Businesses grow by building strong customer relationships whether you run an online or a retail store. Hence, it is important to manage out your relationships before that you start implementing a marketing plan. This step is as important as knowing your target audience but is critical in terms of knowing audience needs and expectations. This guide lets you know how social listening can easily improve sales and market presence for a business in most efficient ways.
Identify your Business Needs and its Specific Leads.
To begin with, one must identify the type of business practices that are being done, after which it becomes easy to identify the digital platform that could be effectively used to promote your products and services. The efficiency of such platforms varies from business to business.
It is presumed that LinkedIn fits best for B2B companies to promote their business among other companies, salespersons and other employees. These people, especially salespersons and employees are active users that identify and acknowledge all the new updates being made.
Whereas, social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook fit best for B2C brands in terms of implementing social listening and marketing strategies. The reason being, people openly share their user experiences as well as ask for recommendations on such social media platforms.
Other platforms like Twitter stand neutral for all sorts of promotions due to its user type. Furthermore, communities like Reddit and Quora allow you to help mark your social media presence in productive ways, especially among communities that want to know about your product.
Now the key goal is to know why and what are people feeling about your company or brand, as well as monitoring your competitors on platforms that support your business in the best ways.
Monitor Hashtags and Keywords.
Social Listening is all about knowing what your customers and other users say about you across digital platforms because at the end of the day, buyers do consider user experiences on a large scale. So, whether it is a rant or an appreciation post, it will get follow ups and consequently, people will recognise your brand or company.
But how to master the art of tracking hashtags and keywords? One can easily use the following terms to search out keywords and hashtags:
Brand Specific: One can effortlessly monitor brand names and relevant hashtags, especially while doing competitor analysis, by searching their names example: #Nike, #adidas, @Samsung, @apple etc.
Business Terms: These are highly important as many of these help users to make decisions while opting for a product: #sale, #purchase, #promotion, #price, #rate, #package etc.
Help Specific: Users often ask for help online for matters they get stuck at. Same goes with choosing a product and start working on it. They may ask for a product recommendation as well, following keywords and hashtags make it easy to fetch such conversations, #help, #recommend #support #ideas #tips #hacks etc.
Criticism: Another important type of conversation to be monitored is criticism that often comes your way while having an active presence on social media. It might be towards your campaign or the product itself. To monitor them try searching out the following, #rant, #complain #condemn #fault etc.
Enjoy Competition
Just as monitoring hashtags, it is important for you to know what your competitors are up to. You may use their position in an effectual way to trace in your presence and increase your sales.
The goal is to act wisely and respond to users to provide them with satisfactory answers for all generated queries online. Even if the query isn’t for you, you need to analyse where you might strategically fit in your response that may add value to your sales.
Interact
Don’t hesitate to actively interact with your niche-based leads and followers. You don’t always have to sell your product and bombard your social media community with traditional marketing outbound messages. Any kind gesture towards them or a savage reply may add value to your marketing game. Even just a ‘like’ may work in cases where there’s nothing to respond to. Your social media interaction always adds value to your marketing game which eventually leads to lead conversion and increase in ROI.
Retort Queries In Time
You might not be the only one using social listening to improve their business sales, hence they might also be tracking your activity and user conversations. Hence it is important for you to not keep your audience hanging but to respond to their queries in a timely manner.
One must reply to user generated queries within 24 hours at most as per not to keep them hanging with ambiguities. By user generated queries, we may refer to direct messages, quotes or comments published in response to your content.
Brand Development
Social Listening is a great way to analyse your brand development. It enables you to compare your companies campaigns as well as the brand and company itself. Insights feature on various social media platforms does provide you with information about the performance of your campaigns as well as the flow of engagements and leads. But real insights can only be monitored via social listening as it is not only important to know the number of leads your brand or company is receiving online, but the quality of leads is all that matters. This particularly means that one must not consider the amount of mentions or engagement but rather what is being said about them, for them and in what context.
Social Listening with its extensive thresholds, provides great PR and marketing benefits for a company or brand simultaneously. From knowing your leads, interacting with them to knowing what your competitors are up to, social listening is a critical practice, but benefits a business in most ways, once implemented. Need to know more about social listening? Comment below!
