It is needless to say that in the wake of CO-VID19, many lives have been changed as the way we live, work and interact with each other. In this fast-changing landscape, it is vital for us as sales and marketing professionals to constantly stay updated in the buzzing social space and understand your customers through social Listening, as millions of B2B relationships and interactions are now taking place online, perhaps now more than ever.
This is where social listening comes in. The increasing urgency and need for sales professionals and marketers to stay up to date with everything that’s going on around them and tap into business opportunities within the digital space of social media. Let’s explore some Social Listening tools, how we can use them effectively and how it can help in this time of crisis.
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is the process of tacking social media channels with regards to the mentions, discussions and sentiment around your brand, competitors and industry.
By integrating social listening as a core part of your social media strategy, it would allow us to track, analyze and respond to conversations about our brand on social media, thus serving as a vital part of marketing research.
You can understand your customers through social Listening in three steps:
- Monitor all your social media channels for direct mentions of your company brand, products and keywords related to your business or industry.
- Assess the information for different ways you can put it into action. For example, replying to a satisfied customer or on a larger scale, perhaps wanting to reposition your brand in the social sphere.
- Use this data to drive your marketing and sales campaigns. In this day and age with the abundance of options to choose from and accessibility of information at our fingertips, our customers are KING under every aspect. We need to be able to identify any existing pain points of our customers and present our value proposition as soon as possible. By putting the customer at the center of our campaign’s efforts, we make sure to deliver the solutions our customers are looking for.
The relevant area of focus to consider in social listening are:
- Brand/company reputation
- Product mentions
- Key stakeholders
- Company mentions
- Competition
- What your competitors are doing online
- What customers are saying about your competition
- Relevant topics
- Industry-relevant hashtags
- Keywords
… and collecting data points of these metrics to measure ROI of your social media efforts, to share with marketing and sales or to set-up new digital campaigns, to name a couple of examples.
How to get set up for social listening?
Good social listening relies on your company’s ability to stay up to date with industry trends, know what it is that you’re listening for and most importantly what it is that you intend on doing with the insights and data of your social listening efforts.
And perhaps most importantly, a powerful first step to establishing this into your social media strategy would be to implement a Social Listening & Tracking tool. Here are some of the best tools out there:
- Sprout Social
- Hootsuite
- HubSpot
Social media serves as the go-to information source in this digital age, now perhaps more than ever. It is for that reason vital do pay attention to what is going on around you or you will, unfortunately, be left behind. Our customers, partners, investors and competitors alike express their opinions, wants and needs in the digital space, and it is for that reason that we need to be present at every phase of the buyer’s journey.
The benefits of social listening are immense- and in this fast-moving landscape that we operate in, a day late is a year behind…
Social listening is only the beginning of the iceberg when it comes to unlocking the untapped potential of social. The future of marketing and sales will focus on developing this further as we progress into a modern selling landscape- and social media will play a crucial role in determining our successes. To tap into what users are saying, the organization must start listening to their buyers to be at the right place, at the right time.
Get in touch with us to know more about how we can integrate Social Listening into your Marketing and Sales strategy! You can also join Eric Haar and Pelin Karamustafaoglu – Managing Director Retail in Switzerland, Accenture -in our next edition of the Tricycle Meet the Masters of Social Selling. You will have the opportunity to discover how executives are leveraging the potential of social to win in the digital space and understand their customers through social Listening.
Author: Nick Tjintjelaar
