It is imperative that your customers see a personable brand carrying the same vision as they do in their beliefs and lifestyle.
The power of marketing in the modern era is more than just being visible — mainly because any brand can do so with enough resources and budget — it's about leveraging data to increase the impact of your messages. For your stakeholders, what they ultimately want to see is the bottom line matching the response of your campaigns.
Many marketing professionals in the B2C industry face one common question — how well they know their target audience. But meeting the question with a conclusive answer can be painstakingly tedious without the right technology and intelligence to look into consumer conversations.
Today, B2C brands are now willing to dabble into social listening to find the answers to their most important questions and, in so doing, put insights into strategy making. Marketers can learn that insights from consumer data can be used meaningfully on a companywide level, from product design, customer service, business analytics, and even frontline operations. Understanding the value of each customer opinion can provide your brand with far-reaching strategies to accelerate positive brand growth and opportunities.
To win the hearts and minds of your customers, first, understand their needs and challenges before selling them things that they do not need. Hence, it is imperative that your customers see a personable brand carrying the same vision as they do in their beliefs and lifestyle.
Engage new consumer perspectives by starting your consumer research with these five considerations to market strategically and resonate strongly:
1. What Are the Common Characteristics of Your Consumer Base?
The latter aspect could be more crucial to develop out of the two for informing strategies. By studying consumer behavior, you immediately gain insights into the psychological considerations of how buyers think and feel. In addition, you will have also grasped the type of content to reach your consumers most efficiently.
What More Can You Do With Your Consumer Data?
- Consumer Differentiation:
On the notion that every consumer is unique, there are possibilities to expand your established targeted demographic by segmenting consumers together based on subtle variations in their behavior. Each sub-group identified should have unique attributes that will allow you to target more precisely.
- Predicting Marketing Trends:
Trends can quickly emerge when tracking consumer behavior, which your brand can actively respond in tune to key opportunities. Aiming to position your brand in front of consumers at the right time will help reduce customer churn by staying relevant and top of mind during purchasing decisions.
- Identifying New Innovations:
Innovation is key to market growth and continuity. Constantly monitoring consumer behavior will allow your brand to spot openings for product or service developments, such as when your team notices an uptick in complaints. Success leverage of the first-mover advantage means addressing market gaps to expand your offerings.
2. Where Do Consumers Congregate and Discuss Topics Surrounding Your Brand?
Before diving headfirst into TikTok, just because you can, does not mean you should. There are many variabilities in why consumers would choose a social or web platform to talk about your business. That being said, channel popularity varies between industries. Doing preliminary research on your social landscape will ensure that you do not waste campaign resources on the wrong medium.
The Nitty-Gritty of Finding Consumer Conversations
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Keywords Monitoring:
Boolean operators are standard amongst most media monitoring software. The ability to track brand names and social handles, phrases, and hashtags across social media, review sites, and web pages, including RSS feeds, can allow your team to scope any topic imaginable on the Internet potentially.
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Visual Listening:
In a digital age where images do more of the talking, it is often critical that you have oversight of where your brand or your competitors are being featured online. By discovering images like a brand logo or product, you can receive more holistic insights into your consumers’ behavior, implicit brand mentions, and perceptions surrounding the images.
3. What is a Major Pain Point your Consumers are Facing?
Determining Types of Pain Points Online:
- Financial Pain Points
- Productivity Pain Points
Customers do not want to waste time with their current solution. Are your consumers finding it efficient when navigating through your product and services? What are the common frustrations felt between the first touch to the last?
- Process Pain Points
Not all business operations are perfect; your consumers get it. But it does not mean they deserve to stick to your solution forever. Consumers want to see an improvement in internal processes, whether it is in the follow-up procedure or a convoluted system in place.
- Support Pain Points
Are your consumers finding difficulty in getting their needs served? Has any lack of support become a need for a change in provider? An example of this pain point might be service agents taking too long a time to clarify a question.
4. Where Does Your Brand Stand Amongst Your Competitors in the Industry?
Brand perception is one key facet you cannot ignore in a consumer insights project. It provides a glimpse into how well received your brand is in relation to its product, services, and even competitors.
Ask yourself the following questions:
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What are your direct, indirect, and emerging competitors?
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Which channels do your competitors prioritize?
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When is the best time to conduct your marketing activities?
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Who is your customer persona? Is it similar to your competitors’?
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How different is your social reputation compared to your competitors?
Key Social Metrics to Track Brand Reputation:
Social KPIs need to be discerned from vanity metrics, namely followers, likes, or comments that are not substantial enough to help you make decisions strategically.
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Number of Mentions:
The number of mentions is as straightforward as it sounds. The more mentions you receive equates to having more buzz around your brand. Assessing your overall brand awareness not only includes mentions that have your brand handle tagged directly, but the references to your brand people make in online conversations.
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The Volume of Reach:
Suppose you are looking to identify brand awareness from a macro perspective. In that case, the reach of mentions may be a more useful indicator of understanding the potential of impressions made regarding your brand. It is more about who is mentioning your brand, as some mentions would comprise a larger social media audience than others. For example, a celebrity compared to a micro-influencer.
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Share of Voice:
Share of Voice (SoV) enables your team to put metrics like mentions and overall reach into perspective. SoV is used effectively by brands to benchmark how large a pie their brand's visibility is online compared to other competitors. From there, you can objectively aim to develop strategy to increase your SoV as a goal.
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Engagement:
Engagement is more often referred to as an umbrella term that encapsulates likes, comments, and reposts, to name a few. While these can all be interactions under one category, their motivations could vary. Observing an increase in engagement can indicate a build-up of stages in awareness, followed by trust and, ultimately, loyalty.
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Consumer Sentiment Score:
Generating sentiment data is an essential prowess of a social listening tool. It uses natural language processing to identify whether a social mention is negative, positive, or neutral. Consumer sentiment is helpful for understanding customer satisfaction, finding hot spots on negative buzz, and evaluating your social reputation from time to time.
5. What Are Your Competitors’ Weaknesses and Unique Differentiators, and How Can You Leverage Them?
Be it jumping on a trend or distinguishing yourself from competitors with a unique selling point, having a competitive analysis provides you with critical insights into your competitive landscape before you decide on your next call to action.
Knowing Your Competitors’ Weaknesses
Your customer base comprises a wealth of information – What are the main concerns of your target audience? What are the negative sentiments surrounding your competitors? Why did they choose one product over another? By listening in on consumer conversations, scrutinizing online reviews, and monitoring competitor activities, social listening provides limitless ways to derive insights into the different pain points that your competitors have yet to address.
Knowing Where You Come In
With the insights gathered from a competitive analysis, how do you translate them into actions? What can you provide with a business that stands out from your competitors? Be it your customer experience, product offerings, or even branding, knowing your unique selling point and how to market it can help your business become top-of-mind amongst consumers.
Revolutionize The Way You Do Consumer Research
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