continuously talking about brands and businesses in the online space. Whether those discussions are good or bad, you need to know what your audience wants so you can deliver. For instance, customers like it when brands respond to their tweets or Instagram posts. Without active listening, you will miss out on these impactful touchpoints.

Secondly, with the data you’ve collected, you’ll know if your marketing strategy is working or not. Perhaps you need to tweak your approach a little or stick with your existing content. It can also help in fine-tuning your in-store experience and promotional items for better ROI.

Know What Customers are Saying About Your Competitors

People are constantly changing, and so are their behaviors. To run a successful business, you need to be in tune with your customers interests and changing industry trends.

Social listening lets you know what your competitors are doing differently and whether or not these differences are resonating with your target market. For instance, they could be launching new marketing campaigns or products. Perhaps they are getting a good response from the market. Social listening can help you look inwards and make new strategies based on new consumer preferences. On the other hand, customers could be disgruntled by something your competition has done. You can use this opportunity to introduce your product as a better alternative.

Cue Into Key Information

Social listening can give you crucial information. Is there something that’s been the cause of repeated complaints from your customers? Could you modify it to solve this once and for all?

Secondly, social listening helps you with real-time data. You get to know if there is a sudden or significant change in a customers’ opinion on your products. You can take it as a warning signal and help avoid any disasters.

Apart from solving the negatives, social listening can also help leverage positive sentiments around your business. If people are suddenly saying good things about your product, you may want to capitalize on it and seize the opportunity to increase sales. If certain key words, design decisions, or a particular tone of voice resonates with your customers, channel these findings into your signs, customer experience, and online presence.

Top Social Listening Tools

There are several listening tools your business can leverage. However, choosing the best one for your brand will depend upon the kind of data you need. Here are a few tools that you may consider:

• Brandwatch – This tool will give you customer intelligence as well as social listening. It can show social media intelligence, saving you a great deal of time and effort. This tool is ideal for brand managers and market researchers, as it will help to create the next big marketing campaign.
• NetBase Quid – This platform offers multiple tools, including one for social listening. It can give crucial customer insights, identify trends, and observe a customer’s reception to the brand.
• Talkwalker – Here is a tool that assesses text, videos, and images in order to capture trends. The tool claims to save 40% of its users’ time by automatically creating and distributing reports.
• Digimind – If you’re a brand that works with influencers or wants to understand and manage brand reputation, Digimind would be the best tool for you. It integrates with other platforms in order to resolve all your social media management and tracking needs.

In-store Insights

Digital insights can help you improve your physical store experience too. Social listening can help you better understand your customer and  deliver outstanding products and interactions. You can use your newfound insights to enhance your visual displays, like using table covers, marketing materials, and banners to promote trending products. Social listening can help you understand what’s clicking with your customers and where you can make improvements.