How do I Check my Online Reputation?

A strong reputation has always been important for businesses and brands. With more people eager to shop online in recent times, online reputation has become vitally important for everyone, especially businesses. Good reviews on search results, social media, and business portals can attract potential customers. A good reputation helps a business to grow fast while anything short of it can affect a business in varying degrees, all negative.

That said, negative reviews are bound to happen. They could be from a disgruntled customer, from a rival, or even from an unsatisfied employee. It may or may not be your fault entirely, but it sure can drive away customers. That is why businesses need online reputation management or ORM. And with the right ORM tools, it is possible to monitor, analyze, and manage your brand’s online reputation.

How to Monitor Online Reputation with Social Listening?

To create and implement an ORM strategy, businesses first need to decide how they want to

monitor their reputation online. There are many ways to do so, with social listening being the most effective. And there’s a good reason for me to be saying this.

Social listening makes monitoring and analyzing the buzz around your business easier than any other research method. Marketers have been using the data obtained to create ORM strategies and to perform many more branding activities. It provides a one-stop solution for all your brand marketing needs.

This brings us to the discussion of how brands and businesses can use social listening to monitor their reputation online. Well, this can be done manually or with the use of social listening tools. Automated tools like Auris reduce the time and effort required to extract data relevant to your business from social chatter. Here’s how social listening can help:

Monitor Conversations in Real-Time

Listening to what people are talking about your brand is the first step of ORM. Social listening tools comb through millions of social media conversations to find out what people are talking about when it comes to your brand.

Launch New Products

Businesses must select a good time to launch products for their success. If the user sentiment is currently negative, your product will receive a poor response. With social listening tools, it is possible to gauge market sentiment and prepare for a launch accordingly.

Have Accurate Data for Analysis

It is impossible to judge how well a brand is doing without factoring in data from social media. With about 3.6 billion users in 2020, social media is a big marketplace. As such, brands have to monitor and analyze their reputation on social media before formulating any ORM strategy.

Set Alerts

It is not possible to monitor market sentiment 24*7 manually. If a disaster strikes when your marketing team is busy with other activities, it may blow out of proportion before you can act. That’s why brands can set up alerts for an unusual spike in the volume of @mentions, hashtags, etc. if using a social listening tool. With timely alerts, brands can jump into damage control before things go out of control.

Improve Brand Engagement

A negative review is, no doubt, bad. What’s worse is not responding to it. Often brands fail to

respond to a review because they aren’t aware of it. Social listening can help you here. As soon as you receive an alert, you can see what’s going on and respond suitably. This shows that you care about customer experience and are eager to make up for any of your faults. This will not only retain present customers but will also attract potential customers.

Analyze Competitor Sentiment

Analyzing user sentiment around your brand isn’t enough for ORM. Brands must also analyze how users feel about their competitors, likes and dislikes, strengths, and shortcomings, etc. This will allow marketers to create a strategy that benefits from the competitors’ pain points.

Any brand or business that wants to flourish must take care of its online reputation. ORM must be a part of your marketing strategy. And adopting a data-driven method isn’t a choice anymore, it’s essential. Automation like social listening provides accurate and useful data. Integrating this will only help to improve a brand’s reputation and in keeping ahead of competitors.

6 Reasons Why Online Reviews are So Important

Online reviews can build or break a business. Yet they are a valuable asset for every business. Smart entrepreneurs use online reviews to derive actionable insights for their business. Every business needs to know its customers and their expectations in order to build its brand further.

Importance of Online Reviews

If you’re still wondering about the “Why”, here’s some context.

82% of consumers read online reviews before purchasing a product.
Good reviews drive more revenue. Products with a 5-star rating sell 126x more than products with a 4-star rating.
SEO experts say good reviews are one of the top-ranking factors.

Reviews can be an extremely powerful tool for attracting new customers. They also help you better understand your target market, their wants, and what improvements you can make.

Let’s look into some of the great things that online reviews can do for your business:

1. Build Credibility

Customer reviews impact revenue generation to a considerable extent. The more reviews you have for your products and services, the more credible your business appears to the customers.

2. Contribute to your Digital Portfolio

Online reviews will help build your online portfolio so that you can get new leads. Essentially, online reviews act as a testimonial that you can portray to your future clients. This will help you to convince your clients that your products and services will be valuable to them. And it goes without saying online reviews help you to establish a strong brand identity.

3. Improve Online Visibility

According to research by Bright Local, around 82 percent of customers check out online reviews before investing in the products and services.

Hence, the more reviews your brand has, the more eyes you catch. This means better online visibility for you.

4. Boosts SEO

If you think that the use of keywords and optimized alt tags can get you the targeted traffic and make your website Google-friendly, you are wrong. According to a local search factors survey by Moz, review signals contribute 15 percent of Google local pack ranking factors.

Customer reviews have become an integral part of SEO. Customer feedback adds more keywords naturally. Thus your customers act as your content creators by adding keywords through their reviews, and this process improves the search engine rankings.

5. Increase Interaction

By responding to the reviews that clients leave for your business you can improve your website’s interaction. Responding to reviews also indicates that you genuinely care for your customers. This customer-centric approach can take your business to new heights.

6. Research and Development

Listening to your customers and interacting with them over reviews can help you gauge their needs. When you take these insights into consideration you have data for your R&D team. Say you are a company manufacturing and selling audio devices. Listening to reviews you understand that the ear-pieces in most headphones are malfunctioning. There is clearly room for improvement.

How to Find Useful and Relevant Reviews?

Hearing positive reviews is the dream of every entrepreneur. But, getting positive reviews may not be a cakewalk. You may need to revamp your business strategies if you want positive reviews for your business. And in order to revise your product, service or your business strategy you need to know the goal. Listening to real-time feedback can help you with that. How do you track these feedbacks?

Google Reviews

The simplest way to look for reviews for your brand is through Google. Perform a search for your brand name on Google and customer reviews show up.

This is a free service. However, there are limitations attached. Google records reviews by customers who actually come to your Google Business page and leave it there. You need a more 360-degree approach.

Social Listening

Social listening services like Auris can help you listen to every mention, every review your clients leave for you even if they don’t tag you officially.

With social listening, tracking reviews don’t stop there. The tool runs a complete analysis of the data acquired from different sources. It tells you about your pain points, audience sentiments, areas of improvement, your SOV, SOE, and much more.

When you track reviews, analyze and take action it goes to show you care for your customers. This can help you build a loyal customer base and more. The raving fan reviews on your web page can do great things for your business. And we hope you get positive user reviews for your business following the tips here.

3 Brands that Deliver the Best Customer Experience

The e-commerce space has become very competitive and most brands are struggling hard to find a foothold. Under such circumstances, it makes sense to focus on creating the best experience for customers. Wondering why? Well, a good experience can retain customers and easily get you new ones. A poor experience, on the other hand, can cause disengagement and scare away new ones. Offering the best customer experience can go a long way to ensure brand popularity and business growth. What’s more, people are ready to pay more for a better experience.

Top Brands that Offer the Best Customer Experience

Creating a unique and impressive customer experience isn’t new on the block. Yet it is an aspect unexplored by many. The majority of businesses and brands fail to understand the importance of creating an unparalleled experience for their customers. Yet it is the one thing that consumers want. Reports and studies have shown how consumers respond better to personalized experiences. But for those that want to know how some of the top brands in the world do it, here’s a rundown:

Apple

Everyone knows how Apple has retained a loyal customer base over the last many years. That’s despite the high price tag that Apple products are known for. How does Apple do that? Well, the high quality of the products is one reason. But that isn’t all that Apple offers. Apple has been connected to its loyal customer base. The company has been listening to their demands and responding well to their needs.

Take iPhones, for example. They are fast, sleek, and high-end. But what happens when it dies or malfunctions? Customers have to rush to the service center for help. No! That’s not the Apple way. With the Genius Bar on iPhone, experts at Apple solve problems remotely. So, expert help is always at hand, even if the customer is far away from a store.

Disney

Disney isn’t all about pretty princesses and fancy castles. It has built an empire out of its stories and characters and does the best to offer visitors an immersive experience. Disney has been making use of behavioral analytics to deliver on people’s demands. And although being in Disneyland may feel fantastical, a lot of effort and research goes behind it.

Disney has been studying their audience demography since the beginning in 1960. Based on these insights, their staff is thoroughly trained to be the character that they play. From demeanor to accent, from greeting visitors to being the characters – the young women learn it all. Why? Because Disney doesn’t compromise on the experience that visitors look for – a day with their favorite princess or character.

Disney has also responded well to the changing preferences of the newer generation who prefer to be online rather than visit the place physically. Disney has moved beyond the theme-park into the digital world with online games and more.

Netflix

We have spoken about Netflix in the past and why not! They may be new on the block, but they surely know how to prioritize their consumers. Netflix didn’t only change the way users consumed content, but they actively upped their customer experience play.

Netflix actively uses social listening and engages with its audience online to gauge their interests. This OTT platform has seen success even in niche markets. With the help of consumer insights, they were able to gauge what their audience likes and dislikes. In India for example, Netflix saw an opportunity to infiltrate the market with shows in vernacular and casting local actors.

In the past, Netflix has used consumer insights to come up with inventive solutions like “Netflix Socks”.

How Social Listening Can Improve Customer Experience?

It can’t be denied that most famous brands have created brand excellence through customer satisfaction. And there are many ways in which brands can enhance their customer experience. But to know where to start you need to start listening to your customer. In an attempt to do so, brands have been using social listening. As a brand, it is important to know what users are talking about in connection to your brand and competitors as well. This will allow you to understand what your shortcomings are or what you can do to improve the user experience. This will not only please your present customers but also attract new customers.

Customer experience is an important aspect in the current competitive market. Offering the best customer experience is imperative to gain customers and propel business growth. That’s why brands must base their strategies on creating an all-around immersive experience for their customers. This will keep them ahead of their competition and nurture a loyal customer base.

Insights from the Food and Beverage Industry

Every industry dealing with consumers directly is at the mercy of their changing tastes and perceptions. The food and beverage industry is one of them. This makes it essential for an F&B brand to spot emerging trends to survive in this industry. The best way to do it is to research well and stay in touch with what consumers want.

Why is Consumer Insights Needed?

Regardless of the industry, every brand needs to engage in market research before they begin offering their services. Moreover, consumer insights are key to gaining a deeper understanding of the market you’re serving.

Salesforce’s report found consumers respond better to a personalized shopping experience. And to engage potential consumers in a personalized experience you need to know their preferences. Modern social intelligence tools have been helping marketers get a more rounded picture of what consumers like and want.

Consumer Insights from the Food and Beverage Industry

Social listening helped us use a variety of methods to gather the most relevant insights from the food and beverage industry. Social intelligence tools like Auris let you gauge your market share, and keep track of your competitors in the run.

1. Social Media Trends

The food and beverage industry is probably one that sees the most changes in trends. We’ve seen many of them during the lockdown period itself. Dalgona coffee, pancake cereal, cauliflower pizza – all these have been a trend in just the last few months.

Pancake Cereal — Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/CBnBZ50pTiJ/?igshid=1r3j6vmp2b9f1

As per The Economist, most food-related brands are finding it difficult to keep up with the trends that tend to shift so fast. Social listening to food influencers on platforms like Instagram, Youtube, and Tik Tok can help marketers stay updated in real-time.

2. Monitoring Negative Reviews Quickly

One of the most popular things people talk about is food. You can see people talking about their dining experience, preparing a particular dish, food presentation and so much more online. Since food is such a hot topic, a negative review can also spread really fast. And this has happened in the past too.

Brands need tools that monitor such mentions and reviews in real-time and can alert the team before the matter blows out of all proportion.

3. Information about Allergens

UK’s Food Standard Authority published a report which says 23% of allergy sufferers will complain about it on social media.

So providing allergen information is becoming really big these days. If you’ve been tracking these conversations around the food-allergy space, you’ll be able to serve your consumers better.

4. Health Consciousness

A large part of your consumer base could possibly be in the health-conscious segment. Everyone, and particularly the modern generation, is getting more and more aware of sustainability with their own health and nature’s health too.

Go Vegan — Source: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/govegan/?hl=en

Listening to conversations around healthy food and vegan/vegetarian options shows how it is really a big trend right now. The rising awareness among people about GMOs, animal cruelty, the obesity epidemic, etc is all causing major shifts in the F&B industry.

Gathering insights from the food and beverage industry may sound like a huge task given that it’s a broad industry. However, social intelligence tools like Auris make the process way more simplified. Insights are gathered based on the most relevant keywords and audience segments. Once you have the most relevant insights at your fingertips, you just have to start strategizing right.

Is Marketing Automation Critical to your Brand’s Success?

People tend to link the term automation with major industries and big businesses. However, in the modern scenario, every business needs automation, small businesses more than anyone else. As a solo entrepreneur or startup founder with limited team members, you can’t expect to be doing everything manually. Moreover, building a business needs you to think strategically and plan for future growth. You can automate the data analysis and customer acquisition bit. Here’s why marketing automation is critical for your business and how to get started.

Why is Marketing Automation Critical for Your Brand’s Success?

Every marketer wishes to increase the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Automation is a smart way of doing it. Here’s how marketing automation can benefit your business operations.

1. Quality Leads

Any business needs a constant supply of quality leads. Everyone knows quality leads can only be attracted by targeting the right people. Targeting the right people requires studying consumer behavior, their interests, buying patterns, etc.

Marketing automation tools help you to gather such information and analyze data points like customer sentiment, buying patterns, etc.

2. Time Efficiency

It is quite evident from the previous bit that market research and implementation of the strategy is a time-consuming process. For a business owner time is money! Automating repetitive and mundane marketing activities like social media posting, media monitoring, etc can save a lot of time.

3. Improved ROI

Marketing automation tools like social listening have really made it easier for modern marketers to forge relationships. Listening to chatter online helps you gauge public sentiments, user behavior, and more. This allows you to reach out to the right people with personalized content and to nurture a strong bond.

4. Happy Customers

Marketing automation tools help you listen to online conversations around your brand keywords. This in turn helps you understand your customers. Armed with such information you are better able to serve them. Happy customers are your brand advocates. Positive word-of-mouth from them will bring in more business.

Top 3 Marketing Automation Tools for Any Business

Picking the right automation tool for your business is as important as any other part of the process. Here are the 3 most useful automation tools which allow you to streamline most of your marketing activities.

1. Social Listening

Market research and social media marketing are essential for any business trying to grow. But tracking information on social media is an impossible task given that over 69444 million posts are uploaded every minute on Instagram alone.

Against such a scenario, automation tools like Auris can help you take care of multiple marketing tasks like:

2. Video Marketing

Video marketing is one of the hottest marketing trends in recent years. Surprisingly, only a few brands are utilizing it to its full potential. Perhaps it is because of the tedious creation process. However, it doesn’t have to be difficult for your brand. Video marketing automation tools help you render a video within seconds.

Everything is automated from data-backed research to pre-made video templates. Simply put in your logo, content and click publish!

3. Sales, CRM, and Email Marketing

With advanced analytics come advanced sales and CRM tools. These tools help you reach out to leads via SMS marketing, email marketing, etc. The dashboard allows you to manage massive lists of leads and broadcast to them.

Marketing automation tools have become a savior for most businesses. Targeting, and segmenting the right kind of audience manually has always been a puzzle. The process doesn’t end there. Your leads still have to receive the right content, the right offer, and then convert. With first-hand statistics and data from social media, the process becomes much more efficient. If you don’t believe us, give Auris a try!

How to Improve your Marketing Strategy in 2021?

Businesses are getting back on their feet after facing very tough times in 2020. Everyone is eager to make up for the losses incurred due to the pandemic. But how? You could rejig your marketing strategy. To keep pace with changing times, businesses must adapt to new ways of marketing. Consumer behavior changed significantly during the pandemic and analysts believe that some of them are here to stay. So, it’s time you rewrote your marketing playbook.

5 Ways to Improve Marketing Strategy in 2021

Prioritize Social Media

Social media marketing was already gaining momentum before the pandemic hit. As an aftermath of the pandemic, SMM became significantly more important. Wondering why? The lack of physical interaction during lockdown forced people to go online. From medical advice to education, everything happened online or on social media platforms. What started as a necessity has now become a practice. With more people on social media, it would be silly to ignore social media marketing. Businesses need to up their SMM strategies for 2021 and beyond.

Update to Google’s Algorithms

According to Google, the next update to its algorithms could be here as early as the first half of 2021. This update will add a new metric named Core Web Vitals and will measure the user experience of every site. This will depend on factors like visual stability, responsiveness, and speed. A drop in the metric’s value will directly impact search results on Google. So, to maintain SERP rankings, further optimization based on Core Web Vitals will be necessary.

Offer Personalized Experience

Going forward, businesses must focus on creating customized experiences for their customers. Relying solely on mass marketing techniques alone will not yield satisfactory results. People are keener to interact with brands that are ready to personalize the customer experience. That can be as simple as sending a custom push notification or discount offer to something as powerful as sending a birthday wish.

As such, businesses should develop marketing strategies that can target each user individually and not the entire audience base. Social media listening can help marketers analyze what their audience members like or dislike. These insights can come in handy while planning personalized content.

Review Analytics

How you formulate your marketing strategy depends to a great extent on the results of your past campaigns. Unless your goals have changed, the results could be a point of reference for your future strategy. If results from the strategy yielded promising results, you can continue using the same for your business.

However, if results are poor or not impressive, you may have to turn to analytics to help determine the root cause. You can easily obtain these from platforms such as Google (Google Analytics), Facebook (Facebook Insights), etc. Businesses can also use social listening tools like Auris for an in-depth analysis of what went wrong.

Use Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization may not be new but it has been evolving. It’s no longer about backlinks and content marketing. There is more to it now. Mobile-friendly designs, long, informative posts, local SEO, brand SERP optimization, and more contribute to SEO. To keep pace with the changing scenario, adopting new techniques and strategies is vital.

Every business must determine its goals before formulating a marketing strategy in 2021. No one formula will serve all. What clicks for your competitor may not work well for you. So, analyze your values, targets, strengths, and most importantly, your customers. Create a strategy that will work well with all parameters.

Do’s and Don’ts of Online Reputation Management

Online reputation building is important for any business, even if it primarily operates offline. It gives business credibility and makes potential customers trust you. But the online landscape is such that a smooth ride isn’t always possible. Not all feedback or reviews are positive. It is quite natural to have some negative reviews along with positive reviews even if you do your best. However, negative feedback can make people doubtful about your brand and drive away business. That’s where online reputation management comes in.

Why Is Online Reputation Management Important?

Many businesses do not comprehend the importance of reputation management until it’s too late. Online reputation management is not for covering up negative comments or feedback. It is a continuous process that stays focused on maintaining and improving the positive impression that people have about your brand. That’s why reputation management campaigns should be a part of your online marketing plan from the start.

With the right strategy and approach, reputation management can do more than managing PR disasters. It can help you improve your products and services based on negative feedback. And when you listen to your customer’s inputs, you make them feel valued hence fostering a strong relationship.

Do’s and Don’ts of OnlineReputation Management

All brands and businesses receive negative feedback from unsatisfied customers but that’s not the end of the world. Here’s a list of things that you could do or not do when you receive negative feedback:

Do’s

Claim and Monitor Your Business Profiles

Make sure that you own your business profiles on websites like Google Business, Yelp, Yellowpages, TripAdvisor, and others. Add accurate business information to these profiles and actively track the reviews posted because reviews can affect your business. As soon as you receive a complaint, work sincerely to resolve it. Make sure that you work on the pitfalls.

Use Active Social Listening

There is no denying the importance of social media. People trust the information on social media much more today than ever before. So, it is important to track all negative comments or feedback on various platforms. Businesses can use social listening tools for this or manually track @mentions, comments, hashtags, etc.

Be Professional

Be professional while replying to reviews. Businesses must try to offer personalized replies to all reviews, negative or positive. Generic responses can hurt reviewers and they may never look back. But a genuine reply with the assurance that you will look into the matter can make up for some of the lost trust.

Make An Offer

An easy way to deal with an unhappy customer is to make an alluring offer. Present them with a gift code or discount code as an acknowledgment of your fault. Chances are, you may win the customer back. Even if it doesn’t happen, you may impress other users as it shows you take after-sale service seriously.

Don’ts

Retaliate

Unless the review is fake or made out of malice, do not retaliate. Negating your customer can make you lose potential customers. What you should do instead is respond to their feedback. Enquire what went wrong or why they are dissatisfied. If the reason is already mentioned, say that you will look into it and take care of the problem.

Panic

One negative review will not ruin your future. Don’t leave everything else and jump into damage control without planning. Hasty decisions will do no good. It is important to judge the situation and create a strategy for damage control. Taking a measured step is important to prevent backlash and keep the situation under control.

Be Passive

Do not leave negative reviews be. Sometimes customers might mention your brand name without tagging you. Social listening tools will alert you to any negative mentions. Try to follow up as soon as possible. Leaving out any negative mentions/reviews can make you lose business.

As a business owner, it’s natural to fear negative reviews or comments. However, it shouldn’t blow out of proportion and hamper your brand’s image. That’s why pro-active online reputation management is better than a reactive approach. Social media listening can help you judge your audience’s sentiment and formulate a suitable response.

Strategies to Build a Strong Brand Identity

A strong brand identity is crucial if you want to elbow out the competition. Focussing on other business efforts without strengthening your brand identity would be like filling fuel in your car when there’s a hole in the fuel tank. Having a strong brand identity helps you increase your credibility to such an extent that you can sell sand to an Arab.

Why is a Strong Brand Identity Important?

Your brand identity communicates your business personality to your clients. Without developing a consistent personality both online and offline; you can never be relevant to your target audience. A strong brand identity helps you win loyal clients and encourages better conversations with your leads.

It further helps you to:

Shape your client’s perception of you.
Create a differentiation between you and your competitors for your audience.
Influences your audiences’ purchase decisions positively.

This is why smart marketers put some strategies in place to achieve this with ease. Let’s take a look at them.

What are the Strategies to Build a Strong Brand Identity?

Here are some tools and techniques to help you get started:

Influencer Marketing

If your brand has been in the market for some time now, you’ll have a few followers who love your product/brand. These are your brand advocates. You can engage with them, make them feel valued, and thereby encourage them to spread positive word-of-mouth.

Another way of spreading awareness and building a brand image is by partnering with social media influencers. Influencers usually have droves of loyal followers, and they can advertise your products and services to their followers.

If you are wondering how to choose the right influencer for your business, you can use social media listening tools. Social media listening tools come with a social influencer feature. This feature allows you to find influencers based on their influence score. It makes it easier for you to find the right fit.

Some influencers will lend their names to the brand for a long duration; this will involve the brand and influencer growing together. According to recent research from Forbes, influencer marketing helped the company to reap more profits in 2020.

Customer engagement through trending topics and regular posts

Posting witty content on social media around trending topics can quickly catch your leads’ attention. It would help if you were also more frequent with your blog posts to keep your clients engaged.

But, researching trending topics can be a tedious manual experience. You can take the help of social media listening to search for trending topics. Use social media listening to search for what your clients would be interested in. Use these insights to curate content that easily cuts through the noise. The more your content is visible, the more followers/converts you’ll receive for your page/website.

Utilize Hashtags

Hashtags can be an effective way to boost sales as well. Dunkin’ Donuts used #mydunkin to boost their sales considerably. Hashtags act as a search engine for social media sites. Once you familiarize yourself with one trending hashtag from your industry, you can track it to discover more hashtags and trending content around it.

Promote your Profile

Go beyond social media to promote your profile. You can go for print advertising, broadcast advertising or direct mail advertising to promote your products and services. You can utilize social media listening techniques to find out what your customers say about you and use the information to boost your profile beyond social media.

Consistent Monitoring

Are you working your fingers to the bone building yourself a strong brand identity? Your hard work will not be fruitful unless you monitor your progress daily. Constant monitoring is essential for achieving success. If you follow the above strategies, building a strong brand identity will not be an impossible dream.

Monitoring your campaigns, industry keywords and brand mentions will tell you a lot about your potential customers. It will help you assess the effectiveness of your strategies and what customers expect from your brand.

All brands are businesses but not all businesses are brands. Building and maintaining customer trust is key to reaching that stage where your business is a brand! Social listening tools help you understand your audience and bond with them better.

How Clarins used Social Listening for Increased Customer Engagement?

The beauty industry is one that relies heavily on customer input. The huge competition within the industry also shapes the dynamics of the commercial space. Marketers today have been using social media, influencers, trends to outshine their competition. And one of the key strategies to gain a larger market share is to build a larger customer base, Here’s how cosmetic brand Clarins used social listening to improve their market research and subsequently increased customer engagement.

What Challenges did Clarins Face During the Pandemic?

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, affected physical stores the most. Many cities and countries across the world imposed lockdowns. This meant the closure of all physical stores, except for essential items. This affected the popular cosmetic brand, Clarins. Unlike other popular brands, Clarins had little online presence. Clarins is popular for its bespoke in-store services.

But when physical stores closed, Clarins faced a debacle. There was no chance of any one-to-one sessions that made Clarins popular. With no in-store activities, revenue streams dried up. Clarins had no way to reach its customers. This meant reinventing the entire marketing strategy at Clarins.

How did Clarins use Social Listening for Increased Customer Engagement?

Clarins faced a problem as they tried to take everything online. They needed a platform that would allow them to offer the same experience to their customers. Social media was their first choice. Clarins took to a social media listening platform. They used it to change the way they interacted with customers.

Clarins used social listening to collect and analyze data. This data became important for their brand’s marketing strategies. Results revealed that:

People were more interested in skincare than makeup. As they stayed indoors, makeup products lost importance.
Demand for skincare products increased. People had more time to take care of themselves.

Clarins used this insight to change its user-interaction messages. They shifted their focus to skincare products. They used social media campaigns to promote their new skincare-focused products.

How did Clarins use the Insights?

Clarins found that the customers loved their in-store client servicing. But these had to be taken online. Consumer insights also helped them understand the demography and what kind of content works best. Clarins then changed the way they interacted with customers.

They wanted customers to have the same experience that they had at the stores. But this time around, it would be online. They sought help from Rebecca Jones, beauty coach at Clarins. She started sharing skincare rituals online via Instagram Stories.

Customers liked these DIY skincare rituals from the start. They were eager to replicate the same at home. This is where consultations from Clarins came in. It was impossible to offer sessions at physical stores. So, Clarins decided to take sessions online. They started their Clarins & Me service. This video consultation service was a success from the start.

The insights helped them devise their new social marketing strategy. Their new aim was to drive more traffic to their official website. This worked quite well as e-commerce sales increased in the weeks that followed.

Changing marketing strategy amidst the pandemic was pretty tough. But that didn’t stop Clarins from reinventing itself. They accepted the change and adapted well to the online marketing landscape. And with social listening, the data helped them change the way they communicated with customers online. Not only that, they increased customer engagement with one-to-one online sessions. That’s why, despite the closure of physical stores, Clarins generated good revenue.

Social Listening – An Effective Alternative to Focus Groups

In today’s day and age, there’s hardly anyone not on social media. Statistics show that social media platforms are gaining users at an average rate of 7.2% per year. With such massive growth, social media has become an important source of information and insights. Brands and marketers are extensively using social media intelligence technology to dig into the deeper industry insights. Among the many methods used by brands for acquiring and analyzing data, social listening has the top position. Thanks to the reliable and quick results, social listening now offers an effective alternative to focus groups.

What are the Traditionally used Research Methods?

Business research has always been important. Whether it’s about a new product launch or user feedback, research plays an important role. Market research has come a long way from what it used to be. However, some traditional methods are still in practice.

1. Surveys

User surveys have always been a useful technique. Whether in the pre-digital era or after it, surveys haven’t lost their importance. The medium has just changed. Instead of using paper forms, surveys are now served online, sent over email, or even via phone calls.

Surveys can have any number of questions depending on the extent of information that a business requires. With the right questions, surveys can offer a truckload of information to be processed.

2. Focus groups

The next most commonly used market research technique is the creation of focus groups. As the name suggests, these groups include a few people (usually 6-10) and a moderator who leads the group. Marketers choose participants depending on factors like demographics, purchase history, and others.

The moderation asks the participants a number of questions. These can be about a particular brand, their product(s)/service(s), their positive and negative aspects, and so on. These discussions provide details about user experience, satisfaction, needs, and more.

3. Interviews

User interviews have always been useful in market research. Marketers contact users over the phone, email, or any other platform. Then, they interview them about their experience with a product or service or the brand itself. One-to-one interviews are quite personal and promise to offer insights directly from the customer. However, this is neither cost-effective nor time-efficient.

4. Public data

Brands and marketers can use public data that is available. This is referred to as secondary research. Data is available from

i.Government databases like Data.gov, UNICEF, etc. set up for public consumption

ii. Research papers and results published by other institutions or groups like Pew Research Center, NHS Digital, FDA, IMF, etc.

iii. Business directories like Glassdoor, Yelp, etc.

iv. Marketing sources like Graph API, Google Trends, etc.

v. Miscellaneous sources like Kaggle

This data, however, may not be available the way you want it but is free.

How Social Listening is a Better Focus Group Alternative?

Market research has changed with social listening. Results from social listening data surpass those obtained with traditional digital market research techniques. Let’s take a quick look at how social listening fares against other methods of data collection and analysis:

Better Research

Social listening paves the way for better market research. There is no need to restrict the number of participants like in focus groups. Social listening tools can track, collect, and analyze data from thousands of people with ease. More participants mean more data accuracy and thus, better results. Also, social listening tools offer unbiased data which is useful for better brand management.

Real-Time Data

Social listening keeps you updated on everything that’s happening on social media. You can collect a variety of user-related data from social listening tools. This helps in making quick changes to brand messaging, curbing negative sentiments, etc.

Social listening ranks higher as it brings in unbiased information when compared to traditional methods. This is because the interviewee may become uncomfortable in a live focus group or an interview. Social listening helps to track genuine feedback using what users are expressing online without having to directly question them or influencing them in any manner.

ROI Measurement

Social listening can help to measure the success of your marketing campaigns. Coupled with other techniques, social listening offers businesses a better estimation of their ROI. This is very important when we want to understand the success of any marketing campaign and create new ones.

For many businesses, social listening has proved to be the best alternative to focus groups and other research methods. With much fewer resources, brands have successfully edged past competitors with the right use of social listening.