Let’s imagine you are an FMCG brand. After extensive market research, you have come up with a great product. A baby soap for all sensitive skin types. The first of a line of baby products that you plan to launch one after the other.
After you launch it, how will you understand the market response?
Your target audience, in this case, is clear. They consist of young parents.
By analyzing their needs, you can gain several insights. You will be able to understand what exactly they need from a soap. In that process, you will understand more about your key consumer, what they need and where to find them. Customized communication around the product to grab their attention is key to meaningful engagement.
This in a nutshell is what social listening will enable. Taking this a step further, it will also help identify emerging market opportunities that may lead to niche ideas for the new products.
Listening vs. merely monitoring your brand presence
Social monitoring is the use of tools to monitor information across social platforms that may be relevant to your brand or product or service. The key difference between social listening and social monitoring is that the former leads to actions related to brand development while the latter merely refers to engagement with customers. While social monitoring will tell you what the buzz around your brand is, social listening will enable you to delve deeper in the whys.
Social listening takes you closer to your customer.
- Channels of engagement
On the surface, social listening seems like a great way to understand where your brand is mentioned in order for you to respond accordingly. This is a means of receiving or establishing a feedback channel for your brand. But if this is used consistently, it establishes a channel of engagement with the customer.
- Emerging areas for future product development
Like any data that is collected intelligently, social listening over dimensions of time, target segment interest and target segment needs will help you identify pockets of opportunity in your product line.
For example, if you were in the baby products industry, you may have understood that in the beginning of the pandemic, there was a huge need for baby friendly sanitizers without any harmful chemicals or allergens to sensitive skin.
55 percent of consumers learn about new brands through social media.
- Influence your way into the market
Using social listening tools that are easily available in the market, you can mine keywords related to your brand. This will lead to understanding who are the people who will take your brand to your target, namely influencers. Using influencers to sell a product is seen as one of the most cost-effective method of obtaining new customers in 2021. 43 percent of consumers had discovering new products as one of the main reasons for using social media.
- Deliver targeted customized marketing communication
Social listening can be seen as an exercise to get to know the ideal customer. This customer can be profiled based on who they are, where they are from, what they like to do on the internet. Such detailed profiling of your target audience will help you deliver campaigns which are highly personalized, targeted and hence more effective.
The extensive information gained by social listening can help further brand value. It will also direct the effort spent in marketing towards the right audience.
- By eliminating pain points regarding your product by processing feedback and comments around your brand mentions, trust is created with the customer.
- New products that are exactly what the market is looking for can be delivered at the right time.
- Personalized targeted marketing content which resonates with your target audience and drives your sales forward.
- By knowing customer’s profile, new opportunities for refining, sustaining market dominance becomes possible.
- Penetrating markets by knowing what kind of strategies to use and identifying the right influencers leads to good level of adoption in the market.
With the digital world spreading across geographies, the wealth of information out there about consumers is like a deep and abundant ocean.
With the right tools and strategies, you can mine this ocean to understand your product, its reach in the market, the consumer of your product and different ways to reach them. Are you listening?
