What is Social Listening and how can it help you sell more?
Social Listening gives brands the opportunity to track, analyse and respond to conversations about them on social media. This is a vital part of audience research and allows you to make notes on what you can improve upon and what your biggest strengths are. As we all know, audience research is vital to a great marketing strategy and knowing how your current customers perceive you is essential for growth and retention. Not only is social listening a good tactic to track information about what customers might be saying about your business and products; it’s also good to monitor what’s happening with your competitors, and generate leads based on what your prospects and customers are interested in.
How can I implement Social Listening right now?
Honestly, it’s a lot easier than you might think. You don’t need to implement something like a reputation management system right away, just simply personally contacting customers and asking how they feel about your business is a great start. You don’t even need to email them, just check out what they might be saying about you online and engage with them!
Humans love to complain about things so if you’re doing something wrong, so they’ll most likely tell you if you ask them. Likewise, humans also love to talk about things they, well, love! No one will tell you that straight away but, trust me, they do. If they love what you’re doing, chances are they’ll tell the world without realising it. If they do that over social media, make sure you thank them for it! Interactions like these help you improve both your services and your relationships with customer. Who knows? Maybe that reply to a customer’s tweet about how much they love their new kitchen you installed will get them to come back to you for more work or send new customers your way.
Are there any ways to automate Social Listening?
Yes, of course! Reputation management systems like Repuso have existed for a while now and help you manage your reputation online. You can set your minimum rating to appear on your website so that you can always display the best reviews. Any reviews that come in under that rating will automatically be directed away from your website and the feedback sent directly to you. This way you can improve upon what the customer had said and resolve any issues, if necessary, without effecting your reputation online.
You can also set up free surveys and send them to customers for their feedback. While this doesn’t quite work the same way as a reputation management system, it does allow for customers to tell you what other services they’d like to see from you. You might be avoiding stepping into a certain market only to find that your customers would love for you to do so! At the very least, this survey will give you valuable marketing information to work off.
The above is more focused on managing customer feedback, requesting insight from them, but social listening is much greater than this.
Having a Revenue Growth Platform such as SharpSpring, will provide you powerful tools for social listening – and unlike some other social media management platforms, it’s not limited to a single network. Find and filter social conversations on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn by #hashtag, keyword and more. Find out what folks have to say about your brand, competitors and industry. Spot customer queries or support issues and respond instantly. Re-share user-generated content and positive reactions. Organise that feedback in customisable tabs so that your team has the information they need at their fingertips.
Okay that’s all well and good, but how do I increase my profits by using Social Listening?
By using a mix of the techniques we’ve discussed so far, you can figure out how your customers perceive your business, what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong and what markets you could be tapping into and making more sales from. By having the information needed to decide which areas to improve on, you’ll be able to fine tune exactly what customers love about your business and get more sales simply because of that. And by introducing new products and services which your customers want, you can easily increase your profits through more frequent sales. This is even easier considering that your customers could already be saying these things in their emails to you or on their social media platforms. By increasing the frequency in which you use social listening, you will immediately increase the number of sales you make as a result! And remember listening out for conversations across your social media channels that are triggers for products and services you provide or competitive insight that you can leverage accordingly.
Social Listening is a great tactic to increase your sales, and improve your customer service…but what if you don’t have the tools to manage your entire customer lifecycle and automate some of those activities? Well, Social Listening won’t help you there but what can help is our Revenue Growth Platform! Find out more here 👀
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About Autus
Autus provide Revenue Growth Platforms, Marketing & Sales Automation and Digital Marketing services to help sales and marketing personnel and teams build efficient and effective sales and marketing best practices and automate their marketing and sales processes by leveraging personalised content, various digital marketing tactics, segmentation and behaviour of their prospects and customers.
Autus recommend various products for automation, such as Active Campaign, Hubspot, Mailchimp and SharpSpring…it will vary on your requirements and budget the best option for your business.
Find out more here.
Our founder, Tom Berry, also provides selective fractional CMO services and is a member of some client boards.
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If our team at Autus can help advise further, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our founder, Tom Berry.
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