When businesses use social listening, they can know more about their customer’s needs, likes, dislikes, and preferences. For any business to grow and succeed it is essential to do market research and find out more about customers’ demands.
Social listening is the process of monitoring digital conversations and interactions on social media platforms to evaluate the brand perception and customer feedback. Social media platforms allow you to filter your search to help businesses track their records. And according to 63% of social media marketers, social listening will gain popularity over the upcoming year.
More than 50% of marketers have already turned to social listening to understand consumers’ changing preferences during the Covid-19 pandemic. 51% of brands globally have made use of social listening in any capacity. Gathering information from customers helps you know better how your business is perceived. This helps in making your products and services more relevant for customers. Once you fulfill the need, it will help you increase sales and generate more revenue.
Around 3.6 billion people are using social media globally, and this number is expected to increase to 4.41 billion in 2025, making these channels a good platform for marketing products directly to customers. Various internet marketing services are now actively working to help promote brands and businesses. The content that is now used by brands is more relatable for their audiences, which is why it is becoming easier for brands to connect with clients.
There are several tools that are now available to help facilitate social listening for your brand. Rather than organically searching on each platform for your brand’s mentions, you can simply use these tools to track your social media presence and get notified instantly. Some social listening tools include Awario, Agorapulse, TweetDeck, Keyhole, Mention, and Brandwatch.
5 Ways Social Listening Can Help Your Market Research
1. Conduct Detailed Audience Research
In order for any business to succeed, it is important that they are well aware of who their target audience is. If you know your audience, you can direct your marketing efforts towards the right people and yield better results. Social listening helps with conducting detailed audience research and understanding your audience better. Through social listening tools, you can segment your audience based on various criteria including keywords, location, language, and even influencer score. This is not only useful for small-scale businesses but also for well-established ones as it helps you keep up with your audience’s interest.
2. Find Out What Customers Think About Your Brand
Countless posts are shared on social media daily, and people also post reviews about the products they are purchasing on their platforms. These reviews help brands understand how they are perceived. You can also track what products are performing well and which ones need to improve. Through social listening tools, you can get updates about your brand mentions on social media, forums, blogs, and websites. This helps you identify both positive and negative feedback from your audience. You can also fix issues by identifying them through social listening.
3. Measure the Effectiveness of Digital Marketing Campaigns
Social listening also helps in measuring the effectiveness of social media campaigns as well as monitor their performance. You can track brand mentions before, during, and after the launch of marketing campaigns to monitor the results of your key performance indicators and improve them with time.
This also helps in getting useful data that can help with your decisions. There are several ways to get quantitative data, however, social listening helps in getting qualitative data on top of this. With the help of feedback and opinions of different people, you can improve your brand and add useful elements that you are lacking.
4. Evaluate Competitors
While social listening helps you gain insights into your own business, you can also look at the results of your competitors. Competitor analysis is also essential for you to focus on your strong points. Through social listening, you are able to see honest reviews and feedback about your competitors to see what makes them different to your audience. You can also learn from their mistakes. This also helps in improving your own brand and helps in evaluating the market trends and practices.
5. Come Up With New Campaign Ideas
Social listening helps in market research for effective campaigns as well. The data that you collect from social media platforms also helps in identifying a pattern and allows you to differentiate between market needs and demands.
After getting insights, you can analyse and come up with new ideas to play around with. You can think of innovative ideas that can work better for your brand and the audience. Campaigns that will interest your clients more will give better results, and the more you know about your audience, the easier it will get to launch relatable campaigns.
In Conclusion
Social listening helps you gather useful data about your business, and also allows you to identify your brand’s perception. Through this, you can make more conscious and informed decisions as well as monitor your success. It helps you reach your audience directly and see what they have to say about your products or services. This is an excellent way to gather data and improve your brand’s image and launch more relatable campaigns for your target audience.
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