3 Ways Social Media Listening Is Paving The Way For Deep Customer Personalization

Deep personalization is more essential than ever for businesses in a customer-centric era, where a wealth of choices and stiff competition means customer experiences can make or break a sale.

Salesforce has identified 'personalization' as one of the new 3P’s of marketing, the other being people and privacy. Consumers want to feel more satisfaction before making a purchase, where their needs are heard, and businesses they patronize give back. This is a time where consumers are granted more purchasing power as they have developed an inclination to pick and choose to their whim and fancy. How then do businesses create a strong enough allure while adapting to changing consumer preferences? 

While customer engagement is important, businesses like yours first need to have an idea of what consumers are expecting from you. Although that may be easier said than done, businesses need not feel lost about how to go about collecting consumer data. 

Intelligent social listening tools are gaining more exposure and recognition on their ability to conduct extensive consumer research insights, measure audience sentiment, and aid key decision making.

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1. Social Listening Is The Gateway To Your Consumers

Consumers are creatures of habit. Brands loved and trusted are the ones that stay top of mind with consumers, and it’s hard to break through that rosy-veiled barrier that keeps other competitors away. Personalization is an effective way to meet the needs of your target audience, enabling you to replicate that relationship seen with brands that are offering similar products and services to their consumers.

With social listening, you gain a tool that enables you to understand consumer behavior in real-time. With a plethora of online sources from social media and news, to web forums, social listening tools work to gather unstructured text from conversations, and help deliver insights about trends and patterns observed.

Consumer feedback, product testimonials, tweets, and even hashtags can be funneled under a customized dashboard that helps you to build a crystal clear view of how your consumers are reacting to the market, your brand, and even your competitors. From there, you will be able to work out what your customer value proposition is and move forward by plugging unmet needs by offering new products and services, or rebranding to build a more differentiated identify in the market

Objectively, you would want to be able to: 

• Detect what consumers want before your competitors 
• Build a customer-first strategy
• Generate consumer resonance

2. Social Listening Helps Future-Proof Your Personalization Strategy

Integrating social listening into your business model will enable you to successfully predict and respond to your customers’ needs. As consumer needs and trends are constantly in flux, having an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven tool on hand means that your business can effectively monitor spikes and dips in social media conversations and even performance in branded content.

By analyzing social conversations in real-time, you can realistically plan ahead to feature products or content that are most relevant to your consumers within a short turnaround. In addition, it can help save your business costs by reducing the need to make large-scale changes midway through your campaign.

When it comes to building a future-proof strategy, understand that personalization is not a one-step process. Making personalization work is how your business is able to respond rapidly to improving customer experiences. Social listening platforms function to enhance businesses agility by using AI to tag mentions, analyze sentiment, filter geolocations, and much more so as to allow users to focus on impacting strategy and not data collecting.

3. Strengthen Your Consumer Positioning

As I mentioned at the beginning about consumers who now have the luxury of choice, brand messages are critical to making a lasting impression and influencing purchasing decisions.  Implementing a business model that uses deep personalization puts one foot in the door by targeting what your consumers like and dislike.

From brand offers and social media posts, to product descriptions, consumers are more inclined to continue pursuing your brand only if they like what they have been seeing. Social listening insights are particularly useful in this context, as you are able to optimize your messaging according to a specific customer type, location, and context. This can ultimately help to affect consumer behavior online and close customer journeys in this highly competitive digital space.

By using social media listening to drive customer personalization, you can deliver highly-prospective messages, along with business innovations that are designed to a T, to boost growth and increase customer lifetime value. Consumers will trust in your business as soon as they feel satisfied and valued as individuals, rather than being just a number to your sales figure.

Investing In Personalization Will Nurture Future Sales

As more brands and businesses offer increasingly personalized content and recommendations at every customer touchpoint, it is more likely that social listening will be part and parcel of this digital future for years to come. A long-term strategy aimed at driving stronger customer success, requires constant fine-tuning and goal matching to be successful. 

In the meantime, spend time thinking about whether there is an existing business model guided by personalization that will help you reach consumers at a 1-to-1 level? If not, have you explored tools like social listening to help you attain the necessary data to get there?

Read this guide on how personalization strategies are adopted using social media intelligence, and the kinds of data that are used at each stage of the campaign.