Becoming a market leader and introducing innovation that brings opportunities for growth and revenue is the ultimate dream of every businessman. There are many perks of becoming a leader of a market by providing the specific product needed by the consumer. However, the product may not serve the needs of the consumer forever. With time, the market needs differ. What you offer might seem a viable solution today but not in the coming years anymore.
Pushing the need for continuous innovation, the competition is rising day by day. Take an example of Google. Ever since it becomes public, it never stops upgrading and enhancing its features. Many competitors have come and go but, it remains there. Wanna know how Google and a few others have managed this growing competition? It occurred only because they learnt the key to offering their consumers what they want. For example, DuckDuckGo. It offers perfect privacy to surf which no other search engine offers. They succeeded in establishing their own product clientele, repute, and success rate because they put their ears to feedback. They listened to people and offered a solution to their problem in the form of a secure and safe searching platform.
Social media usage has widened the avenues that companies, organizations, SMEs, and SMBs can use to know what their customers are saying about their products. Simultaneously, they should focus on monitoring real-time marketing campaign feedback, testing product satisfaction, and so on!
Here in this article, we have discussed the importance of social listening, the benefit it offers to your business, and why you should start using social listening if you haven’t begun it yet. Along with this, we have listed a few social listening tools that will help you in your quest to making social listening an active marketing and product development strategy.
No worries at any point, you can contact Techloyce. We will help you in selecting the right tool that will make your marketing strategy a success with data-driven decisions.
Read: 5 Ways How Customer Interaction can be Enhanced
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is a practice of monitoring social media for direct or indirect brand mentions, reviews published by customers, and traffic evaluation against the content published by the company. Whatever is the reason behind social listening but the goal is to mitigate crises to maintain company reputation and to hunt for potential opportunities.
Why Social Listening Is Important?
The success of a product or service depends on what others say about it and how a company would account for feedback. Suppose, you are a tech-Solution provider who just launched an application that synchronizes essential account passwords and credentials directly to the notepad of a smartphone and simultaneously ensures no privacy leakage. But after hitting the market, a customer finds a bug and posted a bad review, not just that, you ignored it for days and, as a result, it started affecting your overall sale.
All of this could have been avoided if you had a counter-social listening strategy in place that could help you in mitigating the crises at the initial stage and point out potential threats for timely product improvement.
Here are some advantages that social listening offers to businesses.
1. Crises And Risk Management
One of the most essential things about social listening is, you can keep track of everything starting from the very early stage of product development and marketing to managing customer feedback, mentions, hashtags, sentiments of users, and reviews, etc.
This continuous monitoring offers quick insights into product or service performance. A single tweet, mention, or Hashtag can tell you what your customers are saying about your product and how your product is behaving in a particular environment.
Additionally, you can measure the activities of users and track negative comments and mentions, or even timely mitigate the impact of accidental posts published by an employee on the company’s website.
Remember, everything is online, hence maintaining a positive image has become essential than ever, especially for companies, celebrities, and politicians.
This can only be made possible if you have a comprehensive social listening strategy in place that aims to counter negative sentiment, offer timely apologies, even retrieve products from the market before things could get worse. A prominent example would be Burger King’s lettuce incident in 2012 and the FixGreggs campaign in 2014.
2. Deep Insights into Customers
Another advantage is, you won’t have to spend thousands of dollars on customer surveys because social listing will help you in knowing who your customers are, where they reside, what they are saying, etc. It will help you in creating perfect personas with the help of HubSpot marketing software and in creating effective marketing content for all social channels.
3. Track Competitor & Product Development
In addition to traffic monitoring, social listening helps an organization in keeping detailed tabs on competitors and devising counter-strategies to engage customers.
This allows you in identifying the pain point of customers and create proactive solutions. It can be in the form of new product development and deployment or improvement in the existing one.
4. Spot Community Influencer
When we are talking about social media, it encompasses everything from Twitter to WhatsApp and TikTok and Instagram! And, every platform has some influencer, content creator who can directly or indirectly influence users or motivate them to perform a particular task. This means you can innovate your marketing strategy and include influencers to market your product. Hence, social listening has become the only tool that offers deep insights into customers including the ups and downs of digital marketing strategy, and opportunities to tap into.
5. Customer Engagement
With social listening, you not only get who your customers are, but you also get insights on ways to engage customers. Every customer is unique, some need visual content, some need detailed documentation, and some need tutorials.
Another thing is, it tells you when your customers interact with your content and what time of the day or night, they are active.
Problem solved! You can now use these metrics to improve the content and overtly engage a customer with a high conversion rate.
What Tips and Trick You Should Know Before Devising A Social Listening Strategy?
Are you wondering how you can improve your social listing strategies? No worries, we have pointed out the two most important tips that will surely help you:
- Across Platform Listens. The best thing is to include all social media platforms in your social listening list. This doesn’t mean you should blindly add platforms that have a high user rate. Rather, it means to sort and carefully select the platforms that are being used by your customer. In the initial stage, it is better to select a few and with time increase the number.
- Collaborate With Sales Teams. The best resource for customer acquisition and retention is the sales and marketing department. Wanna know why? They continuously interact with customers hence they know all the problems faced by the customer which manual hunting may take hours to identify.
What Tools Can Be Used For Organized Social Listening Practices?
- Zoho Social. It is the first tool on our list. There are several reasons behind this, first, it offers a flexible scheduling option that helps you automatically publish content when your audience is active. Secondly, you can create a custom content calendar and sync it with your devices, and share it with your team. Third thing is, with a single dashboard you can monitor multiple social media channels from likes to mentions, hashtags, and sentiments. Lastly, a comprehensive report on your customers and insight on marketing strategies.
You can consult Techloyce, for Zoho Social consulting, implementation, or for integrating your CRM with Zoho Social or any other third-party application.
Read: Boost Sales with the Business Intelligence Powered by Zoho Analytics
- HubSpot Social Media Management Software
The second tool on our list is HubSpot. It is specially designed to empower marketing specialists by offering access to all kinds of tools. With HubSpot, you can sync information between CRM and HubSpot, automatically update contact information, keep track of conversion and you can even automate the email and content posting across the platform.
To Read More: HubSpot CMS Changing the Way You Send Email with Easy Drag and Drop Editor
Need Assistance?
Then content Techloyce today!
We have a team of skilled professionals to provide Zoho Social and HubSpot Social Media Marketing software solutions. Along with this, our professionals will help you in deciding the right tool that matches your business need.
If you any third-party application integration with Zoho or HubSpot then rest assure. We are certified Zoho partners and consultants. Along with this, we are also partnered with HubSpot.
