How to use social listening to improve your marketing messaging

With so much content and competition fighting for your audience’s attention, effective digital marketing is hard work. So, how do you stand out?

If you want to stand out it is important to understand your audience, the people they follow, the content they like and the conversations they’re having online.

That’s where social listening comes in. Not only does it help you better understand your audience, it’s also a great tool for social selling, monitoring brand reputation and customer service.

What do we mean by Social Listening?

Social listening refers to analysing the conversations and trends happening not just around your brand, but around your industry as a whole, across social media and the web in general and using those insights to make better marketing decisions.

It helps you to understand why, where and how these conversations are happening, and what people think - not just when they’re tagging or mentioning your brand.

By performing social listening, you can create the kind of content your followers actually want, come up with new ideas based on industry trends, improve your customer experience by interacting directly with customers, and continuously shift your customer strategy to fit the current need.

Using Social Listening to Improve Your Marketing

Monitor your brand name and understand your audience better

Understanding the public's perception of your brand or products is an essential starting part for taking your digital marketing strategy to the next level. Social listening gives you an insight into the positive or negative feelings consumers associate with your brand and the features or traits that catch their attention. This will help you to rethink assumptions and create more targeted marketing.

By running social listening you can identify common customer questions, comments, complaints, demographics and general sentiment around your brand, and easily share those insights with the rest of your team.

Identify Industry Trends

By analysing hashtags or discussions within your industry, you can get a better sense of where your market is heading, helping you to create or reposition products, content and general messaging that will become a key talking point as trends develop.

Dynamically adapting to your industry keeps you one step ahead of your competitors and allows you to be the first to engage with their prospects.

Analyse your competitors and learn from them

Social media is a competitive channel for brands. Imagine being able to monitor everything people are saying about your competition online. With social listening you are able to:

• Get a sense of your share of the social media audience - Understand the volume of your messages vs. theirs.

• Understand why their customers may not be satisfied with their product - how could you create a better experience?

• Find the content they share that outperforms your own - Analyse why it resonates with your shared audience.

• Quickly identify the new products or solutions they are offering - Find out what the general market sentiment is towards those products and solutions, and set a goal to outperform them.

There is so much to learn from social listening, and this knowledge can be applied to your marketing strategies to help improve them.