Insights like social listening are crucial to a successful marketing strategy. Researching and understanding your market, audiences, and the sentiment behind your brand, are all essential efforts to achieve an optimal business strategy. And the best way to collect these insights is through social listening. It’s not simply monitoring the discussions and mentions of your product and brand, but it’s also understanding the customers’ response and feelings towards your brand.
What is Social Listening?
Social listening, also known as social media listening, is part of the market research to analyse conversations on social media channels. Its primary goal is to gain consumer insights and observe trends and general sentiment about your brand, products, competitors or industry. It also helps you understand why, where, and how these conversations are happening, as well as what people think—not just when they’re tagging or mentioning your brand.
Rather than doing all the guesswork about what your customers want or think, you can know exactly what they want. With social listening, you can devise future campaigns, create a killer content strategy, and even surpass your competitors. By using social listening to direct your business strategy, your company will surely save both time and money.
Why your business needs Social Media Listening?
1. You can keep track of your brand’s performance
One of the greatest benefits of social media listening is that you are able to identify and analyse customer comments, complaints, and sentiments around your brand in real time. You’ll uncover insights about the positive or negative feelings people associate with your brand, and the specific features that they concern about.
Understanding the public perception of your brand is an essential starting point to take your strategy to the next level. If you are getting positive sentiment, find out the reasons behind it as those information can guide your marketing strategies. If sentiment is negative, look for the problems and make changes right away.
2. You can discover new opportunities
Social listening helps you to perceive the upcoming industry trends. By knowing the popular hashtags or emerging topics within your industry, you can get a better sense of where your market is moving to. This information can help you to reposition your brand’s product, content, and general messaging and become a trendy discussion point.
When people are complaining about a competitor’s product or customer service, you can grab the opportunity to step in and ask them to explain what shortcomings they found. If you engage with them, they will give you meaningful feedbacks or ideas which help to find your sweet spot.
If you can modify your products to address the concerns people are talking about, you can satisfy more of your customers and hopefully, outpace your competitors.
3. You can increase customer acquisition by optimising content
Simply being on social is not enough. Content is equally important to drive engagement and conversion, so you want to get it right. Social listening helps you to discover what topics and hashtags your audiences are interested in. Through it, you will then know exactly what you need to talk about or what type of content to deliver in order to reach as many people as possible.
Social media holds many opportunities for broadening your reach to prospects. Rather than just capturing inactive followers, you convert them into your customers. After all, your followers aren’t simply your loyal customers sticking to your brand; they’re also people who enjoy your content or willing to share ideas with you.
More importantly, it is much easier to convert your active followers into leads and, eventually, customers – compared to random strangers, hoping they can magically turn into loyal customers.
Enhance your market research or strategy with social listening
If you’ve been struggling to keep abreast of the industry trends, it’s high time you listen to your customers on social media. Get to know them better to create a winning and up-to-date strategy with social listening.
At IH Digital, we use Digimind – a global social media monitoring and marketing intelligence platform that provides comprehensive enterprise tools and resources for social listening, social analytics, and competitive intelligence.
IH Digital is a B2B marketing agency in Asia that provides full marketing services, including market research, social listening and more that works across the region.
We offer APAC market research for Asia businesses using the 3-Step Market Research Method. We combined all essential marketing research steps in one package known as the Market Readiness Research (MRR), aimed to help you understand your target market from competitors to audience.
Interested to work with us and conduct Asia market research? Contact us today to schedule a consultation with our Market Research team soon.
