Many moons ago, business owners could get away with dropping into the crowd and figuring out what their customers wanted through some good, old-fashioned eavesdropping. The owner of the booming department store on Fifth Avenue could gauge what people really wanted to find with a simple stroll across the sales floor. With a minor disguise, they could make a trip across the street to their competitor and figure out what their prospective customers were lacking.
In other words, social listening was pretty self-explanatory. Leave the office for an hour, drop into a social space, and start listening.
These days, social listening demands a lot more from businesses, but that’s not to say it needs to be over-complicated. In fact, nowadays, social listening (done right) is a lot less time-consuming than it was for the Victorian department store tycoon.
The only thing that’s stayed the same? The importance of knowing your customers, and knowing them well. That knowledge is the key to continued improvement, and to offering a consistently strong experience that ensures they will keep coming back for years (if not decades) to come.
Well, that, and having the very best social media listening tools available.
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Why is Social Listening Important?
Social listening is the process of capturing and extracting relevant information from your target market on social media. Unlike social media monitoring, which is a more passive process of keeping a tab on your own brand mentions (tags, for instance), social listening is proactive. It takes into account not just direct mentions, but any posts, tweets, or comments that could prove relevant to your industry, and worth responding to in your own social posting or community management strategies.
Social listening is key to informing your brand’s understanding of customers and leads. Without it, you’re missing a big part of the picture. Imagine the Mona Lisa with a piece of paper taped over her face – that’s what a social media strategy without social listening is like. Whether you’re using social media listening for customer advocacy or boosting your content, it’s as fundamental as paint and a canvas.
The right social listening tools can provide you with…
- New Leads
- Pointers for improvement
- Opportunities to excel in customer service
- Opportunities to boost share of voice and thought leadership
- Ideas for content creation
- Insight into how your competitors are performing
- A fresh perspective on your target market
Those are the key social listening benefits, but what does it really do for building-up your customer knowledge?
It Tells You What They Want
What do your customers want? You know what you want them to want – whatever product or service you’re offering – and you know how to encourage them to want it (through strong marketing campaigns and plenty of nose-to-the-grindstone development), but you can never really get a strong grip on your leads until you know what it is they really want in the first place.
Here’s a simplified scenario for social listening. An individual – the decision-maker behind a key B2B brand that falls into your target market – publishes a LinkedIn post detailing their recent difficulties with extracting a worthwhile ROI from email marketing. They say it represents a drain on time – so much so that they just can’t justify targeted campaigns, and simply send out impersonal emails once or twice a month.
What do they want? A solution – a b2b email marketing platform that lightens the load, automates the time-consuming and laborious parts of generating targeted emails, and allows the business to generate a strong ROI that proves the value of email marketing to stakeholders. But they’re not directly asking for a solution – they haven’t tagged any prominent brands in email marketing software – they’re just shouting into the void.
With social media tracking, brands have the opportunity to turn that void into something productive – to insert themselves into the conversation, offering a solution with a little self-promotion.
But not all leads will be as clean-cut as that one…
It’s Vital for Lead Scoring
If there was ever a time when collaboration between marketing and sales was fundamental to the business’s success, it’s now. Scoring leads means sorting them according to how likely they are to be converted. Not all customers who show interest in your brand are suited to the products or services you’re offering – but, if you’re nurturing every lead in the same way, you’re wasting a lot of time and effort in the wrong places.
The more their wants align with your brand, the higher the chances they’ll be converted, and the better off you’ll be investing plenty of time and resources into nurturing them as they move through the funnel.
You can score leads based on very broad parameters, like business size and industry, but there’s a limit to how valuable these parameters can be on their own. Social media is great for generating behavior-based insights. If your lead scoring takes into account whether they have interacted directly with a post, clicked a link that directs them to your website, followed or tagged you directly, then your sales team will have a much better way of gauging how strong of a lead they really are.
It Shows You What They’re Getting From Your Competitors
When you’re trying to win a person over, it’s always worth knowing what their type is. We’re not saying you should work to embody that type at the sacrifice of all that makes you (and your brand) unique, but that, if your competitors are doing something you’re not, it’s always better to know about it.
This is the art of social media brand monitoring, and a lot of competitors are already doing it.
Social listening takes you beyond the parts of social media that are directly concerned with your brand. It’s not about your comment section, your DMs, your tags or mentions; it’s about the conversations and interactions that take place outside of that scope…and plenty of the conversations and interactions most relevant to you will be those that take place between leads and competitors.
We see this play out all the time on social media. B2C customers are not averse to calling out a brand directly from their socials, whether it’s for a bad product or experience, and these posts are perfect for name-dropping yourself as a more proactive alternative.
To be able to make the most of those opportunities, you just need the perfect social listening platform.
Knowing What Content Attracts Them Means Knowing What Content To Create
You can’t become the perfect chef – the kind that gets diners flying in from all over the world, bedazzled with Michelin stars, and given their own show on the Food Network – if you don’t commit to getting out there and tasting all the foodstuffs you can get your hands on.
In other words, don’t add Pad Thai to the menu until you’ve travelled to Thailand’s Sukhumvit 38 and tasted every local take on the dish, and don’t add a tiramisu until you’ve sampled your fair share on sun-drenched terraces in Treviso, Italy.
The same goes for good content creation. Don’t produce and publish content to your socials until you form a strategy. How do you form that strategy in the first place? By using social listening to create content that people really, really want to read!
Listen, we’ve all made a bad Pad Thai or a soggy tiramisu, and you can bet we’ve all put together a piece of content that feels great, but fails to perform the way we think it’s going to. Maybe a co-worker critiques it before you press Publish, or maybe the comment section is about as lively as a mall on a Monday morning. Either way, it’s a dud.
But social posting doesn’t have to feel like a constant case of trial-and-error. If you’re gathering and reviewing insights through a stellar social listening strategy, then you can make sure you’re only devoting time and effort to the kinds of content that are sure to capture eyes and hearts.
But, unlike that trip to Suk 38, this isn’t a one-and-done scenario. If you’re going to consistently offer a strong, engaging social publishing strategy to your followers and leads, then you’re going to have to consistently inform that strategy with social listening. Trends are short-lived on social media, and your ability to meet your audiences in those trends will hinge on your social listening strategy, and how well you understand your customers.
Social listening software is a real game changer for building a better understanding of customers and leads, but don’t just settle for anything. At Oktopost, social media marketing is our bread and butter, and we have the platform to make social media monitoring and listening smooth, efficient, and genuinely productive.
