In today’s super competitive landscape, social media is the beating heart of every industry – whether we are ready to give into it or not!
Social media is a critical part of every brand's marketing and advertising strategy, from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. According to a report from GlobalWebIndex, 54% of social browsers use social media to research new brands and products.
And with the advent of social listening, it’s never been so easy for brands to dive deeper into consumer insights and market knowledge, and gain a larger share of that market!
As per its most widely-spread definition, Social listening is essentially the art of monitoring social media conversations around specific keywords and topics – but and that's just the tip of the iceberg. The insights gained from social listening can help brands stay ahead of the curve, increase market share, and improve ROI. In this blog post, we'll explore the importance of social listening, how brands can implement it into their marketing strategies, and the benefits it can bring to brands across all industries.
4 Key Benefits of Social Listening:
Boost brand awareness and reach
As a company, you should leverage social listening to help track social media conversations around their brand name, but also key hashtags and keywords you’d like your buyer persona to find you by. At surface level you can decipher how your content is performing on social by monitoring the reach and engagement of campaigns. But if you dive deeper, you’ll be able to gain insights into social media engagement which will help you adjust posting frequency, messaging, tone of voice, and content. Through this analysis, brands can enhance their campaign performance, resulting in greater brand engagement and relevance, which in turn increases brand awareness and outreach.
Gain a better understanding of audience interests and behaviours
Social listening can provide brands with valuable insights into consumer trends, interests, and behaviours. Monitor social media chatter on key terms related to your brand and consumer demographics to learn about top products, preferred communication channels, and influencers. By analysing these conversations, brands can gain valuable insights that can shape their marketing and advertising strategies. For brands looking to create a data-driven marketing plan, social listening is essential.
Stay on top of the competitive landscape
Keeping an eye on the competition is one of the most important aspects of social listening - analyse your position in the market by tracking competitors’ social media activity, content, and engagement. As a result, you can gain an understanding of what they are up to and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Armed with this information, you can identify areas where they can differentiate themselves and develop strategies to set yourself apart from the competition.
Boost your ROI
One of the best things about social listening is its ability to provide brands with data-driven insights. Insights from social listening can help you allocate your marketing budgets more efficiently, letting you re-focus a significant amount of time, money, and other resources on their social media campaigns. With social listening, companies can clearly identify the campaigns and channels that are driving the best results, allowing for easy strategic evaluations and proactive optimization of marketing budgets and increase return on investment.
Don’t this sound great? It sure does! But how do you start?
Harnessing the power of social conversations is not easy. Our IBT Online Global Brand Management Program has been designed to help you garner the insights critical to moving your business forward. You'll get the data infrastructure and technology needed to synthesize millions of messages in a sophisticated tool that keeps you agile enough to move at the speed of social. From nimble topic creation, quick data population, to AI systems to surface meaningful and actionable insights.
The IBT Online team of digital experts works with industry leading software and tools to help you
- Zero-in on the pivotal conversations and audiences that level-up your current strategy and guide future action
- Gain business-critical learnings from thousands of unfiltered thoughts, opinions and feedback to enhance your current strategy and guide future action.
- Leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technology at scale, sifting through millions of data points to deliver the trends, insights, and key learnings you need in seconds.
- Keep up with industry trends while identifying influencers and thought leaders to engage as brand advocates. Gather honest feedback to generate new product, services, and content ideas.
- Own Share of Voice (SOV) and distinguish your brand. Discover how consumers feel about your competitors, identify industry gaps and leverage opportunities to differentiate your business.
- Apply insights beyond social media. Deliver key strategic learnings across marketing, customer care, sales, product development and more using listening data.
The bottom line, social listening has become a must-have strategy for brands. It can provide an edge in a crowded marketplace. It can give companies deeper insight into consumer interests and behaviours, increase brand awareness and reach, track competition, improve customer service, and optimize return on investment.
Social listening can be the key to unlocking deeper consumer insights and creating a competitive advantage that retains customers and increases revenue. Ultimately, social listening is essential to developing a well-executed digital marketing strategy that achieves business goals. It's time for brands to stop viewing social listening as an option and start using it as a necessary tool for success.
By understanding customer needs and preferences through social listening, optimizing content for different languages/cultures through strong website design/SEO tactics, and managing perceptions through consistent branding messages—you will be better positioned for success when exporting products or services overseas!
Utilize these strategies today—and start seeing results tomorrow!
