Every day, millions of people around the world use social networks to talk about what they do, the places they visit, the companies they work for, the products and services they buy, among many other things; as well as their opinions, feelings and experiences around it, whether positive or negative. These conversations, which may seem ordinary, represent a gold mine that brands can exploit. to know the needs and preferences of your target audience.
The analysis of these conversations has the potential to change an entire marketing strategy, because by providing actionable data, it facilitates smarter decision making.. That’s why he social listening is taking relevanceBecause the more we are able to understand our audience, the more successful we will be, managing to focus our strategies on what customers are looking for or want in the here and now.
Social listening helps gain insight into what’s happening in various industries, needs in different markets, and what audiences are saying. In addition, it provides the information in an agile way, something that does not happen with other tools such as traditional surveys, focus groups, or studies and research.
A digital marketing tool
Everywhere we see and hear the term social listening, but do we really know what it is about? From my perspective, Social listening or social media listening is a process or methodology for analyzing online conversations about our brand, industry and market, including the competition, in order to obtain actionable data. We can see it as active listening to our current and potential customers, on a large scale, which allows us to analyze sentiment in order to improve our marketing efforts.
There are those who consider that technology is the essence of a marketing strategy. social listening, but it is not like that, it only helps us to monitor and obtain the metrics that we want. To put this process into practice, we need to have a strategy, which implies setting specific objectives; identify the social channels to monitor; determine the keywords, phrases, hashtags and tags we consider; define metrics we will focus on; and combine the results with those of other channels, for example, web search engines. Once the strategy is defined, obtaining results can be relatively fast.
Important reasons to start listening to the networks
Social listening goes beyond the numbers generated by the likes, retweets, comments or mentions, since it takes into account other elements such as sentiment and the role of digital influence to generate a positive impact on the brand. Regardless of the objectives that our strategy has, I can say, in a general way, that these are some of the benefits of social listening:
Better understanding of customers
Social listening allows marketers to monitor what their customers are saying about their brand and competitors in real time. By analyzing customer conversations, feedback, and sentiment, we can gain insight into preferences, interests, pain points, and expectations, which can be used to develop more effective strategies.
Improved customer engagement
We can also track and respond to customer feedback and inquiries quickly; which can impact on better satisfaction and loyalty, leading to positive word of mouth marketing.
Opportunities to position yourself above competitors
By monitoring the presence of competitors on social networks, we can identify industry trends, best practices and opportunities to differentiate our brand from competitors.
Greater effectiveness in content marketing
Identifying topics, formats, and channels that resonate with your target audience will help create more relevant, engaging, and shareable content that drives traffic, leads and conversions.
Improved crisis management
This type of monitoring can alert negative comments or crises online in real time, allowing you to respond quickly and effectively to mitigate damage to brand reputation.
Identification of influencers
We can identify relevant digital influencers and track their impact on social media. In this way, we can make decisions in the relationship with these trusted third parties, and measure the return on investment of the campaigns.
As we can see, listening to audiences in the digital world is still as important as in the traditional world, the only thing that has changed are the channels to do it and the tools to support us.
There is an old phrase that says: “you have to listen before you speak”, and in this digital age, nothing better than a marketing strategy. social listening, that provides us with actionable KPIs, for intelligent decision making that guarantees the success of any marketing campaign.
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Hector M. Meza General Director of InfoSol. MBA and Communication Consultant. He was Vice President at IBM Mexico.