How to Use Social Listening to Create a Better Customer Experience
Understanding what customers are thinking and staying in tune with trends within your market is essential. A social listening strategy (also known as social listening or online listening) is a valuable tool that can help you learn how your target market is really feeling, monitor changing trends, and stay ahead of competing organizations. By actively listening, you’ll be able to deliver a better customer experience and build long-term loyalty.
WHAT IS SOCIAL LISTENING?
In simple terms, it’s a tool that analyzes and monitors online conversations and comments to find out what customers are saying about your brand, products, or services. Social listening looks at many different sources, including social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), online forums (like Reddit), customer reviews, and some audio and video clips.
BENEFITS OF USING SOCIAL LISTENING
Strengthen your marketing research efforts
Combining social listening with traditional marketing research can help you paint a more complete picture to make informed decisions. Social listening can help you after you conduct market research (by building on the data you already have) or before (by shedding light on what people are saying about your brand so you can use qualitative or quantitative studies to dig deeper). While social listening can’t replace marketing research, it can add another layer of knowledge, and the more you know, the better the customer experience you can deliver.
Go back in time
Wish you could travel back in time to see what people thought about your business a few days, months, or even years ago? Use social listening to learn valuable insights from past events, product launches, or controversies. Not interested in the past? Social listening can also help you predict the future, since you can still observe where conversations are going!
Stay on top of market trends
In an age where social media is omnipresent in our lives and online comments seem to fly at the speed of light, social listening can help you stay current and ahead of the curve. By monitoring what customers think about emerging trends, you can adapt your strategies, align your offerings, and capitalize on your target audience’s changing preferences.
Stay ahead of the competition
Social listening isn’t just about monitoring your brand reputation; it’s also about keeping an eye on – and an ear to – what consumers are saying about your competition. When you know what your competition is doing well, and what they’re not doing well, you can differentiate yourself, develop innovative approaches, and ensure your business is well-positioned to seize opportunities and better serve your target market.
See your brand through the eyes of your customers
Social listening can help you gain critical insights into what your target customers really want, identify your strengths and areas for improvement. Better yet, it provides you with your customers’ unfiltered opinions about your products and services, which you can use to develop tailored strategies to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Chart showing the benefits of social listening
GET BETTER SOCIAL LISTENING RESULTS WITH LIGHT ANALYTICS
Our team of experts at Léger Analytique (LEA) does not just reuse standard social listening tools, but offers you a robust social listening solution, which can be characterized by:
Its customization : We develop custom code for your project that takes into account the specific details of your brand. We can even target geographically to explore results in a specific area.
Its comprehensiveness : we have the capabilities to perform web scraping on all kinds of media sources, including videos, audio files and podcasts (unlike other tools that only scan text). Our experts can advise you when scraping certain sources is not possible for ethical reasons.
Its consultative side : While some social listening tools focus only on how the public perceives your brand, our solution assesses whether your brand is aligned with its positioning.
With our tool and the advice of our experts, you will obtain better key findings that will allow you to make more strategic decisions based on the needs of your business, which will allow you to offer a better experience to your customers and stimulate your growth.
WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT SOCIAL LISTENING?
Our Leger Analytics (LEA) team would be happy to help you with your next project or discuss in more detail how you can use social listening to gain more insights for your business. Fill out the form below to learn more!
Are you a retailer looking to learn more about how you can leverage social listening in the retail space? Read our article on retail-specific social listening to learn more.
