As an online business, you must manage several factors to ensure that your customers are satisfied. Consumers are far more inclined to express their feelings about your brand, positive or negative, online. As a result, comments from your customers online are likely to be the most candid feedback you’ll ever hear.
Because it is not often that we hear of firms adopting social listening, it sometimes feels like it’s a piece of sacred information given only to a few select brands. In reality, social listening is used by many in the brand management realm; it is just that there are times that it is not to its full potential.
Social media strategists have been practicing social listening for some time now. Neon Lizard Creative marketing team of skilled social media strategists delivers efficient solutions to monitor your brand’s name mentions depending on your preferences.
Although social listening is a product of all the fancy techy notions available today (big data, machine learning, etc.), it does not necessitate a large budget or programming abilities. All you need is an understanding, a tool, and some imagination.
If you’re new to the social listening industry, this article will teach you how to effectively manage your online brand and improve your customers’ online experience.
What is Social Listening?
Learning how social listening works is critical – yet it is simple. Social listening is the practice of monitoring social media platforms for brand mentions and conversations, then evaluating them for insights to identify chances to respond.
You can use a social listening/monitoring program to monitor social media platforms and search engines for keywords (often the name of your business, your sector, your CEO, or something related to your niche). Analyze the data to find methods to put what you’ve learned into practice. That might be as simple as reacting to a satisfied consumer or as complex as changing your entire brand positioning.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, blogs, and forums are examples of popular social media sites. Not every tool can accomplish everything, but the greatest ones, not usually the most costly ones, can.
While many businesses now utilize social listening, their primary purpose is customer service. Keep in mind that social listening is a game-changer in customer service.
Social media listening gives you a better understanding of what your target audience expects from your company. Customer service is quickly becoming the rule rather than the exception.
For example, a current client may tweet about how much they enjoy your product. Or, you may come across a conversation where people search for answers that your product or service may supply.
Nowadays, businesses are also using social media for lead generation purposes. Generating leads on social media may assist both B2C and B2B marketers by allowing you to find social media users that are interested in your brand. It provides you with the required leverage to target them with appropriate information and offers before converting them into paying clients.
Companies would want to attract new customers, sell items in novel ways, and make the well-known social word-of-mouth work for them. The single most effective method for this is social media listening. Let’s activate the creative mode and see what it can do for us.
How to Generate Leads Through Social Listening
1. Find prospects and approach them with an offer that will surprise them.
The main idea of this technique is to discover new consumers online and provide them a reason to utilize your product or service. This method would have a personal touch to it while nevertheless being public. Meanwhile, you’re speaking to a specific person. You will eventually be repeating the strategy with several individuals, but no amount of work will result in a broadcasted commercial that feels impersonal.
You will be conversing with your prospect in public while doing so. That implies that all of that person’s followers will be able to see what’s going on. They may become intrigued and purchase your products and services immediately, or they may merely notice the brand name and its association with their friend. Without knowing it, you are already establishing brand awareness in both scenarios.
You can start this process by searching for keywords related to your business and industry. Consider users who employ those keywords in their posts as prospects. Once you have found the topic on social media channels, you can join the conversation by replying to them. You can begin by expressing your thoughts on a current trend, offering promos and discounts on purchases, or directing the prospect to a related page on your website. People are frequently astonished and happy when they receive such a response from a brand and decide to dig in further. It will help you gain a following and increase interest in your company.
2. Generate leads through dissatisfied competitor customers.
Using the same strategy, you can find consumers willing to test new products and services. This might be the best lead-generating strategy ever devised in the internet age. Not every consumer of your rival is pleased with their products or services. The larger your rival, the more vocally dissatisfied consumers there are on the Internet. Now it’s simply a matter of identifying these unfortunate folks and rescuing them from their ordeal. Or just informing them about your brand and explaining why they’d have a far better experience with it.
If they’ve highlighted a specific issue, make it a point to clarify how your product can help them. If not, consider how your product may be better/cheaper/more acceptable for them.
The technique works by listening to social media. Monitor your competitor’s brand and terms having negative connotations that may be linked with their service or product, such as “terrible,” “bad,” “awful,” “broken,” “struggling with,” and “trouble.” You don’t have to identify every potential word combination: if your rival is large, the most apparent keywords will generate enough leads. If your rival is tiny, you’ll be able to browse through “bad” remarks within the social media listening software and respond to them.
3. Locate prospects who are seeking you.
Despite its drawbacks, social media platforms are excellent tools for connecting with people you care about, sharing and following life updates, and finding out what’s up with your favorite brands.
Social media prospecting or social prospecting is the use of social media to increase your customer base.
Searching for keywords that begin with “can anyone recommend?” ” or “Where can I purchase?” and other questions in your location, if your business is related to a location, and responding to them from either your business account as a salesperson or your account as a regular user, can deliver you the warmest leads possible.
The truth is social media has been around for many years now but there are still a lot of people who are not sure how exactly to use it for business and generating leads.
Yet, social media can be very productive when you’re searching for a potential client, a strategic partner, or a new hire.
4. Find micro-influencers.
Cooperation with the most powerful industry influencers usually has a favorable quantitative effect. It is based on the influencers’ social media reach and engagement. It ensures us a lot of exposure.
Micro-influencers are at the other extreme of the spectrum. It’s a relatively new phrase that has little to do with the excitement, fame, and riches. Micro-influencers are social media users who have a much smaller but more engaged following than macro-influencers.
Influencers are often willing to work with marketers, product review, and advertising the company if it is good enough. And we’ve all heard about the potential of native advertising.
While some influencers made hundreds (or even millions) of dollars from their social media engagement, the vast majority, as one might anticipate, did not. Many became micro-influencers, influencing the attitudes of their supporters in their respective industries. They may just have a few thousand followers as compared to millions, but they are devoted and inquisitive followers.
The objective is to identify the internet micro-influencers with your own business. Here is where social listening comes into play.
The truth is that the number of followers does not help you to anticipate if someone will buy or not. Keeping this in mind, it appears that more and more firms are engaging micro-influencers. If you need help starting up your social media marketing campaigns, you can check out this link to learn more.
Final thoughts!
When you approach social listening creatively, you may enhance brand recognition, attract interested leads, increase word-of-mouth, plus eventually gain a large number of new consumers through social media, both directly and indirectly. The use of social media is the simplest way to get started with implicit marketing, where any idea has the potential to become viral or at least acquire awareness, the border between friends, marketers, and followers is blurred, and people speak about everything. All you have to do is look for relevant topics and join them.