How is AI Shaping the Future of Marketing?

Artificial intelligence tools are being used extensively. They are being used to gain deeper knowledge about customers, clients, and leads. Most of you savvy marketers are aware of AI marketing and are using it to make data-driven decisions. Brands are using AI-powered algorithms in their day-to-day marketing operations. This ranges from chatbots to running personalized ad campaigns.

3 Ways AI is Helping Marketing Managers

According to a study by Dresner Advisory Services,“40% of marketing and sales teams say data science encompassing AI and machine learning is critical to their success as a department.” And this is quite logical, AI does help to automate many of the marketing tasks making the overall process easier. Here are the 3 most prominent ways AI marketing helps.

1.Deeper Consumer Insights

Any brand which creates engaging and compelling consumer experiences is a successful one. Marketers now know exactly what their customers are feeling and what they want. Monitoring this data in real-time allows marketers to act upon it. They can then modify their marketing efforts as the situation demands.

2. Optimizing Ad Campaigns

Consumers would not engage with a piece of content that holds no value for them. And marketers have been using AI-driven tools like social media monitoring to add value to their campaigns and account-based marketing efforts. AI tools can monitor thousands of data streams searching for keywords, brand mentions, etc. The tools also present a full-blown analysis of your company’s online performance. These insights can be used to design and optimize future promotional campaigns.

3. Real-Time Feedback and Customer Engagement

One of the major roles of most PR professionals and marketing managers in the digital era is to maintain a healthy online reputation. This requires constant surveillance of the online space. Social intelligence tools are able to identify major blocks or trends and map the sentiment around it. Marketers can thus monitor the negative trends being reported and get in touch with the consumers who have posted using these keywords. Being able to learn about what a customer is facing in real-time and communicating with them without delay holds the key to improved customer experiences while avoiding any future crises.

Artificial intelligence technology has been helping develop marketing strategies that improve a consumer’s experience day after day. The technology is new and is still learning and faces a few glitches when trying to decipher human speech forms like sarcasm but with extensive use, it keeps learning. As technology keeps on advancing, over time we will be seeing an extensive use of this technology in almost every industry.

Social Listening for Product Development

Product development is an intense and expensive endeavor. From researching a market need to conjuring up a product concept to developing the final product. All this while taking into account the competitive landscape, overhead costs et cetera. The traditional way to test out a product is to develop it and send people some samples and ask for feedback. In the digital era, however, social listening has revolutionized product development. Capturing consumer intelligence in real-time allows developers to know the exact needs of the market. Here’s how to make use of social listening for product development.

How is Social Listening suited for the Product Development Process?

A lot of pressure rides on the back of a product manager when it comes to the success or failure of a product. It is therefore crucial for any project manager to look at the entire process from a strategic standpoint. The typical process involves activities like:

Identifying a problem
Research, designing, and development
Marketing and sales
Finance
Measuring post-launch success

There is typically an entire team deployed behind each of these activities. And the success of each department is a key step towards the overall success of the product.

And while most product managers might be losing their night’s sleep thinking of the Herculean task, we are here to suggest social media listening as a solution. Social media information is a gold mine, especially for consumer-facing brands. This is because people love to talk and when many of them are connected over social media, they do talk about products and services they enjoy or the ones they don’t. Tapping into this resource brings you more information from a larger specimen group than any traditional method of research.

Social Listening refines the Product Development Process

Monitoring social data and analyzing it can help at multiple stages of the product development wireframe. Advances in artificial intelligence tools like social listening and sentiment analysis allow brands to map customer preference and how they influence others or are influenced by others.

Social listening also tackles the problem of unclean data. When companies buy consumer data from vendors, there are a few posts that come from the consumer, the rest are manufactured by the agency and robots. This can lead to distorted results. Social listening sources data in real-time right from the consumers themselves.

Deeper Consumer Insights

Traditionally, for research and development, methods like focus group discussions have been used by companies. While these worked well in the past, the major issue is that these processes are costly and time-consuming. When you are conducting a focus group discussion or survey for an existing product, you get answers to the questions you have already thought about and asked. On the other hand, monitoring social data can bring up issues about the product that you might not have thought about asking.

Moreover, with tools such as Auris, the analysis develops and gets accurate over time as more and more historical data accumulates. This isn’t quite possible with physical surveys and focus groups.

Improved Operations

You will be amazed at the detail at which consumers discuss their interactions and experiences with brands and products. Consumers do not stop at that. They might like your product but they will point out how bad the delivery or packaging was if any of those things are found lacking. Natural language processing and social listening help marketers deduce the precise pain points of consumers, be it a product feature or post-sales customer support.

For instance, you may see a lot of comments regarding the poor plastic packaging of your product. In such a case you know you need to consider different packing materials. Similarly, if you see people commenting on how they love your product, you can deduce which feature they like the most. Use this information to build on your future advertisements.

With the advances in social listening technology, product development and research get easier. You do not have to go over every comment and mention manually. The data is collected, sorted, analyzed, and presented. Manufacturers simply need to pick up what consumers want and implement that in the design and functionality of their product.

Build an Effective Social Media Response Team

Consider your social media response team as a personal disaster management team for your business. This team manages the control center for your business by monitoring your brand mentions in real-time. These are the first responders to any online crisis moment that might come your way. They are also at the forefront of online customer engagement. A strong social media response team ensures you build strong customer relationships.

Why do you Need a Star Social Media Response Team?

If you have a dedicated team taking care of your social media you already must be aware of the effectiveness of such a war room set up. This team is great for most of your marketing activities be it:

New product launch
Customer Engagement via live sessions
Crisis management in real-time or
Online Branding

Building a team of people who then build your brand‘s image online needs much deliberation. You need to consider facts like skills, your current situation, and needs, the budget et cetera.

People you need on the Team

One of the many questions marketers ponder upon is what the ideal size of their brand’s social media response team should be. There is no right answer to this. It mainly depends on how your people are delegating, your goals, your hiring budget, and a few other factors. A survey was recently conducted by Ragan and NASDAQ covering over 2000 respondents from various organizations and found that most of these organizations report having 3 people working in their social media response team.

Leader

You need a leader in your team who drives the action plan, strategizes the campaign et cetera. This person is the hub of all the planning and activities. He/She also manages the overall social media marketing process starting from planning to deliberating to measuring the ROI of the campaigns.

Content Creator

The next important person on your team is the content creator. This is your copywriter or graphic designer and they are on the team to help produce content that can go viral. Their input shows the most when brainstorming content ideas.

Analytics Specialist

This person is equally important as the ringleader or the content creator. He/she would be able to help you with the numbers. The leader and content creator both work in tandem with the analytics person. Now, in the modern-day, this role has been perfected in the form of AI tools.

Social Listening Tools help you Build a Strong Social Media Team

Like we mentioned in the previous section, AI tools like social listening can help a great deal. And this isn’t a surprise. Social media listening automatically does half the job when it comes to monitoring and analyzing the audience’s reactions.

It helps the leader and the analytics person while providing them with data based on real-time mentions. You can place filters and explore every detail about what your audience thinks. It gives you an elaborate picture of your online performance and the exact pain points too.
Social listening also helps with content curation. Knowing your audience in & out lets you leverage the information on what they like, their interests, and what they want to know. Social listening to the online conversation allows you to face the common concerns amongst your audience members. Answering or addressing these questions/topics can also offer great content ideas. You could choose to create multiple resources and promote them. It can be a blog post, an infograph, video tutorial, or even a webinar. You can know more about how social listening helps in content marketing here.

Building an effective social media response team can be tough but not with the support of automation. With social listening, you are performing half of your marketing activities automatically like market research, real-time customer feedback, influencer outreach et cetera. In addition, you are also helping your social media support team with insights about the target market.

How to Handle Bad Reviews?

Online reviews have become increasingly important for every business. Especially now that the millennials and Gen Z rely heavily on reviews and influencers. You may try every bit to deliver the best of services/products and yet someone is bound to be dissatisfied. We have talked a great deal about how businesses should listen to customers and improve their products or services. They should gauge the general sentiment, take a deeper look into the data, and take action. In spite of all these efforts, there is always a negative review or two. And as unfair as it may sound, even these biased reviews may do quite some damage to your business. So how to handle bad reviews?

Why are Reviews so Important?

A healthy online reputation is a must for any company nowadays. Statista says 46.1% of the consumers between the ages 18-60 research products online before making a purchase. And another survey reports that 93% of consumers make a purchase decision based on online reviews.

Every day millions of people are using the internet to share experiences, stories, and opinions. Getting involved and listening to what consumers have to say about your brand is essential because it affects your reputation. Learning to deal with negative reviews is a must because you can’t afford to avoid them. Addressing negative reviews head-on, as Southwest Airlines does, can put you in an advantageous position.

It is also important to note that sometimes people may not tag your brand while commenting about your product/service online. Social media monitoring helps you keep track of any such mention.

What to do when you See a Bad Review?

When it comes to negative reviews, two outcomes are possible. The service might have lacked a little hence the customer complained. You responded in time and took action. The customer is now happy and feels valued. Sometimes, you may encounter reviews that are out of line or not even real. These reviews might be biased. There are ways to deal with both kinds of reviews – honest ones and fake ones.

Here’s how to handle bad reviews:

Use monitoring tools

You can use google alerts or any other social media monitoring tool to get notified every time someone mentions your brand or your campaign hashtag. This is way faster than monitoring reviews and comments manually. And it also ensures you get notified for every mention whether your official handle has been tagged or not. Social listening tools like Auris also analyze the data for you to visualize the pain points and derive actionable insights.

Don’ts

Do not ignore them. Not responding to reviews, especially negative reviews is a no-no. If you do not respond, you are not only losing that customer but others too. Others who see this review might think the customer’s comments are true and you do not care enough to rectify the issue.
Never get into a fight. Aggressiveness is never the answer when you are dealing with a resentful customer.
Do not argue when the customer has a valid point. It is always wise to accept criticism and offer help. This only strengthens your brand image.

Do’s

If you find a customer’s complaint on an online portal. Respond to them publicly there before you discuss the matter with them in private. Other customers should see you responded to this complaint promptly when they view this review.
Having said that, it is also key that you discuss complex issues privately. Say a customer posts a negative comment on your Instagram post. Resolving this issue would require you to ask for their contact number. Do not do so in public because it is sensitive information. Mention you have sent them a private message and then take it forward.
Handling fake reviews can be tricky. When you see a comment which isn’t valid, do not get agitated. This can be the work of an unethical competitor or an online troll. You can mention publicly in their comment that you have no record of having had any transactions with them.

Listening to your customers is key. And pay close attention to what the data is saying. Track reviews and mentions over a period of time and check if a particular issue keeps coming up repeatedly. In such a case, you can take action to fix it. Constructive criticism is always welcome, you just need to tune in, and communicate a solution to your customers.

Integrate Social Listening Insights into Marketing Strategies

Social media marketing enthusiasts have been advocating the use of AI tools for social listening. You may have come across a brand that is already using this technology or maybe you have seen it listed among the upcoming trends to watch. Everyone speaks highly of how social listening insights help your marketing strategy. To begin with, it is quite impossible to monitor every tweet, and every social media comment manually. There are about 3 billion active social media users around the world. Listening to all of them along with your customer base becomes easier. But to make the most out of the social listening insights you need to incorporate the learning into your strategy.

Real-Time Feedback

At the outset, set up the social listening tool with your brand and industry keywords. This brings you all the things your customer has to say about your brand or industry. And this is one of the key steps to building a powerful brand. You can find both positive and negative reviews, comments, and mentions. Take action and extend help to everyone who has posted a negative review. Surf through the mentions that shed a positive light on your brand and use this to promote your brand further. These are real-time testimonials and they are the best marketing weapons you have.

You can also tune into what feedback your competitors are receiving, you could take inspiration from their positives. Remember their target audience is your target audience too. If their customers seem unhappy, and you can deliver better, reach out to the prospects. Social listening tools can help you monitor your competition.

Speak your Audience’s Mind with Social Listening Insights

72% of consumers say they would only engage with marketing messages that have been personalized. The first step towards personalization is knowing your audience’s mind and language. You try to comprehend their train of thought. What product are they looking for within the industry? What specifics are they looking for? Search for keyword phrases, set up a search for secondary keywords on your social listening platform. If you have any doubts about how this will work, use the insights, and create the content for one of your landing pages based on it. Run an A/B test and see for yourself.

Find Leads, Help your Business Development Department

When you are looking for news from your industry keywords, you will also find your target audience. Your potential customers are among this group. The process to reach out and get them transferred to the sales funnel is to begin engaging with them. Now do not spam their inbox with random sales pitches. Chances are they do not even know your brand and would hence block your account if you continue to spam.

Get involved with them over an online conversation. Engage in posts from leaders within the industry. Engage with the commentators on the post. After the initial conversation takes off, offer a valid suggestion or opinion, and send the prospect to a relevant page or your website. You may gain a follower/fan.

Track and Measure Campaign Success

Once you have all your information and marketing processes in place, you will probably start running social media campaigns. Most marketers do not measure the effectiveness of campaigns run by competitors or even their own. Why not? This tool makes it so much easier with built-in metrics trackers. All you need to do is set up the campaign hashtags for social listening. And have a set of goals in your mind. Was your campaign meant to increase awareness? Or was it meant to bring in leads? Once you know your goals, it is easier to look for the right metrics on the dashboard.

Research and Development

The first thing we said was that social media listening helps bring in customer feedback. This feedback could be directed to your brand specifically or towards the entire industry. If the customer feels the industry is lacking some provision in general you could step in and fill the gap. With social listening, you stay ahead of others in identifying these gaps. You can collect these insights and use them to feed your research and development team. You will see customers talk about the need for a particular feature in a product or service. Reach out to them and try to understand their pain point. When you introduce the feature in your own product, they are the first advocates for your product. Listening to a customer and implementing changes and improvements according to their needs makes them feel valued. This in turn buys you a favorable brand image and a loyal customer.

Social listening insights are only being fully utilized when you know all the different ways it can help your brand. Although this article mostly focuses on how social listening helps marketing strategies, this tool goes beyond. You can also tune in to listen to your employees. Your employees are a major asset too. Knowing what they feel about your brand can help you in a broader spectrum of situations.

Benefits of Social Listening before a Product Launch

Your marketing efforts are essentially futile if you do not know what your customers want from you. And if you don’t know what they need, your product/service will obviously fall short of expectations and suffer the consequences. This could prove very costly, especially when you are launching a new product. Fortunately for you, market research which supports and informs a product launch is one of the major benefits of social listening. Moreover, a product launch requires a lot more than primary research. And social listening tools are built to assist you through each process.

What makes Social Listening Beneficial for a Product Launch?

Say you go ahead and launch a product without properly reading into customer insights. And the product does not resonate well with the audience. You begin to wonder what went wrong because you made a top-notch product. Social listening to the chatter online would have told about the competitor who is selling the product at a lower price. Social listening isn’t a traditional method but it is an important step in studying your online audience.

When you listen, you start tracking brand mentions. This opens up avenues to analyze a lot more than you would otherwise do. Analyzing this data goes beyond tracking likes and comments passively. You can draw insights from this and build an impactful campaign for your product launch around it. Social listening is one of the most cost-effective ways to build a product launch campaign and make it a success.

The Components of a Successful Product Launch Campaign

We have established that there are benefits of social listening if done before a product launch. However, this tool does more than offer pre-launch support. Here are all the components that can be aided by a social media listening tool.

Procuring Compelling Insights

No campaign can run successfully without gathering public attention. And you can afford to do so by speaking the language of your audience. Also, you need to track your performance in order to know which part to improve and tweak. Social listening tells you about your existing SOV, the overall sentiment about your brand or industry. If you wish to build your campaign around your new product, say an air-purifier, the tool brings you every news related to the keyword. Study the data and proceed further to plan your campaign. Once your campaign is up and running, the dashboard of the tool helps you respond to real-time feedback while it keeps measuring the ROI.

Helps Build Content

When you are launching a product you have to take care of the content for product descriptions, social media captions, newsletters et cetera. Putting all this together in addition to the stress of other activities of designing the campaign can be really hectic. The intelligence gained from social listening can help your content team pull out tailored content. The data tells you about the interests of your target audience, their purchase behavior, the trends, and more.

Identifies Brand Advocates

For most brands, the easiest way to gain an initial set of fixed eyes and ears is to go for an influencer marketing campaign. If your company already has few products in the market, you can use social listening tools to see who engaged with your brand the most and identify your brand advocates by seeing who commented positively about your brand and track their influence scores.

If you are going for a first-time product launch, social listening tools help you find the best micro-influencers in your market. And if you want to know why you should opt to work with micro-influencers over celebrity influencers, here you go! With a social listening tool like Auris, you just have to set it up to listen to your preferred keywords. The tool brings you all relevant mentions and the profiles who commented and engaged with the topic. You can filter out the right influencer you want to work with based on their influence score. The tool’s algorithm calculates the influencer score taking into consideration metrics like engagement rate, frequency of posts, expertise level et cetera.

Social listening tools can provide a precise picture of your customer’s shifting preferences over time. This helps you not just during the product launch but also for research and development. And thee benefits of social listening do not stop at this. You can uncover the gaps in the market, launch new product lines to fill in these gaps, and expand your business using just this smart tool!

GenZ Buyer Personas and How to Market to them?

Millennials and Gen Z make the most influential consumer groups right now. For most brands, members of these groups fall into their target audience. Their combined purchasing power forecast is nearly $250 billion. Though both these generations of buyers depend heavily on online reviews to make purchasing decisions, Gen Z consumers are more difficult to reach. Honestly, marketers have been trying to understand the somewhat unpredictable behavior of GenZ consumers without much success. The thing is, with GenZ, you cannot make assumptions. You can learn more about them by listening to their online chatter, though. The data is abundant because the members of this group have been netizens from almost the time they left their cradles. The data shows potential GenZ buyer personas. Based on these, we have a few tips on how to strategize your marketing efforts.

Guide to GenZ Buyer Personas

For this generation, the internet and the digital world have been a part of life since the beginning of time. For them, information travels fast and wide. They are a generation who have also been raised in a more progressive society. All these impact their judgment, even as consumers of products/services and information.

If you were to set up a social listening tool for audience segmentation, you would see the different personas from the GenZ group. And looking at the characteristics, it makes sense because it relates to the socio-economic background.

Basing our study on the demographics, interests, and top trends highlighted by the word cloud, here are some insights we drew.

The Prominent Personas

There is a reason why we are discussing this when we should discuss marketing strategies. If you wish to get your message across you, have to align it to the core values of this generation. GenZ can mostly be divided into seven groups.

Digital Natives: They know how to filter information and access data they require from online sources. Extremely tech-savvy.
World Changers: GenZ members are growing up in a world that is at the brink of collapsing thanks to climate change. Members of this generation show a drive towards sustainability, clean energy, and other ways to save the planet.
Adventurers: GenZ members also show a strong desire to travel around the globe. Knowing about interests like these can help you develop a strong message for your brand and make it relatable for this target audience.
Entrepreneurs: With an explosion in population and limited job resources, members of the GenZ community are turning to the idea of being self-employed.
Gaming Fans: Being digital natives, most of these youngsters have built a career online. Some of them are even using gaming platforms like Twitch to earn a living.
YouTubers/Influencers: Like gamers on Twitch, there has also been a rise in the number of YouTubers/influencers from this generation.
More accepting of LGBTQ+: This generation has been raised in a more progressive society and is more accepting of the LGBTQ+ community than any others. More members of the GenZ group identify as LGBTQ+ than any others.
Fashion Forward: This generation is also fashion-forward. They are ready to try out new trends, sustainable clothing lines, et cetera. Study their choices well if you are a fashion brand trying to reach them.

How to Market to GenZ?

As confusing as they might seem, marketing to GenZ is not that difficult. Mainly because this generation talks on social media, all you have to do is pay attention to the conversations happening online. The members of this group are youthful, energetic, cause-driven, and business-minded. They are globally curious, wish to explore more, and believe in making the world a better place.

We looked at the word cloud for what’s trending in their age group. The top keywords seemed to be related to #Travel, #MarchForOurLives, #KPop, #Bitcoin, #Fitness, #Entrepreneurship. This youthful generation is ready to take control of their finances. Children as young as 17 years are already running successful youtube channels and earning millions.

Use these insights to build your marketing campaigns. Examples of brands already doing this are available in plenty. Imagine Dragons (An American Pop Rock Band) combined musical interests with other interests like politics and LGBTQ+ during Loveloud Tour, and it became a massive success.

Airbnb too has started with its cause marketing campaigns. They have associated their brand with various causes. Airbnb’s open house campaign became a success and the brand received 119000 mentions for natural disaster relief. If you listen to these conversations, you will be able to identify the scope of where you can fit in within the circle. After all, it is an entire generation you are targeting here. If you wish to cut through the noise, you will need to deliver your message their way. Hopefully, this guide to GenZ buyer personas can help you understand some of their unique interests and preferences.

What are Social Media Listening Centers?

Social listening has been gaining ground as an essential tool for online marketing. This trend is clearly visible in the fact that an increasing number of companies are tuning in to listen to online chatter every day. And this is for a reason. Active social listening has motivated businesses to perform better. Companies have started to use social media listening centers to monitor and analyze social data. This is how they monitor online reputation and derive actionable insights.

What is a Social Media Listening Center?

You must have heard of brand offices having sleek glass rooms with monitors displaying graphs and charts all over. Every other brand like Dell, Cisco, Tampa Bay, Gatorade seem to have these. These spaces are for the social media team. They monitor their brand’s performance online as the elite system pulls in data. The social media listening center helps an organization monitor real-time tweets, reviews, heat maps and shifts in sentiment. Every department works in tandem with the information which goes out of this room. Hence, it is ideal to concentrate all social listening activities to a dedicated area. This helps ramps up your crisis management strategy and allows you to react well in time.

Why is a Social Media Listening Center a Necessity Now?

The effectiveness of having a centrally communicative system providing actionable information is self-explanatory. However, setting up such a system would require resources. But here’s a business case to justify such an investment:

Everyone has access to data. When you have a centralized system for social listening and data analysis you can team up with other departments and change the way your company shares information.
When you have a dedicated team, you are listening to the chatter and deriving insights round the clock. Your decisions are no more based on guesswork but are backed by the insights that you got from your target audience.
Using a social listening tool makes data more accessible. You can grant access to easily comprehensible tips to all your employees. Data is presented in well-thought-out visualizations which are easier to understand.
When you are monitoring data round the clock, there are very low chances of being hit by an overnight crisis. Your social media team would be able to jump into action at the first sign of a negative mention.
Apart from these additional advantages, you get all the other benefits of using a social listening tool. This includes ease of doing market research, content marketing, influencer marketing et cetera.
A social listening command center goes a long way to help both your customers as well as your employees. As a result, you can build your business better. By listening to your customers, you get to know about their needs and expectations. When you deliver, you win their support. For an employee trying to figure out ways to improve business for the brand, these insights or pointers are of great help.

In Conclusion

Top brands and startups have all started diving deeper into social conversations. For some, it is to measure mentions, while others may use it to generate leads or manage crises. Whatever be the case, social listening has been on the rise and a social listening command center helps to make the process more streamlined.

5 Must-dos for Competitor Analysis

We all think we know our competitors, but do we really? And no, we don’t mean it philosophically. We mean the understanding of our market standing in comparison. This is primarily because the metrics have come to change a lot since Internet marketing. Traditional ways of measuring success against competitors do not fully work today. And you cannot afford to stick to them if you wish to get ahead in a market where competition is stiff. Thorough competitor analysis is key to building a successful business. Here are a few tips to help you out.

The Correct Way to do Competitive Analysis

Many companies still employ flawed strategies. Traditional methods may seem effective but they aren’t when you look around the online world. If you look at a competitor’s full-page ad and think you should do it too, you might be wrong. You may not even know much about their target market. Drawing conclusions without doing any foundational research work might cost you more money than you think.

We are living in the information age, which means you have access to a gold mine of data. Tap into that to actually study your competitor rather than just following them blindly. Where and how to start? Social media and digital content are your sources and social intelligence tools are your friends. Tapping into relevant data and drawing actionable insights has never been this easy. Read more about that here.

5 Must-Dos of Competitive Analysis

Heading into research work without any goals can cost you precious time. Here are some things to expect and do when you are starting your analysis.

Delve Deeper into the Reality

Every marketer tries to sugarcoat details and say great things about their brand on the internet. Everyone does that, perhaps even you sometimes. Who doesn’t like to portray a glossy image? Most see it as a calculated and strategic move. But you have to look beyond it and get the real story. Look at what people are saying about the brand. Taking into account the overall sentiment helps you gauge the real pulse of their success.

Monitor your Social Reach

Measuring your market share first before planning to expand the business. Telefonica studied 1000 millennials recently, in which 57% used search engines to find information about products and services. And 52% said they used social media as well. Consumers rely heavily on search engines and social media as their primary sources of information. You have to measure your performance against that of your competitors in order to see whether your reach and share of voice is capturing enough of the market share.

A Mistake to Avoid

When you use social intelligence tools you have a world of data and insights with you. You know a lot about your competitors. You know about their target market, their marketing strategy, the demographics, their SOV et cetera. When you do competitor analysis it is to get a better understanding of your position in the market. You may look at their strengths and weaknesses. If their campaigns are successful, study them in detail. Most marketers make the mistake of copying/stealing others’ content. This is nothing but plagiarism and is a strict no-no. This can bring your brand down in the eyes of your own audience and detract from your image.

Use the Right Tools

When you study your competitors, it isn’t espionage. It is only a smarter way to do market research. However, if you are smart enough to conduct competitor analysis meticulously, you are smart enough to realize how artificial intelligence tools can help you. You can either choose to stalk your competitor’s online campaigns and social media accounts manually and draw insights like the number of likes and comments. Or you can get into social media analytics to gain insight into their SEO strategy, their target market, overall brand image et cetera.

Tools like Auris help you keep close tabs on your competitors and do a comparative analysis. With advances in technology, competitor analysis has come to be the easiest way to build your brand’s marketing strategy.

3 Customer Experience Insights that will Keep You in Business

Over the years, a lot has changed in the business space. What hasn’t is the fact that consumers still want to be treated well and be heard. This forms the very foundation of the so-called customer experience. Understanding your customers’ wants and needs and acting upon the insights derived from their online communication makes your company future proof. And, in light of the recent events, companies have been confused about how to handle the situation during the pandemic. Social listening and consumer insights help you gauge the public mood and more. According to a study by Futurum Research, 57% of the participating companies reported that they needed to reconsider their business model in the wake of COVID-19. Tracing consumer experience insights can help you stay ahead of the competition in this scenario.

What are Consumer Insights?

It is a deeper understanding of how your audience is receiving information and how they are reacting to it? And more importantly, can we make assumptions about the market’s needs based on this understanding? If a customer isn’t satisfied with a product or service, they are most likely to specify the pain point. They either do this on social media (which can count in as a negative review for you) or they could tell this to you on your feedback form.

Whatever be the case, collecting good quality data can get challenging. People on social media may talk about your product or service and not mention your official handle. If you are sending out feedback requests, some may not take the time to fill up a form for you. Social media monitoring and listening are of real help here. It is how we trace the shifts in customer experience trends of late. Let’s take a look at the 4 customer experience-related insights that will help you stay in the business post- COVID-19.

1. Consumers are Ready to Pay for a Better Experience

If you think you have a loyal customer base who would never give up on you, think again. A PWC study reports that one in three customers (32%) say they will walk away from a brand they love after one bad experience. So unless you have been selling toilet paper in the USA during the pandemic, chances are your business will see a dip if you do not listen to your customers. And, customers expect a premium experience when they are paying for a service, especially people who have had a loss of income in recent days. According to the same study, 86% of consumers are willing to pay for superior consumer experience. And 49% of buyers say they made an impulse purchase based on a personalized experience.

2. Most Companies are Competing on the Basis of the Experience Provided

Gartner says more than two-thirds of marketers responsible for customer experience compete on the basis of customer experience. A consumer wants a proper implementation of the customer experience you are promising. Imagine yourself as a consumer of a product or a service. You try to inquire about a specific feature but get lost amongst vague answers from a chatbot or a myriad of other webpages. Customers are often looking for quick answers and not an automated response from a chatbot.

3. Providing What Matters the Most

Speed, convenience, help from your employees, and an easy & friendly servicing gateway are the most valued among customers, Each of these hits a level of 70% importance. The brands that prioritize to improve on these factors are taking the help of technology. AI and machine learning-based listening tools provide you with benefits by reading into online conversations. Drawing insights pertaining to these areas helps you formulate strategies to improve the functions mentioned above.

Delivering good customer experience has always been important and will become imperative in the post-COVID-19 world of business. People are willing to pay but they expect brands to go beyond the usual and deliver a friction-less, speedy transaction that can be guided by AI tools. And yet a certain human touch can be infused into all the automation so your customer gets to see the human side of your business too.