A poor social listening strategy can make you lose important customer insights. With social listening, you can determine what your customers think about your brand and products. However, it is not limited to just that.
Social listening also allows you to track competitor brands, monitor industry events, stay updated with the latest industry practices, and more. By knowing about the trending topics in your industry, you can create engaging content for your audience.
In this article, we will study how brands are losing important business opportunities by ignoring customer insights. You can understand the relevance of social listening in today’s times by reading it.
What is social listening?
Social listening is a process that includes multiple activities such as monitoring customer conversations, brand mentions, competitor brands, and more. Brands use social listening to gain customer insights.
With social listening, you track customer behavior patterns, their buying preferences, and their overall sentiment regarding your brand. Sophisticated social listening tools have been developed to manage these activities.
The insights obtained from social listening can be used to improve your marketing strategies. Some brands even use these insights to improve their offerings. As most of these decisions are data-based, they help your business grow.
Watch Out: 6 Social Listening Trends 2023 To Stay Ahead Of The Game
How does social listening help your business?
If you ignore customer insights, you might fail to understand their requirements and expectations. With limited access to data, while developing products/services, your end products/services might fail to impress the audience. This eventually degrades your brand value and hinders your growth rate.
Continue Reading: How Can Social Listening Help Grow Your Business?
Social listening provides these benefits to your business:
A better understanding of the audience
The ultimate goal of any business is to meet the expectations of its customers. Social listening helps you gauge whether you have succeeded or not.
For instance, when your audience talks about your products on a social media channel, you get insights into their thinking. By using these insights, you can upgrade your existing products or develop new ones.
Customer feedback can help you improve your customer service. It helps you develop meaningful content to enhance engagement levels. All these efforts help you gain customer trust and loyalty.
Business intelligence
Acquiring business intelligence is essential to thriving in the market. Business intelligence means knowing what works best for your audience.
The insights obtained through BI (Business Intelligence) tools help you make your products and services better. You can also integrate them into your marketing strategies.
If a majority of your customers are unhappy with your product, you can optimize it as per their expectations. The customers might not be happy with the features, shipping policy, or anything else. A lackluster marketing strategy might fail to impress them. Social listening develops your business intelligence and helps you make smart decisions.
Do you know: How Social Listening Differs from Social Intelligence?
Crisis management
Your brand’s reputation is determined by what customers say and think about it.
Social listening helps you measure your brand’s success by providing a wider view of your audience. It also helps you predict a future crisis and take the necessary steps in advance.
Crisis management is an integral aspect of social listening. Most brands are doing well in the market due to their clean image.
When customers say negative things about your brand, it affects your social image. It also hampers your future business prospects by creating doubt in the minds of your customers and clients.
By tracking the negative sentiments of customers in real time, you can prevent them from damaging your brand’s reputation.
Customer acquisition and relationships
As a brand owner or marketer, you must have a clear customer acquisition strategy. Most brands realize that the best way to acquire customers is by solving their issues. Hard-selling products/services by jumping into random conversations do not work on most occasions.
Therefore, brands focus on creating meaningful and relevant content for their users. The focus is on developing content that helps resolve their problems.
Social listening tools provide your insights regarding trending industry topics. They provide details regarding the top influencers in your industry. By analyzing trending topics and collaborating with influencers, you can create engaging and meaningful content. Also, you can explore different conversations and topics to fine-tune your content marketing strategies.
Social listening can also help you maintain customer relationships. By understanding customer behavior and preferences, you can learn about their mindset. Social listening tools provide insights regarding their hobbies, interests, age group, occupation, and more.
These details help you create personalized messages for improved customer communication. Include personalization while interacting with customers to develop a stronger relationship with them. Their loyalty to your brand nurtures your business and improves CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value).
Do you know: How Can Social Listening Improve CX?
Competitor analysis and market trends
Social listening is not limited to what customers say and think about your brand. It also involves studying what they say about your competitors. Their perception of your industry as a whole is also crucial to your market.
Social listening makes you aware of your competitor’s business strategies, marketing moves, and gimmicks. It provides insights into their products, after-sale services, and brand positioning. With these details, you can create better products and marketing strategies.
The recent trends in the industry can help you launch your products. They also help you shape your marketing campaigns. You can track industry trends and topics using relevant hashtags and keywords. It helps you optimize your content strategies to stay relevant.
Predicting future trends is also possible by analyzing the shift in customer preferences. By observing the change in customer conversations, you can determine the topics that are gaining prominence. Similarly, you can also determine the topics that are losing steam. These insights can strengthen your marketing strategies, product development, and campaigns.
Fine-tune content strategies
Content is the heart of your marketing plans. Without a proper content strategy, your marketing campaigns can fail. Your content must resonate with your audience. They must get the feeling that you are conversing directly with them. Refrain from creating generic content, as it may degrade your brand’s image.
By providing deep insights into the target audience, social listening makes you aware of their issues. You can understand the type of language and content they mostly resonate with. You may conduct surveys to get a broader view of their buying preferences and issues. All this information can be useful in improving your campaign targeting.
For instance, most employees talk about dealing with workplace burnout. You can target such employees by creating a guide for balancing work and life. It will make them feel special, and they will appreciate your efforts.
Reasons for losing business opportunities
Some brands rely on social listening only when creating social media campaigns. Others only use them to manage online reputation. The main reasons behind losing business opportunities even after using social listening tools are highlighted below:
Lack of interpretation
Acquiring customer data is not the sole objective of social listening. You must also interpret it accurately to derive meaningful insights from conversations. Understanding the context of the conversations is also essential to interpreting the raw data. So, along with social listening tools, you must also hire a data analyst who has sufficient knowledge about social and cultural contexts.
You must also clean up the raw data to remove irrelevant conversations. Many words have multiple meanings and social listening end-up tracking them without understanding their actual context. You must implement tools that have BI and AI (Artificial Intelligence) capabilities to minimize these mistakes.
Limited access to data
Some social media platforms, like WhatsApp, offer limited access to customer data. The only way to stay updated on trending topics is to join these platforms and observe.
The privacy policy, data collection rules, and other terms and conditions may also differ from one platform to another. So, you must consider these things while collecting data from social media.
Failing to derive insights
While social listening provides you with sufficient data, it may lack coherence and meaning. To derive meaningful insights from raw data, you should be clear about your company’s goals and requirements. The same data can be useful for multiple departments.
For instance, a customer complaint regarding a product can also highlight the lack of responsiveness on the part of the support team. So, data sharing among different data sets can prove crucial for deriving meaningful customer insights with limited data.
Learn more about: 4 Reasons to Start Using Social Listening Today
Conclusion
These were some reasons why brands lose business opportunities with social listening. We hope that you employ social listening and BI tools to derive useful customer insights.
Konnect Insights is a platform that offers access to raw customer data. It also integrates BI, social listening tools, and publishing capabilities to manage the customer experience. Using platforms like this can help you get the true benefits of social listening.
