The concept of social listening is becoming increasingly important for companies. Far too many companies still work only to a limited extent with digitally collected data, e.g., purely in the area of website analytics. Through the integration of Social Listening companies can use the Customer Journey clearly more strongly and effectively analyze and better adapt them.
What is social listening anyway?
Social listening refers to the Monitoring of the various social networks on the naming of your brand, your competitors, your products or similarly occupied terms. The information thus obtained can subsequently be processed and quickly used to implement changes and improve your own standing.
In times of stronger competition on the market and a lower Customer loyalty Social listening can contribute significantly to contribute to the economic success of a company and also help to significantly improve the customer journey in many respects.
Social media monitoring and social listening - from numbers to trends and opportunities
Social listening is often equated with social media monitoring. However, as a rule, the Monitoring only captures the raw numbers and data. Data like return of investment and other metrics, while important, won't help you improve the customer journey in the short term, and in some cases can't even accurately represent how your customers respond. A simple example:
Based on the metrics, you can see that a particular post of your company was viewed and commented on particularly frequently in social media. But this does not mean that this the best post must be. It may also be that under the post a user complained about experience with your company and this complaint has gone viral. This cannot be seen purely from the social monitoring figures.
Only the Social Listening shows you what's behind this trend and what problems need to be solved. You can through direct actions thus prevent this post from appearing particularly frequently or improve the customer journey experience through targeted actions on your part, for example by replying to this customer and constructively contributing to the solution of the problem.
Various tools help to understand the customers and their wishes
Social listening also has various tools and software solutionswhich make the work of you and your employees much easier. After all, you cannot manually monitor all channels and all mentions of your brand or your products in the most diverse networks. It is therefore necessary to collect the data with the help of technology and have it processed. Thus, you have the tools at your disposal that you need to Analysis and optimization of the customer journey need.
Social listening tools include:
Not just collecting data, but using that data
The big problem is that in this day and age, a wide variety of things can be easily captured on the Internet. They can be accessed via the Social media monitoring The social listening tools also offer an enormous amount of data. However, data collection should not be an end in itself, but should help you along the customer journey to identify the Reach customers in a targeted manner and to optimally accompany the individual steps along this journey.
So it is valid the Evaluate data. This is much easier with social listening data, as it is usually based on a natural language and therefore trends and changes can be identified more quickly. Pure numbers, on the other hand, require time for validation and a sufficiently large amount of data to be used effectively.
Effects on the customer journey through social listening
Social listening can be a Have a significant impact on the customer journeyas these measures enable you to understand and get to know your customers much better. This is important because every touchpoint along the customer journey, i.e. every touchpoint with your company, Tailored to the wishes and needs of the customer must be. Here again is an example:
There is a new trend in social media, which you could cover with your product. The need of many users in the social networks is to follow this trend and create images or videos themselves. If you know about these needs and desires, you can position your product in line with the trend and, for example, use influencer marketing to make the use of your offer visible. You will thus reach the first step of the customer journey much faster for many customers and can ride the wave of the current trend.
Adjustments and strategy changes based on valid data
The main advantage of the measures presented here lies in the short response times. If a company only collects the numbers, they usually need to be collected over a long period of time and then validated.
In the context of social listening, on the other hand, a company can react much faster, as it is very easy to map the various current trends and the wishes of potential customers.
(Image: theimpulsedigital.com)
The direct and indirect interaction with customers at the various points of the Customer journey can thus be optimized with pinpoint accuracy. Thus, as an entrepreneur, you can not only sustainably increase and improve brand awareness, but also optimize the standing of the brand through targeted customer interactions in social networks. A direct and above all a successful customer interaction is thus much easier and is perceived by more customers.
Conclusion: Professional social listening leads to better control of the customer journey
The customer journey plays a key role in marketing and the Marketing Automation play an important and central role. Through the various tools used in social listening to capture trends, reactions and interactions of users in social networks, it is possible to Optimally reflect current trends and customer wishes.
This is important for companies that want to optimally occupy the various touchpoints along the customer journey. Because the better and more precisely the wishes and intentions of the customers are met, the more Less jumps the company has to record in the marketing funnel and all the more greater the chance to turn prospects into real customers.
