Businesses would have had a really smooth sailing if only customers discovered a product and simply bought it the next moment. But in the real world, the customer journey isn’t that simple. A customer’s journey includes discovering products, reading online reviews, asking questions et cetera. But while they’re taking these actions, you can follow their trail and learn about your customers and their concerns using social media intelligence.
Understand Your Customer’s Journey
What started out as a platform for social networking has now become a platform to discover new products and services. Facebook and others have evolved to become the chosen communication channels of brands. Boston Retail Partners claim that 69% of retailers view social media as an opportunity to enhance their customer experience.
There are numerous frameworks that explain how the concept of customer journey works. One of the best frameworks is the AIDA marketing format. Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. Of late this has been further enhanced into the AKIPA model – Awareness (I’ve heard about the brand), Knowledge (I know a few things about the brand), Interest (I want to know more), Preference (I’m willing to choose the brand over others), Action (I’m purchasing).
Now it’s essential that you understand your customer’s mindset and which stage they are at in the sales funnel. Knowing your customer’s mindset helps you gauge how they feel about your brand. This, in turn, helps you to appropriately adapt your content, campaigns, promotional strategies et cetera to your audience.
Social Media Intelligence and Customer Journey
When you are trying to understand a person, in this case, your customer, you need to put some data together to know about them. In order to understand them and their behavior, you will need to get to the nitty gritties and learn about their buying pattern, the demographics they belong to and it is possible to get all this only by constantly monitoring incoming data.
Social media platforms are a great source for such a constant flow of information. While this task of monitoring social media data may sound Herculean, the use of AI-powered social media intelligence tools makes it easier. This platform can almost magically let you integrate all your social media content of different business accounts in one place, to unremittingly stream useful information. The services include:
- Real-time social data which makes it easier for you to identify comment/mention alerts, buying signals and brand engagement on a daily basis.
- Customer feedback helps you zero in on the pain points and modify your products to meet popular demand, then strategize your messaging accordingly.
- It’s a platform that gets you real-time customer surveys. Additionally, the algorithm streams relevant data that helps you stay on top of recent developments within the industry and surroundings. Market research helps you direct your focus towards the needs.
Coming to the specific elements of the customer journey and how social media intelligence helps:
Monitoring Awareness
Social media listening is the go-to tool for this simple job. Type in your brand keywords and monitor the mentions. If you are doing this during an active campaign, make sure you mark the number of mentions received before the start of the campaign. Then monitor the number of mentions during the campaign and by the end of it, you’ll see the result in actual numbers.
If the count doesn’t increase, you’ll know you need to launch more campaigns, adapt your content to trending styles et cetera. Social listening helps you identify and analyze the trends too.
Knowledge
Do you see an increase in the number of mentions? Great, people are talking about you. But are they really understanding what you have to offer?
For this, you’ll have to look deeper. Initiate a sentiment analysis and look at the topic cloud. Delve deeper into the mentions. Sentiment analysis gives you a quick view of how the audience feels about your brand overall. Draw insights from the key topics mentioned during your campaigns. Run through the feedback and start rebuilding your campaigns with a story that focuses on your brand’s USPs.
Customer’s Interest
While you’re streaming real-time mentions, you’d also notice buying signals. Mentions like “I’d like to try…”, “I need more information about…”, “Which model would you recommend – X or Y?”
These are the typical indicators of a buyer’s intent. Social listening tools employ customized conversation monitoring to detect language that correlates with buying signals.
Once you’ve identified the leads, you can pursue them. Track their interests, buying habits and you would know how to pitch and also when to pitch.
Monitor their Action
Last but not the least, you always need to monitor results. If you were running this social media analysis for a marketing campaign or as an influencer campaign or just to see your buyer’s intent. You need to know how your brand is performing. As you keep monitoring, the platform builds a stronger base for analysis because it has access to more historical data.
Additionally, you can incorporate this data with your NPS and identify brand advocates and collaborate with them to develop more user-generated content and use it as a promotional tool.
Dealing with the customer journey is a complicated task and you have to stay focused on it. However, AI tools like Auris can make this tough task highly manageable as it is a complete data monitoring solution. You could sign up for a free demo anytime you wish.