Listen. Learn. Grow.

It is the age-old advice that the wise give to the people to make a difference in their lives.

You would be surprised to know, but the experts and marketing pioneers give the same advice to the brands to create a mark in their industries. Listen to what your audience says about you through social listening.

Today, social media has an unmeasurable power. It was once a platform where you would catch up with your friends. Now it has transformed to be a space where one talks to or about businesses. Social media platforms have become a versatile platform where people show off about their last vacation and share their experience with a brand or product.

Social media is one of the greatest consumer research tools today. If you are not leveraging its power and listening to what users are saying about you, you are wasting time.

This article will help you understand what social listening is and how your brand can benefit from its mindful usage.

How Does Social Listening Benefit Your Business?

Social listening has been around for some time. Still, it is a fairly underused strategy in the social media world. Let us explore the ways you can use it for your brand –

1.    Helps in Lead Generation

Irrespective of the business type and nature, the goal of every brand is to be profitable. Naturally, the biggest priority for businesses is generating more leads and converting as many as possible into customers.

However, it is hard to get your message across in the cut-throat competition. There are larger brands with bigger customer acquisition budgets. While startups and small businesses cannot afford to spend a lot of money on lead generation. They need tools that have high ROIs with less expense.

This is where social media comes into the picture. While social media marketing has a bad reputation for lead generation, it can be a great tool to find loyal customers. All you need to do is find social media profiles that are talking about your industry or brand/product similar to yours. Among all those conversations, you need to search for the ones that are asking for recommendations for a product or service similar to yours. Also, target the ones that are complaining about your competitors.

The social listening tool will notify you of the required search. Your next step is to engage with those users and pitch your products or services.

Your pitch is your golden egg here. Remember that conventional sales pitches do not work anymore. Especially on social media, your brand voice should strike a balance between casual and professional tone.

According to a survey by Sales for Life, social selling results in 119% higher ROI than traditional sales strategies. Moreover, not many brands use it, which means you won’t face competition in this strategy.

2.    Determines the Brand Health

One of the many reasons brands fail to make an impression on social media is that they fail to connect with their audience. Understanding what your audience thinks about your brand essentially determines its public perception. If a brand ignores or fails to take the audience’s perception into account, it cannot take its branding strategy to the next level.

A peep into the positive or negative thinking associated with the brand of your audience presents a new insight in front of you. More importantly, it challenges you to rethink assumptions about your brand and its reach and leads to much more targeted marketing.

Social listening tools, such as Mentionlytics, can help you identify the general perception of your brand. You can get to know aspects, such as common customer questions, comments, complaints, demographics, and positive and negative sentiments around your brand. Once you share this social listening data with your team, you can evaluate a general assessment of your brand. You can –

• Find the most common issues your customers face.
• Identify the business areas your customers are happy with.
• Recognize the generic image of your brand amongst the public.

These insights will help you find out the strengths and weaknesses of your brand. After drawing a fair conclusion, you can pivot your strategies and resolve the existing issues.

3.    Provides Assistance in Event Monitoring

Social media has blurred the boundaries of an event’s reach. Be it any kind of event, its glimpse is not limited to just the guest list. It can reach every person who engages with social media and online content created about your event.

However, how do you track every social conversation happening around your event? There can be multiple speakers, numerous hashtags, several accounts. Enter social listening.

With a social listening tool, you can get the complete picture of your event. Here are the ways you can use the information –

• You can track whether the message your audience resonated with aligns with your goals or not.
• You can get to know about the positive feedback and use it in your marketing strategy.
• The social listening insights will also help you recognize the improvement areas or overlooked opportunities.
• The pre-event data can help you understand the audiences’ expectations. You can adjust your plans around that.
• If the pre-event perception of the audience does not align with your event’s goals, you can change the marketing message accordingly.
• With real-time social media listening, you will be able to engage in social conversations while the event is on. It will publicize your event. Moreover, you can provide real-time support to the audience.

Along with these exceptional use-cases, you can also use social listening to plan your event. The above image shows a tweet where a user expresses his wish for an event to be conducted in his city. By listening to more social conversations, a brand can decide the location or other details for the event. Social listening allows you to explore new territories while doing what customers want.

4.    Helps to Stay Ahead of the Competition

Social media is a golden goose for businesses in today’s day and age, and hence, is a competitive space. To grow in your industry, you need to beat your competitors with better products/services and customer experience. However, that is not enough. You also need to be aware of every next move of your competitor to outperform them.

With social listening, you can have the opportunity to monitor everything users are talking about your competitor. A peek into their social media audience will help you unravel the untapped market. You can also see the areas where the customers are not happy with them. It will help you to market their weaknesses as your strength. Moreover, you can see the insights of their content and analyze why the audience engages the way they do with their brand. It will help you bring effective change to your content strategy. If they roll out a new product or service, you can understand the general market sentiment about it and set a goal to outperform them.

Such insights will help you disrupt the existing leaders in the industry and take advantage of their shortcomings. Leveraging those insights to influence your campaigns and marketing strategies will grow your brand in the industry.

For example, you are launching a new product line of skincare products for your makeup and beauty brand. The skincare industry is a well-established market. Hence, before setting your foot out, you should get an insight into the audiences’ perception of the products of the big players in the industry. The more you milk the social listening data, the stronger will be your competitive strategy.

5.    Helps With Product Development

You go to a restaurant, order your meal, and didn’t like the overall experience. While paying the check, the waiter comes and asks you about your experience. How many times do you say something along the lines of ‘Everything was great, thank you’ and move on? While you can review honestly, how many times do you do so?

Most people do not bother to be honest with their reviews offline. There could be several reasons behind it. The person might not feel confident enough to criticize or simply do not have time. However, it changes when you are reviewing online. You see, there are fewer dictating factors behind the screen. The user is more likely to be specific about their opinions online. It is one of the greatest benefits of social listening.

Social listening allows you to get a peek into the customers’ feedback about your products, brand, or industry. The customers’ opinions, negative or positive, are a gold mine for you. You can use the insights and adjust your business strategies to fit the needs of the consumer.

You can use social listening in different situations with a range of different goals in your mind. It can strengthen your relationship with your customers and provide results in the form of higher growth and revenue. Start leveraging the benefits of social listening to expand your business.