The advent of social media marketing has given rise to social listening. And now, it has become a significant part of the B2B sales and marketing strategy. With innumerable social listening tactics and tools available, it is easy for you to identify specific customer interactions and respond to them immediately. Also, approximately 4 billion active users on social media give you an added advantage. You get a major chunk of people who can become your loyal customers. This, in turn, boosts sales for your business. Curious to know how? Let us take a deeper look.
What Is Social Listening?
Social listening is a process where you use your social media channels to track conversations and mentions about your brand. And along with brand mentions, you also search for specific comments, conversations, etc., where users talk about you, your services, or products. Further, you analyze these mentions, your competitors, and keywords related to your brand and take proper measures. That can be as small as acknowledging your customer’s comments or even rethinking the entire marketing strategy if required.
Social Listening Factors to Consider
Before you plan your social listening strategy, you must consider certain factors like:
- Industry: Only focussed listening does the trick. If you listen to everything on social media, you will only have noise, not information. So how can you optimize listening? By focusing only on your business and industry. For instance, if you are a digital marketing firm or a technology company, listening about other industries isn’t beneficial. You should define niches and stick to them for better results.
- Location: Sometimes, users in other countries might mention your brand or talk about them. If your business works at a national and international level, you may benefit from such social mentions. But, if you are a local business, such mentions may have little impact on your business. Instead, a hyper-local focus on users around your location helps you target customers who are genuinely interested in your brand.
- Competition: It’s wise to be aware of the strategies used by your competitors. But you must not let those influence your own strategies. The best thing to do is to identify, observe them and analyze their interactions, response time, etc. Use these observations to structure your own plan.
How Social Listening Helps Improve Sales
Identifying the location, industry, and competitors to observe is only the first step. To use social listening effectively and boost sales, you must focus on the following.
1 Lead Generation
Thanks to social media, customers often visit different platforms to search for products. Although several e-commerce sites with genuine customer reviews are available online, users often love to check out recommendations on social platforms as they find them tailor-made. Well, who would want to scroll through lengthy product pages rather than check for comments or product mentions on social media? Using social listening efficiently, you can convert several of these users into leads.
Important tip: Hard selling is not always necessary. You can use some smart selling with social listening! But don’t forget to be polite and considerate to your prospects.
2 Understand Customers Better
Well, social listening is a legit way of eavesdropping on your customers. Users love social media, and they are often candid about their experiences or views. And you get ample insights into what they are looking for. Build a detailed profile of your target customers, their behaviors, how they communicate, which influencer they follow, and more. Now improve on your sales strategy with this information and boost sales for your business.
Important Tip: Use the data gathered from social listening in other channels like email marketing, push notifications, etc. Target specific segments to sell better.
3 Respond and Reach Out to Customers
Your response time matters. Prospects spend several hours on social media searching, inquiring, for products they need. With social listening, you can effectively trace such conversations, queries, etc., and respond to them immediately. It is a time-taking process. But this helps to build trust among customers and make them aware of your products better. Interacting directly with them enhances your chances to generate leads and convert them into customers in the future.
Important Tip: Pay attention to what users want. If they want advice or tips about your products, offer just that. Don’t adopt an aggressive sales approach.
Final Thoughts
There are several avenues to sell. But you must be customer-focused rather than sales-focused to leverage these avenues and boost sales. Building trust is way more important than implementing your sales strategy. Use social listening optimally and win big on sales!
Also Read: Tips for Finding the Right Social Influencers for Your Brand
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