Your SMM (Social Media Marketing) Strategy can help you bring in the desired number of leads. Perhaps one of the most effective ways to generate leads through social media is through social listening. At this point, a lot of businesses have acknowledged the power of social media platforms. Almost all companies use tools to monitor social media activities to help their customers and prevent any possible social crisis. In this information age, everyone can follow their favorite brand on social channels and send messages to them directly. You can also tweet your complaint, and you will immediately receive a response from their social media manager. Unfortunately, not a lot of people will understand the concept of social media listening.
What is Social Listening?
In the simplest term, marketing social listening pertains to the process of monitoring social media mentions. It will not only be focused on the comments about your brands but also on your products and competitors. It allows you to keep track, evaluate, and respond to their conversation on social media. Imagine you are running a restaurant. You accidentally hear the conversation happening on the other table about their favorite food selection. Then you heard them saying that your pasta taste is too bland. You will then ask around to figure out if most of your patrons will have the same thinking. You will then apply the changes based on the information you collected. Surprisingly, it works. You started to notice the number of orders on your pasta is increasing steadily.
How Should You Incorporate Social Listening in Your Lead Generation Strategy?
If you fail understand what is social listening, you miss some valuable insight that can promote your business to the heights of success. You will be slower in implementing the changes since you are unaware of what the public is discussing. Also, your prospects will start to choose your competitors over you since they are listening more to the target market. If you listen to your customers, you will understand what they are looking for and why they need your product. They will also know if you authentically care for their opinion.
Consider Social Listening as a Business Project
The first step in integrating social listening tool into your lead generation tactic is to develop a well-defined plan. Usually, this will be handled by your social media management team. They may have access to a dashboard that automates the system, or they will perhaps log in separately to your social media accounts. They will check the messages, notifications, like a post, or sometimes reply to random comments. It is the minimum of social media management, but it often fails. To take advantage of it, here’s what you should do.
- Monitor More Than Your DMs and Tags– If you have a famous brand in the industry, there’s a chance that people will talk about your business without even mentioning your brand. You would like to listen to what these people are saying.
- Name Variations- You should look at the different variations of your company name; in our case, that would be Web Tudy.
- Names of Your Representative- You should also monitor the conversations that mention your representatives’ name, for instance, your CEO.
- Exclude Linked Mentions- Since social media platforms will notify you for any tagged mentions, there’s a good chance that you are already monitoring them. It will help if you have a separate for the untagged comments.
- Include your Other Team in the Monitoring Procedure– Messages coming from social media are different. Some are randomly asking for an update or feedback; others require immediate assistance. Therefore, other members of the separate department in your company should only be involved in your social listening. The messages should be distributed promptly to the corresponding department. There should also be a deadline to guarantee that they will act on your customer’s concern on time. Try to use Agorapulse; it allows you to delegate the social media update to the respected team easily. You can even add a comment on it.
Spy on Your Competitors
Marketing social listening will not only help you know your customers, but it can also monitor your rivals and possibly devise a plan that will help you win the competition. Tracking the activities of your competitors is as important as watching your activities. Consumers will not hesitate to share their dissatisfaction over the service of the other companies. Therefore, it would be best to have a separate document that monitors this field. Consider these as your mentions. The message could be assigned to your product manager or web development team. You can also forward their contact information to your sales team to reach out to these people. You may also use these mentions during the development phase of your product to identify your offerings’ competitive advantage and value proposition.
Lead Generating Links
There are two ways on how you can capture leads; directly and indirectly. Additionally, you can collect lead-generating links when you understand what is social listening. You can create another feed that will monitor some of the journalist’s hashtags to gather opinions and sources like #asktwitter, #journorequest, and #PRrequest.
Add the niche and local journalist into that feed and monitor their social media account. You should know the questions they are asking, things they want to know, and what they are writing about. There’s a chance that you will encounter a question wherein you can suggest something they are interested in. They will then create an article that will link back to your website. If you want an easier way to identify these journalists, you can use BuzzSumo.
- Ahrefs– Once you have completed compiling a name of these journalists, your social media team will monitor their social activities daily. They will then assign the tweet to the respected outreach team. You will then need to evaluate these efforts by creating well-developed tracking links. Ahrefs would be an excellent tool to use when you are gaining or losing backlinks.
- LinkChecker– You will also need to organize these links to identify the links that you’ve acquired through your social media. You can also assign the respective metrics to them.
- Finteza- Also, you want to know if these links are generating traffic. You need to know whether the click will help you capture leads.
Looking for Influencers
Social listening tool will allow you to identify and reach out to the relevant influencers. They could help you expand your reach, advance your brand awareness campaign, and gather high valued leads. Social media listening is exceptionally effective, especially when looking for the right influencers. You can search them using appropriate keywords or hashtags. Be sure to look for their content quality and engagement rate to determine the influencers who are best suited to help you collect leads. As an option, you can also reach out to an existing customer already producing great content. You can treat them as your brand ambassadors, and you want to establish a partnership with them.
Improving Customer Experience
Social listening allows you to establish seamless communication with your existing customers. Therefore, you can provide them with a better customer experience and generate new business opportunities. Here are some ways on how you should take advantage of social media listening.
- Engage with the Audience in Real-Time– It allows you to engage with your audience within the best possible time. From sharing their dissatisfaction to telling their followers how much they adore your product, you must monitor this conversation and react to them.
- Gathering Feedback– Listening to your customer’s feedback will help you find ways on how you can improve your product. You will be surprised at how innovative some of your customers can be.
- Detect Any Unusual Activities– Social media is an exciting place to look for leads, and it will also be effective in helping you know what is happening 24/7. It allows you to spot any abnormal activities related to your brand. It could be an opportunity that will help you advance your lead generation or avoid a crisis. Use tools that will help you identify the sudden increase or drop in your traffic, engagement, or data to spot any unusual activity.
Providing Expertise and Help
When you use social listening tool, you will discover online comments, complaints, and questions. These could be possible leads; offering your help to these people will help you convert them into a customer and shorten the sales cycle. Here are some of the things that you should listen to.
- Brand Mentions-Always track what the people are saying. Your possible leads will not tag you all the time. There are times that they will mention your brand name without tagging your social media handle.
- Location Terms- If your business focuses on a specific location, you can listen to what is happening online using related keywords. It would be an excellent way to connect and engage with your potential leads.
- Help Terms- You should also listen and look for topics that could be related to your brand. Contribute to this conversation, and it could potentially help you capture leads.
Discovering Market Opportunities and Trends
There are times when the business opportunities are just in front of you. Unfortunately, you often miss them since you failed to listen. By using social listening tools, you can identify them in real-time and take advantage of them. You will be able to understand the needs of your audience better and offer them something that will solve their problem. For instance, you may notice some a trend that people who are searching for your product is increasing during the low season. Knowing this will allow you to adjust your advertising campaigns and draw people’s interest.
Determine the Persona of Your Buyers
Before you can connect with your leads, you need to identify them first. By marketing social listening strategy, you can monitor the online conversation and determine your target market’s behavior, interest, and demographics. Here are more ways in how you can evaluate your buyers.
- Know Their Sentiments- You can quickly identify the sentiments of these people through their online conversations. It will help you get more precise information about your lead pool.
- Your Competitor’s Audience- You can also reach out to the audience of your competitors. Know the things that they don’t like about the company and offer them an alternative.
- Understand their Preference- With this method, you can determine the preference of your audience. It can help you personalize your content by using the tone and language they prefer.
Social Listening vs. Social Media Tracking
Listening is different from social tracking. Social listening tool is being used to monitor what your prospects are saying about your business. It means that you will have to watch social media for direct mentions, customer feedback, and any other conversations that could be associated with your company by using the related keywords, tags, and hashtags. A data analysis procedure will then follow it. The result will then help you find better ways to improve your social media marketing strategy.
Tracking is also known as Social Media Monitoring. This process includes identifying and engaging with the mentions through direct messages, comments, and a lot more. It is the first necessary step that you will have to take to understand your targeted audience.
Time for you to unlock the power of social listening and data analysis to advance your lead generation campaign. With this, you will get to know your customer better, their hopes, complaints, and the things that satisfy them. Explore the conversation and trends online and start capturing leads through various social media platforms.