7 Benefits of Social Listening for Your Marketing Agency

The emergence of COVID-19 has affected the marketing landscape greatly. Today, most companies and consumers are using the Internet to take a more meaningful part in shaping the world. Brands and marketers who understand how to listen to these digital voices have a significant competitive advantage.

As of 2020, only 50% of marketers utilized social listening tools to gain customer insight. Were you a part of the half that did not? In this changing world, the press, TV, and radio tracks are no longer your most valuable resources. Instead, this new technique helps those who use it to leap far ahead of their competitors.

Social listening harnesses a massive amount of online data to generate relevant and actionable real-time insights. Perhaps that’s why marketing agencies that have developed these skills have had an easier time staying afloat during the pandemic.

Many other businesses have been slow to upgrade their core marketing functions. However, this guide will share a few reasons why a social listening setup is a must-have tool for marketing analytics. However, before discussing the benefits of social listening, it would be prudent to define what it is.

What is Social Listening 🎧

Social listening is a platform that assists marketing agencies in gathering and analyzing social media data. It provides you with an opportunity to explore information such as keywords, brand names, products, and other essential marketing items. It also allows you to respond to this analyzed data.

Additionally, social listening can help brands analyze changes in their audience sentiment scales. For instance, the airline industry assessed the increased number of comments during the early days of the pandemic.

The average number of comments posted on the Facebook pages for the top ten airlines increased fivefold from February 2020 to March 2020. Situations like these can be assessed with ease thanks to a sentiment analysis tool, which is just one part of social listening.

If you have not considered social listening, you are missing out. Here are six reasons why social listening is a beneficial tool for your marketing agency.

1. Engaging with Multiple Customers at Once 💬

The public’s opinion of your agency is vital to your success. By gathering and filtering your online mentions, you can find out who your audience is and address them directly. You can even join online conversations as they happen.

Engagement with your customers is never a bad thing. Instead, it is a way to leverage customer trust. Besides, you can more easily learn about the key issues affecting consumers. Social listening also helps you engage with different customers at the same time. By showing that you care about your customers, more people will be encouraged to support your business. Additionally, social listening will help you respond quickly and accurately to customer tweets. You can directly reply to customers’ individual questions, and you can add as many new queries as you need. The social listening system will keep track of the specific customers and their questions through customizable reports. These reports ensure these clients remain updated and taken care of.

Think about social listening as a long-term strategy. For example, if you are trying to improve your brand through social media listening, sentiment analysis tools can tell you the exact products to display. Thus, you will create an amicable relationship with your followers and build a positive brand image.

2. Obtaining Consumer Insights 🔎

Social listening also helps you gather valuable consumer insights. It allows you to stay in touch with what your consumers like and think. This honest, unfiltered feedback is very helpful when brainstorming ways to improve your business and your products.

You can identify customers’ specific needs, experiences with your company, dislikes, and behaviors. However, managing all this information by hand is impossible. After all, who has the time to go through all of these insights? The situation may even be more time-consuming if you are tracking keywords and topics. Through social listening tools, you can capture all of the information at once. Ultimately, agencies that use social listening to obtain numerous consumer insights will offer better services than others who do not utilize social listening platforms.

3. Securing Pitches and Gaining New Clients 💰

Social listening tools add more value to your agency by securing pitches with more accurate data. In business, pitches refer to presenting business ideas to third parties. When you are proposing to a new client, social listening tools can speak for you.

For instance, social listening tools gather information about clients or industry, analyze the brand reputation, and rate you with your competitors. Besides, the tools compare you with the prospect client’s historical digital data. Through this, social listening tools personalize your pitches to be client-specific, making you gain newer clients

4. Analyzing Effectiveness of Social Media Campaigns 📈

Marketing campaigns are essential in every firm and industry. In this age of digital marketing, your ultimate goal as a marketer is to perform effective social media campaigns. With 2.7 billion monthly active users, Facebook is still a social media giant.

Facebook is many companies’ favorite social media platform to engage in social listening. Facebook pages where customers can post reviews can facilitate more communication with businesses and allow them to more easily answer their requests. Social listening enables you to assess how effective these social media platforms are in the marketing field. For example, on Facebook, you can analyze your competitors’ performance, their products, and their operations.

Also, social listening allows you to learn how customers view your industry as a whole. Whether your aim is to measure other companies’ brand awareness, reach, or operations, social listening tracks dozens of metrics with real-time data. These modern social listening tools utilized analytics-fueled strategies that identify keywords you should use on social media platforms. By using these keywords, customers and stakeholders alike are more likely to see your content on their feeds.

5. Assessing Competitive Intelligence 🏇

There’s this common sentiment that if you focus too much on your business rivals, you will lose focus on yourself and your business. However, you can actually from competitive intelligence, especially if you are a new marketer.

Think of it as a learning process. By using social listening tools to study your competition, you can learn from their mistakes. Developing this competitive intelligence is one of the challenges many firms have faced during the pandemic. Surprisingly, a recent study found that only 8% of brands had leveraged social listening solutions for competitive research and analysis. If you decide to join that percentage, here are some questions that you should consider when assessing competitive intelligence:

• Why are customers of company A happier than company B?
• Do consumers love a particular product more than the other?
• How are brands leveraging specific social media channels?
• How do you compare yourself with others?

Social listening can help you embed competitive intelligence in your marketing strategy. Without it, you will depend too much on guesswork. However, you only need to use these strategies a little bit for them to be effective. Instead, you should remain primarily focused on active conversations about the industry, including new products, new marketing methods, and consumer desires.

 6. Managing Crisis 🚨

No matter how effective your marketing strategies are, you will experience a crisis at some point. Despite the internet’s unlimited connections, there are many potential risks within a social community. These include but are not limited to frustrated clients, rumors, and unethical behaviors. Not only do you need to be aware of these potential crises, but you must also develop mitigation strategies. If you think these threats should only be a concern for reckless marketers, think again. It is better to prepare for these worst-case scenarios just in case. That way, you can respond to them quickly and diffuse the situation.

Agencies that detect problems as they arise often fare better than those that do not. These firms can identify issues before they spiral out of control and take targeted actions to correct them.

All of this is made possible through social listening tools. Social listening is a crucial asset in these uncertain times. By using social listening tools, you will be the first to know if anything goes wrong and be able to regain control more easily. Customer complaints can be resolved through real-time conversation. Misinterpreted messages can be fixed. Even the most severe cases become manageable.

7. Performing Continuous Market Research 🔬

Besides researching your clients’ needs, social listening allows you to conduct constant market research. Marketing research is vital because it will tell you what to focus on to attract more customers and boost sales.

Additionally, marketing research lets you get to know your clients, target audience, competitors, and other marketing factors. Also, social listening is more affordable than other comparable market research tools.

Traditional research can only help you go so far due to the constant changes in consumer trends. A thorough analysis of social media information will help you stay a step ahead. Social listening provides you with candid, unfiltered consumer opinions that can help you get to know your industry and how you can function better within it.

Conclusion

Due to the recent increase in online marketing, social listening is a highly versatile and powerful tool. It can help you gain insight from various digital platforms and make decisions based on what your customers want. Social listening will only grow more popular with time, so your performance in the market will depend on how fast you adopt it. The sooner you embrace it, the better. Companies that do are more likely to soar above the rest.

Hopefully, these six benefits have helped you understand why you should utilize social listening. If you’re interested in developing a social listening app or have any questions about social listening, contact Digimind to learn more.