How Agencies can Improve their Social Media Presence

Billions of people are social media users today – over 3.8 billion! Managing your social media presence as an agency can be tough. And then comes the added pressure of guaranteeing internet success for clients. Effective ways to market on social media become crucial especially if your agency serves in the advertising and PR industry. There is no dearth of advertising agencies. There are 8000 PR agencies in the US alone. Measuring social media presence tells you about your dominance within the industry by giving you an idea about your market share. In this article, we share 5 ways to improve social media presence for agencies and strengthen their overall social media strategy.

Know the Social Media Platform

Whether your clients are large corporations or businesses just starting out, every brand needs to boost its brand visibility. Even your own brand needs to boost its online performance. Sometimes brands and agencies make the mistake of treating all social media platforms the same. They are not. If every social media platform was the same, there wouldn’t be so many. Each platform has its own personality so you need to identify and mold your content and strategy accordingly. People use Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Youtube very differently. You cannot expect to attract an audience on Instagram with the same content that you posted on LinkedIn. Here are some of the most popular social media platforms that your agency probably uses.

Facebook Features

As of now, Facebook attracts the highest number of daily users. People come to Facebook to share more personal content, share photos, updates, and general news. These users are generally highly opinionated and will pay close attention to any catchy news on their feed. This presents a great opportunity for marketing.

Twitter Features

Twitter is fast-paced. People have a lot to say within the 280 characters allowed. They are constantly tweeting, retweeting, clicking on links, and moving on. On Twitter, you need content that will keep up – fast pieces of information. They can be tweeted with a short message or link, a photo, or a quick GIF.

LinkedIn Features

LinkedIn is designed keeping professionals and businesses in mind. Most users on LinkedIn are there in a professional capacity. Many of them will follow content via LinkedIn groups et cetera. Being visible in these groups presents a huge opportunity for lead generation.

Instagram Features

Instagram has grown in recent years and it is a platform that adopts a different way of displaying content. People here are more invested in displaying their content aesthetically in the form of theme-based photo-blogs. Businesses and influencers spend hours putting out visually captivating content. And visual content does a great job of capturing the attention of an otherwise capricious audience.

Know the Audience

The next most important thing to do is knowing more about your target audience. Knowing the exact buyer persona helps you personalize your offering when you market your product. These are not your generic display ads from Google/Bing. Running ads on social media allows you to segment your audience. So when you have this choice, personalizing the content increases your chances of gaining potential customers.

This is also where the choice of platform matters. If you are in the B2B market, LinkedIn ads might be more useful to you. Study your target market’s demographics, interests et cetera. Listen to the industry chatter on the chosen platform. You will know about leads who are the most active and interested. Marketing to such people increases your chances of gaining the right attention.

Storytelling

Right, so you now have your target audience, you know the platforms you want to work with. But how do you start? Where do you start? You have to improve your social media presence and brand awareness, but how? The answer lies in the age-old marketing tool – storytelling. As Seth Godin said, “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make but about the stories, you tell.” Storytelling is a great way to start and reach your customers. Let them see the human side of the brand, let them know the benefits they can reap from your services, and be inspired to take action.

This tool is age-old, the only change that has been made is the ease with which you can do it. You have a digital medium like videos and photos which make the story truly appealing. And AI tools help you peek right into the minds of your audience members to tell you all about what they want to know. Monitoring the social chatter around your industry keywords is the first step to start planning your storytelling campaign.

Retargeting and Remarketing

When people search for products or services on Google, they are actively looking for these things – they are hot leads. It is not the same case on social media. To convert the cold traffic from social media into warm traffic you need to remarket. Retargeted customers have a 70% more chance of converting. Social media monitoring helps you plan your remarkable campaigns. Monitor your audience when they engage with your page and posts. Pay close attention to their comments and the posts with which they are engaging. The next time you send out an ad to their inboxes, it could be tailored around these insights.

Another way to remarket your brand to your existing audience members is to gather insights about their topics of interest. Encourage your clients and send out gated content revolving around these topics. These are sure to catch the attention of your cold leads. Once they sign-up for an e-book or a webinar, you can send them promotions that are targeted for more leads down the sales funnel.

To turn strangers into prospects you will need to create brand awareness. Offer helpful pieces of content and educate them about why they need your service or the benefits that await them by signing on. Every step you take via social media can be managed via social media management tools. Remember, building an online brand image comes with patience. Keep monitoring, reading the data, take actions based on the insights, and do not stop measuring the impact.

Understanding How Gen Z Consumers Shop

Gen Z can truly be called the digital generation. They grew up in the world of social media, smartphones, and cheap internet. So where does this generation spend most of its time? The obvious answer is – on Instagram, Snapchat, and Youtube! That’s right, Gen Z uses these three platforms the most, and Facebook is only fourth on the list. Shunning Facebook from the top seat this generation may seem unpredictable. However, they do talk online about products and services a lot, quite like their predecessors – the Millennials. So we decided to take a dive into the purchase habits of Gen Z consumers, decipher them, and gain some insights.

Social Listening helps to Understand GenZ Consumers

Understanding these young minds isn’t difficult especially when they are ready to interact with you online. Social listening platforms like Auris are capable of researching insights from these conversations. Here’s an analysis of how this generation likes to shop and arrive at such decisions.

They Love Authentic Content

Remember what we told you about millennials in our previous blog posts, and extend it to Gen Z because Gen Z consumers too love authenticity. Any marketer would be happy to know that Gen Z talks about purchases they make or want to make online – a lot! The previous generations discussed such matters with friends and family members. But for Gen Z, online influence is greater. For them, influencers and the Instagram-culture are the new normal. And usually, any authentic and favorable content from their favorite influencers drives them to make purchase decisions.

For marketers trying to figure out the connection, Gen Z might seem young, childish and their loyalty fleeting. But their behavior can be understood clearly from social data. Listen to the chatter, connect with them, and offer values that compliment their lifestyle. This increases your chances of converting them into your paying customers.

This Generation is Really Smart

Lastly, members of Gen-Z might be young but they are probably the smartest when it comes to being tech-savvy. McKinsey says 65% of Gen-Zers say they like to know what’s in vogue and wish to be in control. They are true digital natives and thanks to their savviness they are well-informed. Before making a purchase, they would spend hours on research. They evaluate the information online. They visit your website, read reviews, watch videos, and make informed decisions. To impress this generation make sure that the information about your brand as well as product is readily available and transparent. Keep an eye on what others are saying about your brand because all these reviews matter to GenZ folks.

In conclusion, Gen Z is easy to understand if you are listening to them and acting responsibly. Reports show they are 59% more likely to connect with brands on social media than the previous generations. So you have to stay alert for any negative review that comes your way. These folks are active on social media and will call you out. Social media monitoring helps you receive real-time alerts. Use its help well to win these young consumers over.

Influencer Marketing for Start-Ups

Almost every brand wants a slice of influencer marketing, even startups. You might think that influencer marketing for start-ups is a no-go given their budget constraints. And obviously, they would want the maximum possible return on their investment. Well, the good news is, they don’t even need a lot of capital to get started with their first influencer marketing campaign. What’s more, influencer marketing for startups gets them an edge over bigger brands. So here’s how even startups can implement an effective influencer marketing campaign.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Any individual with the power to convince others and influence their purchasing decisions can be called an influencer. With the advent of social media platforms like Instagram, the influencer marketing industry has seen a boom. The global spend on Instagram influencer marketing is expected to be around $8080 billion in 2020.

The most surprising element here is that not all influencers have thousands of followers. In fact, influencers with a lesser count of followers (2k-30k) have more engagement on their posts. And this is the trick we use for influencer marketing for startups.

Steps for Influencer Marketing for Start-ups

This isn’t a tough strategy to formulate. You might feel a little intimidated thinking big brands invest in influencer marketing, but it really doesn’t depend on your company’s size. There can be a different pathway for you to take. Let’s discuss it step-by-step.

Your Ideal Influencer

There are various types of influencers like mega, macro, and micro-influencers. So when you decide to opt-in for an influencer marketing campaign you have to make a decision. It is advisable for start-ups to opt for micro-influencers. These influencers have an active follower base and negotiating your offering with them will prove a little easier. Also, you have to judge other factors like whether the person exudes an innate sense of business. Do they have enough credibility? Have they, at any time in the past, worked with your competitors? Answering these questions might help you narrow down your list of potential influencers to work with.

Your Goals

Defining your own goals is key. It is important because you will need to communicate them to the influencer too. Also, when you are sure about your goals, you can decide which KPIs to keep monitoring in order to track your progress and ROI. For startups, the primary goal is to increase awareness. For this, working with multiple micro-influencers works best. For instance, say you sign up 10 micro-influencers and organize a giveaway contest. They will ask their followers to share a post or story mentioning your brand and their handle in order to enter the contest. Imagine the ripple effect here. If you can get even 10 influencers with say 2k followers each, you will have each of these followers mentioning your brand on their feed!

Social Listening to Find the Right Match

It is important for you to be clear about your dream influencer. Profiling the right influencer begins when you start tracking them by what you are looking for. Social listening tools can help you here. Tracking influencers becomes easy when you have access to the influence scores of every person who engages with your industry chatter. Since you are tracking industry keywords, you will automatically find people who speak to your niche audience. Now all you need to do is decide whether you want a macro or micro-influencer. Sort the influence scores accordingly and you will have found your ideal match.

Communicating Your Goals

If you have gone through all the above steps, you already know your goals and have an influencer in mind. As a startup, you will have to decide how much creative decision you want to hold. Be clear about the message you want to convey, your primary goals, and how much control you want over the content/language.

Once your campaign is running, you are left with only one job, giving it as much visibility as possible so keep re-sharing the content on all your online channels. Monitor and measure the metrics. Take note of any discrepancy that might crop up, discuss it with your collaborator. Hopefully, you will gain some long-term collaborations and improved brand sentiment and awareness.

Share of Voice – What is it and How to Measure it?

Marketers often use the term “Share of Voice”. So what is it – an important metric or just another buzzword? Don’t we already have a lot of other metrics to measure and analyze? And if you do try to measure this, what benefits does it bring to your business? Let’s dig in.

What is Share of Voice (SOV)?

Share of Voice is the measure of your brand’s visibility. This is often measured in comparison to your competitors’ SOV across multiple channels. This gauges your brand’s dominance within the industry-specific conversations. So the more your market share is, the more popular you are. SOV refers to a brand’s share of paid advertising. But now, in a broader definition, it has come to include other digital marketing elements too. SOV now considers social media mentions, traffic for keywords et cetera. An understanding of your brand’s share of voice, only helps you understand how dominant your current position is, in the marketplace.

SOV can be calculated for:

Impressions and reach on social media pages
The organic traffic on your site
PPC
Revenue
The volume of mentions across the Internet.

Why is Share of Voice Important?

If you are investing all your energy and resources into a business, you wouldn’t profit from it if people aren’t even aware of your brand. Share of voice helps you measure the level of awareness for your brand. This in turn tells you what percentage of your target audience you are reaching, through your marketing initiatives.

The benefits of knowing your share of voice include:

Competitive analysis: Get a true picture of your standing in the market, your affinity to your customers, and how you are performing when compared to your competition.
Market segmentation: Calculating your SOV can bring out useful insights into the regional markets and the demographics of your target market. Organize this information, analyze and know all about your weaknesses and strengths.
Measure the success of your campaigns: When you run campaigns, one of the major goals is to increase your brand awareness. So, measuring the share of voice helps you gauge the success of a specific campaign.
Improve future marketing campaigns: When you measure the SOV of your current campaigns you have access to all the data. Analyzing them can help you to make improvements to your future campaigns. Social listening tools store all historical data from your previous campaigns and provide precise insights into your areas of improvement.

How to Measure it?

To know your current position in the market, you need to calculate your share of voice. So how is it done? Easy! Divide your target metric by the total metric for your market/industry. Multiply the result with 100 to get the percentage of your market share.

(Your target metric / Total industry metric) x 100

For instance, if your brand hashtags appear 10 times among the industry total of 50, you have a 20% SOV. This means 80% of the market is taken by someone else and you are yet to catch up before you become a market leader.

All this seems easy until you realize that calculating the total number of industry keyword mentions manually is almost impossible. AI and SEO tools like Google Analytics or social listening tools can easily monitor and calculate the SOV for you. They even provide a comparison between the fluctuations in your SOV. These insights help you in your future campaigns.

Quick Recap

Share of voice mostly refers to the advertising a company does. However, it has now come to measure other elements of digital marketing. Measuring and monitoring your SOV over time will help you better equip for and scale your marketing campaigns.

Protecting your Online Reputation Made Easy

Online reputation has become one of the most important assets of a company today. And we are not alone in saying so. A survey found 97% of the respondents reporting that a positive online footprint is of utmost importance. It is important but not always easy. And one incident which hurts your online reputation could hurt most or all of your business opportunities, for a long time to come. So how do you keep a check on your online reputation and protect it round the clock?

Why is Online Reputation Management Important?

A brand’s reputation is never completely in the management’s control. This makes constant monitoring of its status so valuable and important. Modern buyers make educated decisions. They use digital platforms online to research before making a purchasing decision. And it is not just customers who search for reviews and news online. Potential investors also depend on online research as a part of their due diligence efforts before making decisions. In either case, leaving a crude first impression is definitely not what you would want.

Moreover, in the digital age of social media and online news platforms, a negative review or article concerning a brand name will spread fast. You risk losing 22% of your business when your potential customers find negative search results related to your brand.

How to Protect your Online Reputation

Online reputation management is a vast subject. Here we discuss how effective social listening and tracking mentions can help your brand.

Spot Early Signs

Social listening tools help you prevent a crisis from happening. You will receive alerts about any brand mention in real-time. This includes all mentions be they positive, neutral, or negative. If you keep the alert notifications on, you would know of any suspicious mention or comment at once. This allows you to act before a negative review turns into a potential disaster.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is also an important part of online reputation management as is real-time media monitoring. This tells you how your customers feel about your brand/product/campaign. If a high number of mentions take a negative tone, the sentiment analysis would show a spike in the negative graph. A spike in the positive sentiment graph shows that you have been successful and people like your online presence and show you love. This feature is guided mostly in an AI-powered social listening tool by NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) which is still learning how humans speak, so most AI tools cannot understand the sarcasm behind a comment like “Yeah, right’ yet. In such a case, you will have the option to change the sentiment manually. As you keep doing it, the system learns. With repeated use, the program’s machine learning feature starts to understand better.

Managing Negative Comments/Reviews

We have talked about preventive measures up until now. But what if you already have a couple of negative reviews. How would you take care of those? Remember, no brand is perfect. There is always room for improvement, and there are always customers who are not happy with a product. In case you get an alert for a negative mention, do not allow it to unsettle you. You just have to act fast and you would be able to manage the situation.

This is how it works. Say a customer posts a negative review and you do not respond for an hour. 50 others see the negative review and note that there’s no response. They start viewing your brand as irresponsible. If you act fast and appropriately, others would clearly see how ready and willing you are to address the concerns of a dissatisfied customer. This maintains your image as a responsible brand if not improve it.

Sometimes, a member may leave a rude comment because of a miscommunication or voice untrue things which they may have heard as a rumor. Whatever the situation, stay calm and do not begin an online feud. Try to explain the matter and do the best you can to stay on the same page with an unhappy customer.

To protect your brand’s online reputation, you need to have a crisis management plan in place. Every member of your team needs to play a specific role when a situation arises. Without a firm action plan, your reputation can suffer heavy damages. Social media is a crowded place and news spreads fast. A drop in your reputation is a boon for your competitors as they might try and convert your customers into their own. So ensure that you have a strong strategy in place.

The Future of Digital Storytelling

Digital storytelling is the new buzzword being used to describe a brand’s digital narrative. The word is sometimes used to refer to film-making. However, the newer definition of the word has come to include the marketing aspect as well. Digital storytelling on social media is being used by most brands today to tell their stories which resonate with the audience. Brand storytelling shows the human side of your business to your audience.

Successful Digital Storytelling on Social Media

Being on social media doesn’t mean much unless your content is king. And if you are starting out your content journey, you may want to start by telling your brand story. You can get creative and tell a chapter of your story with each new campaign or product launch. If storytelling is the marketing strategy you are planning to adopt, be consistent. Focused campaigns with a definite and cohesive theme tend to be more effective.

So how do you get to planning such a campaign and implementing it? Traditionally one would simply go out sharing their brand’s motive. But today, social listening and data analytics helps you through the process. This is the reason why I called this article the future of social media storytelling.

Social Listening for Digital Storytelling

What is more important than storytelling is effective storytelling. And your story will only be effective if you find an audience that can relate to your content. Also, to be consistent with your content, you will have to study your audience. What are they thinking? How do they feel about you? What do they want to know?

This is where social listening steps in. Social listening helps you collate and analyze billions of conversations happening online. You can draw up a clear picture of your current brand health and plan your campaign in accordance. Let’s see how the data helps you tell your story!

Know Your Audience

The more you know about your target audience the better stories you will be able to create. Also, this helps you research better. You would know what your audience wants to know. Your future campaigns will be better informed and thus seem more relevant to your followers. This in turn can increase public engagement on your posts and stories.

Social listening gathers minute details like the general sentiment around your brand, demographic details, top keywords your followers are looking for et cetera.

Involve your Advocates/Employees

The best way to gain traction for your posts is to make your customer a hero. Who doesn’t love a little attention? So, find out your biggest fans, feature them in your story. Make them the hero. This tactic is one of the most successful ones out there. Once you feature this person, the customer feels so valued they share your post with their followers. They tell their friends and family about you. This increases your visibility.

Social listening helps you find your supporters. Look for commentators who have mentioned you on a positive note. Check their influence score. If it’s high, you have found your advocate.

Employees are your best advocates too. A happy employee will appreciate your brand and would be willing to share your name with their followers. This also shows your customers that you take care of your customers and employees – helping to improve your brand image.

Measure and Learn

Social listening insights also help you learn from your past campaigns. You could set the tool to track individual campaigns. The analysis will help you understand the buzz. Learn from the feedback you receive and build on it. This too can be a part of your brand story. Dominos can be an inspiration here. They did a social listening survey to find out about the key complaints and addressed them. This helped them return with a new narrative: one of how they successfully listened to their customers and took action.

In the end, it is your audience who consumes your story and reacts to it. Your audience’s sentiment matters, hence it is a metric worth focussing on. Drill down to find out the pain points your customers are facing. Address these in your narrative and your story would naturally gain traction. Lastly, what’s the objective of your story? You either want to improve engagement or maybe develop a relationship. So, add a call-to-action, this will guide your audience members towards the next step.

How to Work with an Influencer?

Over the past year, we have spoken a lot about influencer marketing. The reason is that working with influencers is a trend that has been gaining ground. Hence it is important to highlight the way it really works and to talk about the platform which has seen the highest jump in this trend. Yes, we are talking about Instagram. The simplicity of the app allows influencers to share thematic content and direct it to their niche audience. Many brands have been working with them and you would be right if you are wondering how to work with an influencer!

Influencer marketing campaigns can prove to be really beneficial, but only if you manage to choose the right person. There’s a real challenge in finding the right influencer on a given platform. And in deciding on how to proceed, after finding one.

Here are a few pointers which would help you choose and plan the flow of your campaign.

Work with an Influencer following these Steps

Working with an influencer can complement your overall marketing strategy. However, the implementation of an influencer marketing campaign needs a strategy for itself.

What are you looking for?

You would obviously have a marketing strategy in place. If you have been monitoring your campaigns you already know the aspects where your brand is falling short. Maybe you can plug these gaps with an influencer marketing campaign. Or you may even have unique goals. Whichever it is, make sure you are clear about them. Maybe you want to:

Increase your brand awareness and reach. For brands who have just shown up on Instagram, this is the perfect way to get the needed attention. An influencer already has a following. When they promote your brand, you get a fixed set of eyes. You don’t have to hunt for an audience.
Launch a new product or promote an existing one. Influencers have a dedicated following so when they promote your product conversion rates promise to be higher.
Build a follower base for an upcoming event. If you are hosting an event in collaboration with an influencer, their followers would want to sign up. This gives your event an increased number of audience members.

Setting your goals would help you to decide which type of influencer you want to engage with.

Choose a Type of Influencer

We had spoken about the types of influencers in one of our previous blogs – “How to find Instagram influencers?”. If you don’t remember, we will help you blow the dust off the old memory file.

In the digital world, the market for influencers has boomed. Now there are influencers of all kinds. You can choose to work with a celebrity influencer, a macro-influencer, or a micro-influencer. The decision depends on your needs and goals.

Micro-influencers have the smallest following of the three. Their follower count is generally between 2,000 to around 50,000 on a single social media account. These creators generally have a focused topic of interest and they have a niche audience. And this is why these accounts generally have a higher engagement rate.

Macro-influencers have around 50,000 to 1,000,000 followers. These accounts perhaps started out as micro-influencers themselves and have grown to their current stature organically. These profiles are considered leaders or experts in their niche. They also have a huge fan base and a loyal one.

Celebrity influencers are also called mega influencers. These accounts have more than 1,000,000 followers. These are mostly accounts of real-life celebrities and they make up a group of most expensive influencers.

Ask yourself these Questions before you Work with an Influencer

Now, you are clear about the goals and you have a partial idea about the type of influencers you can choose from. Next, you need to come to a final decision and asking yourself some of these questions might help you with that.

Your Budget

Influencer marketing is versatile when it comes to pricing. Each influencer type has its own price bracket associated with a campaign. Micro-influencers won’t demand nearly as much as a macro influencer. Most brands choose to partner with multiple micro-influencers and send them free samples to review. However, if you are looking for the wow factor and have a lenient budget, you could opt for a mega influencer.

Who Follows them?

Finding a perfect influencer would need you to know their own personal brand. Hence make sure their audience is close to or similar to your target audience. This is absolutely essential because otherwise, you will invest in a campaign where the conversion rate wouldn’t be high. If your influencer’s audience isn’t interested in your niche, they will not buy your product.

Engagement Rate

Being popular on social media is easy because people sometimes buy fake likes and followers. So as a brand trying to find the right influencer, make sure you pay attention to more than just the vanity metrics. Check the engagement. See how active the influencer is and how often do they engage with their followers. High engagement rates show that the influencer has an actual following. The more the dedicated following is, the better chances of conversion for your product/service/event.

Has the Influencer Worked with your Competitor?

Another important consideration is to be sure to check whether the influencer has worked with your direct or indirect competitors. You would also need to decide whether it affects your campaign. The situation presents a conflict of interest and might appear unauthentic to the public if your influencer has also worked with your direct competitor. If they have worked with your indirect competitors, you need to decide whether it is best suited to your goals.

Their Content and Past Experience

Like I mentioned earlier, past work experiences may matter. Similarly, their content type also affects your brand. For instance, if they have worked with your competitors, your campaign may seem inauthentic in the eyes of the public. Also, if this influencer has done a lot of sponsored posts in the past, they might again seem inauthentic. It is crucial to gauge their content. The content for your campaign should not be in contrast to the influencer’s previous posts.

Planning a Campaign Together

Planning an influencer marketing campaign starts with you. You have to find an ideal campaign partner. We’ve discussed all the strategic steps up to this point. Furthermore, I even suggest that you use Instagram’s hashtag facility, a social listening platform, and do some research. The tool automates a lot of hard work.

So, now you have an influencer, there is still a campaign to plan and implement. You need to work with this person/brand. If you are teaming up with a person who is already a fan of your brand, they probably know your product well. This partnership will be smoother. If the influencer isn’t familiar with your brand, don’t worry. Educate them and convey to them the specifics and goals you have in mind.

In conclusion, influencer marketing works well for any brand that is looking to improve strategic marketing goals. This could involve increased awareness, engagement, or some effort at building connections. Influencer marketing is the form of non-traditional marketing that has become quite popular in the digital age of Instagram. I hope this guide can help you to work with an influencer in the future.

Can Social Listening Boost eCommerce?

Social media platforms continue to evolve. Platforms like Instagram and Facebook offer a marketplace feature already which allows online shoppers to buy items. This proves that social media platforms have made eCommerce easier. 55% of online shoppers use social media sites like Facebook, Pinterest et cetera. Also, social media is where influencers are. According to Global Web Index, almost a fifth of the internet population follows their favorite celebrities and influencers on social media. This popularity of influencers means that 14% of online consumers discover new products or services via endorsement posts. Amidst all this, what can social listening do to boost eCommerce? What has it got to do with this?

How Social Listening Boosts eCommerce?

Social listening helps with everything related to eCommerce via social media. This includes customer service, customer insights, lead generation, and influencer marketing. Social listening primarily works by gathering every mention of predefined keywords. This data is gathered from every possible online source available and social media platforms are a part of that. These real-time alerts could be set up for any number of keywords. You may monitor your brand name, competitors, products with a name, industry news et cetera.

Social listening is so versatile that each of these actions can help boost your eCommerce in different ways.

Customer Service

When you track your product, the tool brings every possible conversation around it. So when a customer is reviewing your brand/product, complaining, or appreciating it, you know about it instantaneously. And this works to your benefit as all customers expect an early reply.

What makes social listening so very important is that most of your customers won’t tag your official handle. You could risk your brand’s image if you remain unaware of these mentions. In the example given below, the social media user describes Starbucks in appreciating words.

However, in this post, they are being discussed in relation to the recent “Black lives matter” protests. The brand itself hasn’t been tagged in this post or the post below. Ignoring the mention below could have potentially ruined Starbucks’ online reputation.

If you’re a brand trying to sell online and/or on social media, you cannot afford to have a pile of negative reviews or posts with negative associations on your plate. Social listening offers an effective solution to this.

Business Insights

Social listening also allows you to know your audience better. You get a complete insight into the times when they are the most active, their purchasing habits, and what they think of your product/brand. Customer feedback is extremely important for eCommerce, especially when you are looking for product improvement tips. These insights help you with not only that but also in your marketing efforts. Supposing you invest big bucks into running a new ad campaign. But, it misfired and people aren’t very happy about your messaging! Wouldn’t you want to learn about this immediately, to initiate some damage control efforts while halting further ad runs?

Influencer Marketing

eCommerce has been booming on social media. And one of the reasons for this is influencer marketing. Millennials and Gen Z look for authentic reviews from influencers. This has given rise to the trend of micro-influencers and brand ambassadors. When you take an influencer on board you have some sets of eyes fixed on your product. And the conversation rate promises to be higher as most followers are generally loyal to the influencers they follow. So if an influencer is endorsing a product, the general belief is that it is a genuine review.

Social listening helps you find the right fit with the right influencer for your brand. And this is important because finding the right influencer is a tough job. The profile has to be authentic, with real followers and engagement. Then there is the part where you work out what niche they serve. This entire process of finding and choosing the right person is automated when a social listening tool is at work.

Lead Generation

People require products and services. They even use social media to seek recommendations for some of them. They may not even know about your brand or have any preference for you. Listening to industry keywords might help you find and connect with people looking for product recommendations. This comes as a great opportunity to reach out and start pitching an offer.

In conclusion, learning about customers can help you understand ways to improve your eCommerce strategy. These valuable insights help you adapt your business tone to better suit your customers. Social listening boosts eCommerce by helping you improve ways to drive sales online. This includes lead generation via better customer service, social engagement, and reputation management.

Start a Social Listening Campaign and Leverage it in these 3 Ways

Manually tracking online conversations is an impossible task. Social listening is the way to go here. Use a tool to track all mentions of your brand’s name or to track any buzzword of your choice. More and more businesses have been using social listening because of the immense benefits offered. Almost every business maintains several social media accounts. Over 65 million businesses use Facebook’s local business page. Additionally, they have accounts on Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms and forums to manage too. Juggling between all these platforms and getting all the relevant information is a tough task. This makes a robust social listening campaign a necessity. It helps a brand set priorities and helps them engage better with their customers among other things.

Why a Social Listening Campaign?

Imagine attending a social event. You cannot listen to every conversation taking place in the room to add your own informed comment. The chatter on the world wide web poses a similar problem. It is quite impossible for a human to track every brand mention, every review to add their comment. Social listening uses artificial intelligence to serve insights. Research shows that almost 30% of Tweets do not tag the brand and their official handle when they are talking about a particular brand. How would you be able to reach such mentions manually?

Moreover, social listening can be leveraged in more ways than simply using it as a tool to track mentions. There are some unusual ways social listening campaigns can serve your brand. You can leverage the tracked conversations and find better opportunities. You can identify brand advocates, interact with them to build a loyal customer base. Or you can choose to track the latest buzz which in turn informs your content marketing decisions.

Start Social Listening and Leverage it

Social listening is a crucial component of your marketing strategy. It becomes further evident from the words of Jay Baer: “Listening to customers is more important than it’s ever been because their feedback is manifestly public where it’s historically been private”.

There are plenty of tools both paid and free to help you set up your social listening campaign. But how would you use these to their full potential?

Identify Opportunities

Firstly, use this tool to simply look for opportunities within your own community. Listen to the comments of your existing customers. The tool brings up “complex app interface” as a trending keyword. You would know most of your clients who love your product aren’t comfortable with the app interface. The opportunity here lies in working on the app interface or you could lose these customers to a competitor brand with a simpler interface.

Speaking of competitors, another way social listening could provide you opportunities is by offering competitor analysis. The tool tells you about your competitors. You get to see if their customers aren’t happy with their product. You can send out targeted promotional ads. Offer them a discount code, free trial et cetera. Who knows, you could win over their customers.

Engage

When you are listening to the chatter, you already know what your audience is talking about. Use these insights. When someone posts a comment about a complex app interface, ask them what exactly is troubling them. This shows the customer you care and it helps you save time trying to figure out what exactly went wrong. You could drill down to the pain point easily.

Social listening tools send you real-time alerts whenever your brand is mentioned. You cannot expect customers to reply and explain further if you contact them a week after they left a review. The notifications alert you so you can take immediate action. Respond in real-time. This will also help you prevent your brand’s online reputation from being maligned beyond repair.

Content Creation

Customers often ask questions and doubts when they post comments about your brand. Social listening informs you about these as well. These questions, complaints, and even compliments could be used as an inspiration for your next blog post. Social listening could even help you perfect your SEO. If you track your industry keywords, you would be aware of the trends. Developing content around them would drive more traffic to your site.

These are only a few of the many use cases of social listening. Hence having a social listening campaign in place seems like a no-brainer. Every business is present on social media, but unless you are really listening and paying attention, you’ll be limited in the ways you conduct business.

Managing Brand Reputation during the COVID19 Crisis

Rumors and misinformation spread fast in normal times and even faster, during times of crisis. And now with a raging global pandemic, people are reading anything and believing everything. Everyone is in panic mode and fear seems to have gripped most of us. Businesses have had to reassess their priorities and workflow patterns. And this is also the time for them to practice the utmost vigilance. The whole world is depending on online communication. It is also the space where misinformation spreads very quickly too. Brands have to find ways to effectively defend their brand reputation during this COVID19 crisis.

Here are 3 ways to manage online brand reputation during the COVI-19 crisis:

Monitor Brand Mentions

With everyone stuck at home, your followers would be more active on social media. And there will be customers talking about your brand. They might be asking questions, posting reviews, or even advocating for you. No matter what, keep tracking for all mentions, and derive insights. These would help you to figure out the need to re-design your operations and processes during this time. You can also hone your communication skills to decide how to communicate and what to communicate. These are the key steps to manage and maintain your brand reputation online.

For instance, someone might be worried about the delivery of an order they placed. You need to reach out to them giving them the details of their order. If you are in the process of having it delivered, provide the customer with the tracking information and if possible, the expected date of delivery. Align your operations to ensure the item reaches them.

It would be unwise to ignore these mentions and reviews as you would be risking your brand’s credibility. This is the time when you would want to build stronger connections with your customers.

Do Not Shy away from COVID-19 Conversations

Your brand has been doing social media marketing but does that include a plan for crisis communication? During the time of a crisis, do not abandon your customers. They obviously expect to hear from you. Establish an official communication channel and be prepared to send out messages or respond to incoming messages.

If your industry is directly being affected by COVID-19, it is important that you pin an official announcement on all your business pages. Try and communicate, engage with your customers. Your brand is also run by humans, so humanize your operations and tell your customers about it. They would definitely understand. You only need to keep them in the loop.

Engage with Customers

Engaging with your customers during this time will not only make them remember your brand after the pandemic is over but also build trust. This will serve to improve your overall reputation. Amidst the crisis, your brand is sure to be receiving an increased influx of questions. Prepare answers to these questions using Google Q&A.

Send out email alerts to your client base if you have stores which would remain closed, or would be working at limited capacity et cetera. Social media monitoring helps you understand your customers’ concerns. Address these in your newsletters or social media posts.

Remember, the crisis situation won’t last forever, but the relationships you forge now could decide the future of your business. It is absolutely essential that you keep your social media profiles active, keep listening to the chatter, and keep responding in time.