In an ideal world, we’d all know all of our customers personally. We’d hang out with them, listen to them, understand their needs, and give them products tailored to solve their exact problems.
We don’t live in that ideal world. Any successful brand will have hundreds of thousands of customers and potential customers at any one time. It’s impossible to know them all personally and individually, much as we’d like to! But that doesn’t mean we can’t listen to them and understand their needs.
Social listening tools, techniques, and technologies allow you to get a highly accurate overview of how your customers feel about you. It will tell you the topics that come up when people talk about your brand and products, what your customers like and dislike, and more.
When you start digging into social listening data and drawing actionable insights, a world of possibilities opens up. Ultimately, you can easily turn social listening data into sales opportunities that bring in customers with high lifetime value. How? Read on:
What is social listening?
Let's start by defining what social listening is.
Social listening involves paying close attention to what people are saying about your brand. The idea is to gauge the mood of your customers, spot common themes of discourse, identify issues your customers are having, track competing brand reputations, and pinpoint burgeoning trends that you can take advantage of.
How is this done? Well, the process typically comprises keyword tracking/monitoring and sentiment analysis:
- Keyword tracking involves monitoring things like brand mentions and other keywords relevant to your brand across the web. Spotify is a great example of what this looks like in action. Their 'Spotify Cares' account picks up on any mention of Spotify (whether hashtagged or not) and steps in to offer proactive help if needed.
- Sentiment analysis is all about taking the temperature of discourse around your brand. Are people generally positive, negative, or neutral when talking about you? Sentiment analysis is also useful for capitalizing on your competitors' mistakes like Samsung did when the internet erupted with rage over Apple's infamous 'iPad Crush' advert.
With the right tools and skills, social listening data can become a very useful form of external sales data. When used properly, social listening data can translate into leads, sales, and strong customer loyalty going forward. Let's take a closer look.
Why is social listening important?
Social listening gives you a much deeper understanding of your customers, their mood, and what's more important to them than more basic forms of data can.
When combined with things like conversion rate data and engagement data, social listening data allows you to gain an unparalleled understanding of how your brand, your products, and your industry are viewed by your target audience, as well as any potential problems or opportunities in upcoming trends.
This has a lot of practical applications when it comes to sales and growth. For example, financial modeling requires a strong understanding of key drivers in the current and future market. Social listening is one of the very best ways to get into the heart of your market and understand what's motivating it, what's troubling it, and how it's likely to move in the future.
Similarly, something as simple as a bit of social monitoring on your social media posts can yield valuable insights about the kind of content that your audience likes and responds to best. You can then use these insights in future marketing campaigns.
How can you turn social listening into sales?
So, with the theory out of the way, let's get into the practical side of things. How can you turn social listening into sales?
1) Create solid social listening goals
While general social monitoring is a good idea purely to keep an eye out for spikes in positive or negative sentiment, to be proactive with your social listening strategy you need to have solid goals. Just as you would with social media, set SMART goals for your social listening: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely.
Think about what you want your social listening to achieve and how you can work this into specific goals aligned with specific metrics. Once you have these specific, well-defined goals, you'll be more able to turn your social listening data into actionable insights.
Some examples of social listening goals include:
- Increase understanding of your audience. You could track this through metrics like customer retention, engagement rate, conversion rate, and anything else that indicates that you're properly connecting with your customers on a level of mutual understanding.
- Monitor ongoing customer sentiment. You would measure this by tracking keywords related to each product, campaign, or brand you want to analyze for sentiment. You would then analyze online conversations around those keywords for positive, negative, or neutral sentiment.
- Gain actionable insights about your competitors. Search out chinks in your competitors' armor by listening to what potential customers say about those competitors.
2) Identify relevant keywords
By this point, you'll have noticed that we're talking a lot about keywords. Keywords are a big part of how social listening works. Most social media monitoring tools will ask you to enter keywords to help them find the right topics to 'listen' to. Those that don't definitely should.
Even if you don't have any social monitoring tools, it's easy enough to follow discourse about certain keywords in a limited way through Google Alerts. But we definitely recommend that you invest in something a bit slicker than simple Alerts to do social listening properly.
But what is a 'relevant keyword'? Here are some ideas:
- Brand-related keywords. Your brand name, product, names of any prominent employees or representatives, and so on.
- Competitor-related keywords. The same as above, but for your competitors.
- Campaign-related keywords. Keywords related to a particular campaign you're running. If your campaign has a hashtag, that's a great help with this kind of thing, but also monitor keywords related to other aspects of the campaign (the product it's promoting, for example, or any influencers you're using to push the campaign through influencer marketing).
- Industry-related keywords. These are keywords relevant to your wider industry. Think particularly about industry issues which could affect public sentiment about your own brand. For example, if you run a fashion brand it's a good idea to keep a close eye on ethical issues around fashion using keywords like 'fast fashion' and 'fashion-conscience'.
- Local keywords. If you’re trying to connect with an audience in a specific location, hyperlocal social listening is a great idea. For example, if you’re a Thai restaurant in Brooklyn, monitoring keywords like ‘Best Thai restaurant Brooklyn’, ‘Thai food Brooklyn’, ‘Thai delivery Brooklyn’ etc will help you to establish who your main competitors are and what your potential customers are seeking.
3) Be smart about monitoring and analysis
Once you've got a list of good keywords, you need to think about how you're going to monitor them and how you're going to use the data you gather from them. This is the point at which you should start thinking strategically, with particular reference to how your social listening data will play into social strategies and marketing strategies.
Potentially, there is a huge amount of data to be gathered from social media conversations and digital discourse. There’s so much data, in fact, that anything actionable might easily get lost in the noise, even if you've picked your keywords with great care.
So, you have to be smart about your monitoring and analysis. Monitor the right audiences, and make sure that you're always analyzing relevant data.
For example, you should figure out the best people to listen to and focus on them. Hone in on your total addressable market, learn which social media channels they use, study the kinds of language they use, and direct your social listening efforts accordingly.
Similarly, clean out your keywords regularly. Make sure that you're not following redundant keywords and hashtags, and regularly replenish your list with fresh, new, relevant keywords.
4) Use the right tech and tools
The tech you use can make a huge difference to your social listening strategy. Good social listening tools can quickly parse vast amounts of data, select what's useful to you, and present it in ways that allow you to easily draw valuable insights.
Many social media platforms now offer their own social media listening facilities. For example, Meta AI will now summarize comments under any given post, which can save a lot of time when gauging the general sentiment of a comment section.
Specialized social listening tools are capable of working tirelessly in the background, monitoring mentions and keywords and noting down common conversational topics. Moreover, these tools often include features like heatmaps, which can visually represent the intensity of discussions across different regions or topics, providing a clear snapshot of where your brand is receiving the most attention.
Many will automatically alert you if anything significant changes in your social conversation, which allows you to act quickly to capitalize upon opportunities and address problems.
Also, remember that social listening isn't just about social media listening. You can undertake social listening from pretty much any point of interface with your customers.
For example, outbound call center tools like call recording and conversational AI can pick up on keywords, prevailing moods, and common issues just as easily as social media listening tools can. In fact, these kinds of tools are sometimes even more useful as they can analyze tone of voice as well as mere text.
All in all, the right technology can make social listening much easier and more impactful. Shop around for powerful tools which can help you gather the right social listening data and use it to make informed decisions about marketing and sales.
5) Train your sales teams in social listening and how to use it
The most important aspect of your sales system is your sales teams. As we've covered above, the best sales automation tools can automatically alert you to significant changes in social listening data, but it's up to your human team to interpret and act on those changes. So, it's vital that your sales teams understand what social listening data is and how to utilize it in their sales work.
Don’t just leave social listening to your social analysts. Incorporate social listening into your sales staff training. Make sure that everyone understands what social listening tools you're using, how they work, and how to find things like social listening reports, notifications, and general insights.
This will help to keep your sales teams informed about customer sentiment and common customer pain points, which will in turn enable your salespeople to direct conversations in ways that the customer will appreciate.
Ideally, bring your social media and marketing teams in on these training sessions too. Sales, socials, and marketing can all benefit from social listening, and should be freely sharing social listening data and insights amongst themselves.
The most successful brands use social listening heavily in both their sales and their social strategies, as this example from Clean Origin demonstrates. The brand 'listened' for mentions of lab-grown diamonds, and utilized positive mentions in their own social media:
6) Be proactive
This may sound obvious, but in order to truly turn social listening data into sales, you need to act on it.
We've spoken above about how sales teams can use social listening data to inform their sales conversations. You can drive people to engage in those sales conversations in the first place through proactive sales and marketing based on social listening data.
On a larger scale, you can use social listening data to create marketing campaigns that speak directly to your customers' concerns, wants, needs, preoccupations, and general mood. You can take what you've learned from social listening to craft adverts that skewer your competition and propel you into the hearts of potential customers.
To further capitalize on these insights, integrating social commerce into your campaigns can be highly effective. By incorporating shoppable posts and direct purchase options on social media platforms, you transform active engagement into immediate sales opportunities, making the customer journey from interest to purchase smoother and more direct.
On a smaller (but no less important) scale, social listening helps you to respond in real-time to customer mentions, conversations, and queries. This example from Nike not only answers the customer's question, it also demonstrates Nike's care for its customers (as well as publicizing these shoes to a wider audience!). It's a very effective piece of everyday social media management, and it's all powered by social listening.
So, our final piece of advice is: don't sit on social listening data and insights. Use them. Use them proactively and frequently to bring in leads and get conversions.
Use social listening and monitoring to boost sales opportunities
Whether you work in social commerce or high finance, social listening can make a huge difference to your business. Social listening arguably gets you closer to your customers (and your competitors’ customers) than any other form of market analysis. And, if you know what you’re doing, you can take what you ‘hear’ and transform it into sales opportunities.
Never underestimate the power of conversation. Something as simple as taking note of what your customers are chatting about can yield powerful insights. Use the tips we’ve shared here to gather those insights and turn them into sales.