Listening Provides Actionable Insight

With the rise of self-publishing on the internet, the Brand monologue (PR, Advertisement, Below the line activities) has become more of a multilogue: a many-to-many conversation. Your customers, investors, supporters, and detractors talk amongst themselves and share their views on you to anyone who is interested. They share their voice in different formats and on different platforms. The question is: Are you listening? Are you listening to their views/ opinions/ suggestions? Are you responding?

For all brands that want to leverage Social Media to reach out to its consumers and build relationships, listening (Social Media Monitoring) is the first step. Some important objectives brand can achieve from listening are:-

1. Tracking Brand Mentions: This certainly improves the self-awareness to track volume of information, but it’s like normal PR “clip tracking service” which ends at number of mentions and share of voice.

2. Measuring Success of a Marketing Campaign: Listening during different phase of campaign (pre, during and post) can provide the marketers some useful insight to define and manage campaign more accurately. It can also help in identifying the success and failure of different elements during the campaign and to make course corrections nearly real-time.

3. Customer Feedback and Market Research: With an understanding of topics, themes, sentiment and trends, sources (websites) and level of influence, enterprises will have new opportunities for scaling business and protecting brands in an efficient and effective manner. Brands will have better insight into customers touch points, influencers, negative feedbacks and detractors. With right tools and listening practice Brands will be able to reduce risk of flare ups before they become mainstream, identify prospects and poach unhappy competitor’s customers.

4. Measuring Customer Satisfaction:  In addition to customer satisfaction scores, organizations can measure real-time sentiment as customers interact or react to the brand. Brands can measure impact of real time satisfaction or frustration during the actual phases of customer interaction.  Then identify areas of improvement during customer lifecycle

5. Engagement: Active listening with an active customer advocacy (Social CRM) team that’s empowered, training, and ready to make real-time responses. Customers will feel a greater sense of satisfaction and build engaging customer relationships.  The opportunity to not only serve customers in their natural mediums, but to offer them a richer experience regardless of their touch points.

6. Social Media Crisis Management: As mentioned in point 5 – An active listening post is like a surveillance program where it alerts you when there is any negative chatter around brand. By monitoring and analyzing the negative feedback brand teams can club the negative chatter into 3 different baskets 1) Product Related 2) Constructive Criticism and 3) Trolling/Spam. This helps the brand/ organization to take corrective actions with better understanding of the issue.

Listening help at all stages:

1. Brands which are planning to experiment with social media this could initially be the only thing a brand might do in the realm of social media, providing valuable support to brands traditional marketing efforts.

2. It may be an immediate precursor to a more active online presence, it will help you identify where your customers are and what they are saying

3. It may be a supporting player to an active role, listening in on important chatter as you create and build on your social media presence. It helps you identify right social media platforms to engage customers, identify influencers, analyse response to your activities, and monitor competition activities.

As social customers become more empowered, brands must have a good listening program in place.

Happy Listening

M

Cross-posted at 2020 Social: Because Business is Social.