Jaimesha Patel, CEO, Creó GlobalMost brands are speaking louder than ever, but are they really being heard? They publish content, analyse metrics, then repeat. But in this process, are they truly listening to their audience? There’s a lot of digital noise out there along with diminishing attention spans, so it’s a challenging landscape at the best of times. And if you’re not truly listening to your target buyers, then you’re putting your brand in a very risky position.
In fact, there are documented cases of brands that thought their core brand association was getting through loud and clear, only to find through social listening that in thousands of comments it was completely absent. But when it’s used correctly, social listening can be astounding – for example, the NBA used real-time audience insights and saw a 352 per cent increase in views of its basketball-related videos compared to the previous season.
In the past, social listening was something that mainly concerned public relations crisis teams and customer care departments, but today it’s a critical aspect of marketing. Over 60 per cent of US businesses already use social listening to monitor brand mentions and customer sentiment, with around 30 per cent of agency professionals stating that social listening is factored into every decision they make.
So, where does this leave brands that want to ensure their relationships with their audiences remain strong? That’s what this article looks at – how social listening can help brands gain a competitive advantage, and how it can bridge the gap between marketing and sales.
What exactly is social listening?
Let’s start with what it’s not. Social listening isn’t simply monitoring mentions or hashtags. When done well, it includes collecting and analysing conversations, comments, reviews, and sentiment from social media platforms, forums, and blogs. In all cases, the goal is to accurately uncover what your audience truly cares about and the language they use to discuss it.
Imagine a kind of real-time focus group but with millions of participants. But unlike traditional methods such as surveys or polls, social listening provides a much wider, unfiltered view of customer emotion and intent. Brands can also use it to spot emerging trends, understand changing sentiments, and identify pain points.
Bridging the gap between marketing and sales
When was the last time a sales objection actually informed your next campaign? Marketing teams often work in campaign cycles while sales teams are closer to the customer, hearing their objections in real conversations. The problem is, the insights from these sales calls don’t always find their way back into marketing strategy.
Social listening can help bridge this gap by analysing conversations around a product or a pain point. This information then enables marketing teams to produce content and campaigns that are far more aligned with the priorities of real prospects, delivered in the language they use. Sales teams can also use the insights as a way to personalise their outreach and anticipate what objections might arise.
The more sales teams understand the mindset of their prospects, the more effective their outreach becomes. Social listening provides key information on what’s trending in the industry and what’s happening in the world of customers or prospects.
For B2B sales in particular, this can be a game changer. If, for example, your target buyers are medium-sized tech firms, you can listen to discussions on platforms they frequent (whether that’s LinkedIn or GitHub or anywhere else) and learn about common operational challenges they face. Sales reps can then reference those insights directly in their emails or calls. Sales teams can also use this to co-create better content with marketing that supports the sales process.
Deep insight into customer behaviour
Many brands still judge social media success using metrics such as likes, shares, and impressions. The problem is that these tell you little about what’s really going on in your market. What social listening does is shift the focus so that your core objective is understanding what your customers and prospects are thinking and feeling.
Leading marketers leverage social listening tools that use natural language processing and AI to detect patterns in emotion and intent. And they can do this at scale. This helps with identifying aspects of customer behaviour, why a particular post went viral, and why certain pain points are being discussed more frequently.
The competitive advantage
Social listening is about understanding your customers and keeping an ear on your competitors. This competitive intelligence can help you anticipate shifts in market sentiment, identify opportunities, and even shape your pricing or positioning strategy.
Let’s say a competitor launches a major update but gets backlash over a problem with the product. By listening to that sentiment in real time, you can accelerate your communications to differentiate your offering and potentially pick up new business.
Why social listening is no longer optional
These days, customer expectations are higher than ever while brand trust is lower. Historical data is not sufficiently up-to-date. You need to know what’s happening now. Social listening delivers this, and while it’s not perfect, it can be an important thread that helps connect marketing, sales, product, and customer service.
Ultimately, all departments strive to gain a deeper understanding of the customer. In fact, according to the Harvard Business Review, ‘Social media comments need to move beyond the marketing departments and service agencies that collect them and become part of monthly management committee meetings.’ Social listening has the potential to benefit all aspects of the business.
In addition, it allows you to move from reactive to proactive because you’re no longer waiting for feedback or complaints, but you have the necessary information at your fingertips, which means you can get ahead of issues before they escalate.
Implementing a social listening strategy doesn’t require a massive investment. Once you have defined your goals (such as brand perception and understanding your competitors’ strategies) and selected the right tools to achieve these objectives, you are ready to start.
However, it’s also crucial to ensure that you make an effort to embed the importance of social listening into your culture and that those insights are shared across departments, including sales teams, product managers, and executives.
Are you ready to start listening?
If someone asked what your customers are thinking today, could you give a confident answer? As we have seen, now more than ever the brands that succeed will be the ones that don’t just speak, but hear what’s being said in real time. Then act on it. The value of social listening reminds brands that while messaging is crucial, so is hearing what comes back from the customers.
In this sense, it completes the circle, allowing you to get much closer to your customer. You’re able to make decisions with greater clarity and speed, helping you stay ahead of the competition, and the insights you gain can be applied not just in the marketing department but across the entire business.
By Jaimesha Patel, CEO, Creó Global
