Social Listening for Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty is the emotional connect that is built when a customer can really trust a brand. Business expansion and acquiring new customers are worthy goals but can’t come at the cost of losing one’s existing customer base. A loyal customer-base can actually help you to acquire new leads. Statista says 65% of customers demonstrate brand loyalty by purchasing more products/services. 61% of such customers will also recommend their brand and its products to friends and family.

The long and short of it is that the key to success lies in converting your existing customers into brand loyalists before you go looking for more of them.

What makes Your Customers Buy from You again?

The answer to this sounds very simple. If they love your brand, they would return as customers. However, as simple as it may sound, being everyone’s preferred brand is not so easy. The one thing that can make it easy is your ability to know what your customers think of and expect from your brand. Reaching out to resolve their issues with any of your products and customizing your offerings to their specific needs will go a long way to make them love your brand. After all, everyone loves being taken care of. Studies show that around 77% of customers will stick to one brand or become brand loyalists if they feel connected.

One of the most economical and easy ways to get to know your customers is to listen to the comments, reviews, and chatter they post online and on review boards. Social listening helps you do this very well and provides you first-hand information right from the customer in real-time.

How does Brand Loyalty come into Play?

The key is to connect with your customers. If your current set of customers are happy, they will purchase more, keep revisiting and spread the good word for you. It is every bit a win-win situation for you.

The Art of being Associated

It is always a relief to see a familiar face in a strange crowd. On the same lines, put your customers at ease by making them feel how much you care about their interests and needs. If they express a need to which you can’t cater immediately, use their contact details and let them know when you are able to do so. It is possible today to know what your customers think of your brand or what their needs are in general. Use a social listening tool to begin monitoring the comments online which mention your brand. You can dive deeper to analyze them, once you get more comfortable with the tool.

Create the Experience

Sometimes it is possible for just the simpler things to make people remember you. These can be the courteous behavior of your staff members, the ambiance of your restaurant business, or the overall experience created by your product/service. A brilliant example of this is Disneyland. The Walt Disney Company came up with this fantastic concept of converting the intangibles into tangibles and making it possible to monetize them. Their animated films and television shows can now be seen and realized in live-action shows, making the audience remember the whole experience. The awe created in the minds of your audience makes them want to associate with your brand. And this can be achieved using well-planned marketing campaigns.

What’s more? Social listening can help you gauge the interests of your target audience and cater to them better. Sometimes the feedback your customers have can help you tweak things within the department. For instance, a lack of post-sales customer support can affect the overall experience of your customer. Listening to the reviews, you can reset the processes of your post-sales support team or create one.

Value Proposition and Quality Assurance

It has been famously said that the modern customer does not simply buy a product, they buy solutions to their problems. If your product fails to offer a true value proposition or prove its worth, chances are that it will not sell. Brand loyalty demands a strong value proposition and quality products ably enhanced by a support team. These essentials can be honed to perfection using social listening. Social media comments and reviews practically present an open book of research data to you and social listening tools filter out the most relevant ones for your immediate attention. Furthermore, the analysis presented by these tools helps you know more about what interests your audience, what causes negative chatter and so on.

Gaining customers and turning them brand loyal is most certainly not the easiest of tasks. However, with the data-driven approach of a social listening tool, the results can be realized sooner, and the quality of the offering is improved.

Why should the Automotive Industry track Social Data?

When we talk of social media and businesses, the automotive industry is also a keen participant online. In fact, some auto brands are leading the pack on social media, which is a top destination for people who want to discuss automobiles. In this blog post, we deal with all of the available data, how social listening can help, and how the automotive industry has been performing on social media as a whole.

What does Social Data say about the Automotive Industry?

Automobile companies have embraced the digital world and some of the leading brands have set quite an example in running successful social media campaigns. Data predicts that by 2020, millennials (the fastest-growing generation of car buyers) will make up more than 40% of the US automotive market. With over 3.5 billion active social media users of which 90% are millennials, you can understand the importance of effective social media marketing.

Automotive industry’s followers discuss every little detail in a critical way online. The rich source of social data lies in their discussion of which brand is the most innovative, whose designs offer luxury, who is engaging with fans and followers the most et cetera. Everything is noticed and talked about online. Listening into the conversations gives you an insider’s view of how people perceive your brand. The benefits do not stop at that. One of the major pluses for the automotive industry is that social listening and monitoring social data can help them to identify the gaps they could fill. A great example of this would be how Honda expanded its motorcycle market to the US using the insights derived from their market research.

How are Auto Brands Performing on Social Media?

Over 50% of millennials fear they are missing out when their friends share posts of their new cars on social media. This only goes to show how involved this generation is. Listening to the chatter can also help car brands to devise the components of their management strategy in the following areas:

Handling Customer Complaints
Lead Generation
Identifying Market Opportunities
Competitor Analysis
Consumer Insights for Strategic Decision Making

Looking at the performance of some of the top brands on Facebook, we see that Skoda did quite an impressive job with its 2017 campaign which gathered much user-generated content for their flagship model – the Superb. Their engagement count for this campaign managed to eclipse the efforts of giant brands like Ferrari and Mercedes Benz.

Besides Skoda, the other brands performing well on Facebook are Mercedes Benz, Ferrari, Maserati, Chrysler, Audi, Tesla, and BMW.

If you are in the automotive industry, you know how driven this industry is – both literally and metaphorically. If you do not engage with your customers, your business would not thrive for long. The very first step to understanding customer preferences in a given automobile’s features requires you to listen to them. Knowing the demographics and the preferences based on gender, age group et cetera will help you decide the target audience you need to follow.

A very interesting study showed that over 44% of females discussed Mini Cooper over social media while for all the other cars and brands together, the number of female social media contributors was below 39%. Can we assume that car size matters and that Mini is more popular with the ladies because of that?

So how can Social Listening benefit the Automotive Industry?

The numbers clearly tell you that social media marketing is the most obvious way to go forward if you are trying to build your brand as number 1. Yet, social media marketing is not simple. The data generated is huge and zeroing down on to the people who are talking about you can be daunting if you are trying to do it manually. Thanks to modern times, technology and AI bring you social listening tools which make social media listening and analytics easily accessible.

Monitor Complaints and Reviews Diligently

The very first thing that will establish your brand as trustworthy is when you listen to your customers, their problems and respond to them quickly or resolve their issues.

It is easy to overlook comments when your social handle is burdened with thousands of mentions every minute. A social listening tool helps you divide and conquer. The tool segregates positive and negative comments; highlights the comments which need your immediate attention, like that of the KIA Motors customer above which needed a quick resolution, in real-time. It can also present you with an analytical map of your whole online marketing campaign.

Lead Generation

Finding leads gets simpler when you can customize search results to include a specific keyword or particular locations on a social listening tool.

In-built search facilities in the tool allow you to find leads by listening for specific keywords. For example, a person looking to buy a car would look for recommendations online. Setting up a specific search for this keyword phrase helps you find prospects. Next step would be to engage with them and social listening helps your sales team with that too. Your sales team can listen for the trending topics, the interests these prospects have and pitch the product in such a way that it sounds more personalized and attuned to their interests.

Competitor Analysis and Identifying Market Opportunities

The major advantage of social listening for the automotive industry is that social listening platforms serve as a great hunting ground for new market opportunities. And there are several ways to do this.

While listening for the needs of your customers you might identify a gap in coveted product features. Fulfilling these needs that no other company has delved into can set your brand as an exclusive one. Listening for competitors can also help you acquire market share. When the customers aren’t happy with your competitors, you would know about their specific grievances. Make sure you swoop in to pitch the model from your line which best suits their requirements.

The comment here by these customers clearly show how they have been put off by Tesla’s quality-control issues. And these weren’t the only people complaining about the paint issues. Social listening tools track down all such comments within 5 seconds. Workflow and business decisions become quick and efficient with a social listening platform at your fingertips.

Customer Insights for Strategic Business Decisions

Such instances can help with your core management and strategic decisions. Your tactical team can make crucial business decisions like whether or where to expand the business, what features to include or exclude, how well your online presence is growing and the like. Social listening also helps in zeroing down on problems your company might be facing at the operational or branch level.

Social listening tools help you track comments and know the exact location they are originating from and the analysis will give you an exact picture of the location where there’s most chatter, analyze its tone whether it is negative or positive, and provide a detailed insight into the reasons behind the negative chatter. If your showroom in Dallas has rude salespeople, analyzing online comments tell you of this. Social listening makes it easy for you to learn about employee attitude and customer experiences together, in real-time.

In conclusion, we trust we have presented a wholesome view of how you can set up a social listening tool to benefit your business and prosper in the competitive environment of the automotive industry. And yet, with advances in AI, new possibilities are endless. Till then, let’s enjoy a part of what is possible to achieve using social data.

Busting the Common Myths About Social Media Intelligence

Being a netizen in the 21st century, you’d be surprised to know about the myths marketers believe in, about social media and its related tools. Some of these myths have the potential to cause damage to your company. Thereby, we chose to listen to some general comments to figure out the most common myths and to address the ones about social media intelligence and its allied services.

Social Intelligence and its Metrics are Not Important

It is surprising to see that companies really do believe that investing in social media marketing is a waste of resources. And even the ones that reluctantly engage with social media marketing or at least make an attempt, are not really sincere in doing so.

If you believe that social media marketing and the metrics related to it do not matter, you are gravely mistaken. Take a look at these facts for a moment:

71% of customers say they would recommend a brand further if they have a positive social media service interaction.
90% of social media users use it to interact with brands and companies.
Link clicks account for 92% of Twitter interactions.

Impressions, engagement rate, click-through rate might not seem of much importance at a glance, but not paying heed to what your audience expects puts your business in grave danger. In fact, surveys show customers being unhappy with the kind of content companies provide them, which does not even match their interests.

Monitoring social media metrics is an essential strategy to make sure your customer satisfaction rate is high, your business is growing and gaining attention – and not losing any!

Social Media Intelligence doesn’t Increase Sales

This is one of the greatest living myths related to social intelligence out there. Read on to see why you need to change your thinking if you are also prone to believing this, read along.

The fact is that Customers are found to be more attracted to products viewed on social media, be it an ad or even a featured review from a blogger.

To think that social intelligence is not important is highly erroneous. Social media is the number one platform to spread awareness and receive business insights. 90% of millennials interact with or mention a brand online. Social listening helps you gain business intelligence based on the data gathered. If customers are unhappy with the fabric of the upholstery your brand is selling they would tweet or comment about it. Social media intelligence gathers this data and analyses it to give you real-time feedback. Bad reviews make you lose customers and social intelligence helps you know the cause for bad reviews before you have to shut down your brand.

Besides, every marketing strategy needs to be backed by well-researched facts. Consumer-centric decisions cannot be made unless you know their opinion. Social intelligence is the opinion miner.

Not All Social Media Platforms are Important

Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Twitter are the most common names when marketers are asked about social media platforms. And understandably so, these are the platforms which top the lists when it comes to the most number of active users. However, if your brand focuses on building your brand on only one or two platforms, you are not diversifying enough.

Also, the choice of the social media platform for your online marketing campaign should complement your business. Fashion and merchandise businesses can look forward to Instagram marketing. Pinterest is another interesting choice for businesses. Pinterest might not have a mammoth number of active users, yet it has people from the right demographics. In the U.S., half of their millennials use Pinterest. Over 65% of American women within the age group of 25 and 54 use Pinterest extensively. This makes it necessary for any brand looking to target women to have a strong online presence on Pinterest.

Though the concept of social media marketing and monitoring social media intelligence has been spreading like a wildfire across the globe, these commons myths set companies back from realizing the full potential of this tool.

Did this International Hotel Chain fail in Real-time Reputation Management?

Most of us, saddled with the burden of grocery shopping, roam the aisles of the supermarket looking for discounts and offers. We mourn the rising prices of onions and bananas and blame the government and global warming. Yet, we don’t often question any hospitality business for charging us exorbitantly for squeezing a lemon into cooled soda water.

On a dull, normal day at JW Marriott in Chandigarh, their celebrity guest actor Rahul Bose threw a videoed fit on Twitter, over the price of Marriott’s bananas. And like all good fits and tantrums, it went viral on Twitter, attracting a lot of interest and many comments and reactions.

You have to see this to believe it. Who said fruit wasn’t harmful to your existence? Ask the wonderful folks at @JWMarriottChd #goingbananas #howtogetfitandgobroke #potassiumforkings

4:46 PM – Jul 22, 2019

As with every issue, the responses from Twitterati were mixed, throwing in an abnormal amount of advice, sympathy, ridicule and even complaining about their unhappiness. Some turned against the actor and lamented over what they paid for a movie of Rahul Bose in a multiplex (implying that they didn’t like and would have liked to get a refund on it) as well as the price of popcorn in theatres! Some even told him to grin and bear it because that’s what 5-star hotels do.

For the 5-star hotel, serving two bananas priced at Rs.442.50 plus GST must have been a routine affair. After all, 5-Star hotels are text-book standard examples of conspicuous consumption at its best (or, worst) depending upon which side of the fence you are on!

Some blamed both parties, in a way.

Yet others found the whole issue funny and worthy of a good laugh.

It must be noted that many were completely and specifically upset with the JW Marriott in Chandigarh and mentioned their own personal experiences, sharing pictures of their own and supporting the actor’s stand. Some wanted other, better hospitality chains to be patronized instead of JW Marriott. Some promoted the idea of staying with national hospitality chains and shunning International hotels like Marriott, bringing in the low wages they paid to their staff into the equation.

In case the allusion escaped you, Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code is about punishing cheating and dishonesty!

Special mention went to the ‘5-Star attitude’ which makes you feel unwanted or cheap, the minute you bring up the price of anything!

Some questioned the charging of GST on the bill, rather vehemently.

Some worried about how the farmer who actually grew the banana didn’t get a fair share of the price.

The storm also tried to swamp Starbucks in its wake.

Some others saw a business opportunity!

Even as the storm raged, JW Marriott Chandigarh was conspicuously silent. The hotel in question has an exclusive page on Twitter but does not seem to have anything to offer or say on this whole issue. For all we know, they may not even be aware that Rahul Bose has sparked interest not only in the Twitterati but also from some TV channels which have picked up the story and are running with it, as we speak. Only time can tell what its effects on their business would be. But there’s no doubt that being oblivious to social media comments is definitely not going to help any business, anywhere in the world.

As we have said time and again, organizations big and small need to have systems which make them aware of the mentions on social media, in real-time. Nothing can ensure reputation management better than employing a social listening tool!

What can Companies learn from their Net Promoter Score?

In our blog posts, we have often talked about online brand reputation management and the importance of it. Here, we discuss something closely linked to ORM. Net Promoter Score – a measure to gauge your brand’s customer relationships. NPS detects how well the customer feels connected to you, how they rate you. It’s simply a mark of how often they actually recommend you to others and so on.

Net Promoter Score or Your Customers’ Definition of Your Brand’s Health?

Net promoter score is essentially a customer loyalty metric. NPS is a metric easily measured on the basis of social data, customer feedback and opinions voiced online and calculated to decide your actual NPS. When you ask your customers a simple question “How likely are you to recommend our brand to family and friends?”, your customers would respond with a score in between 0 to 10. People who rate 9-10 are the promoters, who support your brand, are your loyal customers and would probably spread positive referrals. Respondents who score you from within 0-6 are detractors and these are the customers unhappy with you, they do not create any value for your company. However, the goal of tracking your NPS score and boosting the process with social listening for feedback may help you salvage the situation.

Customer Experience

Multinational companies use net promoter score most commonly, to know more about the experience of their customers. An example; a customer rates brand XYZ at 4 on the NPS scale. The form would prompt the customer to explain why they rated XYZ poorly. The customer states that due to the way XYZ’s customer support team is structured, the guidance they needed came late and only confused them and clarified nothing. XYZ now knows the fault lines and what needs to be fixed with their processes, based on the interaction. They can engage further with the customer to offer any possible redressal, gain more insights and change their processes to appease the valued consumer.

If you are thinking NPS is only useful in cases of negative reviews, you are wrong. If a customer rates you high, you can receive further insights as to what they did like about your service/product. Conversing with an already happy customer makes them content and willing to spread a good word about you. Additionally, you now know your strengths to advertise.

Lowering the Cost of Customer Acquisition with NPS

In an extension of what we said earlier, NPS helps you save on the cost of customer acquisition. Tracking NPS keeps a check on your customer success rate and helps you gain a sense of how well your customers like you. The better they like you, the better the NPS ranking, and the more they are likely to spread a positive word of mouth for your brand. NPS has been termed the leading indicator of future growth because it indicates the number of customers who would potentially refer your product onward. The larger this number is, the lower the cost of customer acquisition gets for you.

NPS and Other Online Reputation Management Tools

NPS essentially helps you keep a check on your customer satisfaction levels. It not only gives you a score but a qualitative analysis too. However, using NPS with other tools can help complement the entire customer engagement and satisfaction process. NPS can tell you whether customers are happy with you or not. Social listening for reviews and online chatter related to their specific cause of dissatisfaction helps you zero in upon the real issues. Social engagement tools help you stay connected with your promoters and detractors. This, in turn, is absolutely essential for branding, especially during the formative period of a company.

Simple tools can be used to bring about a phenomenal change in your company’s customer care efforts. NPS, social listening, social intelligence and engagement tools can be used to serve a multitude of purposes simultaneously. Gain customer insights, receive feedback to reduce churn and improve product/service, identify promoters and detractors all from these few easy tools. We’d like to think of these ORM tools more as tools that open new doors to opportunities and not as any alarm devices.

Social Listening is Keeping Your Competitors Ahead

Are you unable to understand how your competitor seems to have a better online presence and worried that you are missing out on something important? Then you may want to read on and find some answers, to help you take some control. Let’s talk about how social listening might be helping your competitors and how you still have time to reverse their winning streak.

Is Social Listening Really helping Your Competitors?

Social listening has plenty to offer. Are you already using it to your advantage or is your competitor racing ahead and leaving you way behind? Here are some definitive signs which tell you that your competitor is ahead of you using social listening:

They respond quickly (response time is far lower than yours) to any negative chatter or social media crisis moment.
They seem to know what the customer wants and present it to them on time. They also seem to know why your customers are dissatisfied and are trying to entice them away.
They engage with their advocates and find influencers at the same time.
They engage with their audience actively.

If any of this sounds familiar, it is time for you to step in.

Respond Quicker and Stay Ahead

If you’ve noticed that your competitors are quite active on social media it might be because they are vigilant to the social mentions of them. Many companies employ social listening tools to help them with digital marketing. The world wide web is a massive space with billions of active users, and it is a daunting task to track your social mentions manually. Social listening helps you track social mentions, gauge public sentiment and respond well in time.

Replying to your customer’s grievances or queries after a long wait time never leaves a good impression. Besides, if you are unable to respond in time while your competitors engage actively with them, it is easy to guess why your competitor would gain business, while you lose custom.

Sentiment Analysis and Other Strategic Insights

Even if you are not keeping an eye on your competitors, they might be keeping a constant eye on your brand’s health. The negative chatter around your brand helps them to lure your audience away. A key strategy to stop such poaching is to plan your digital marketing in such a way as to make your brand visible, trustworthy and relatable. A brand which cares enough would zero in on the pain points of their customers are facing and extend help both offline and online.

With social media being a free source of all the data you need, social listening gives you precise insights into its message. Which outlet is gathering the most negative chatter? Why is that particular outlet doing something different/weird? You do not have to dig too deep for the insights, you have to be vigilant enough to respond to the criticism and resolve the problem.

Sentiment analysis helps you gauge the overall perception of your brand. And provide you with deeper insights. Responsive actions can gain you serious fans who could actually promote your brand and endorse it for all the world to see. To identify these influencers/heroes, you have to keep listening to social media buzz to know who loves you. Marketing which happens through positive word-of-mouth is a foolproof way to rank high on a list of trusted brands.

Social Listening provides you with many key metrics that could help you avoid not just losing business to your competitors but also to stay one step ahead of the game. If you are looking for the perfect social listening tool, we can guide you.

4 Reasons to Dig Deeper into Social Listening

.There’s no gainsaying the fact that social listening is highly beneficial for conducting sentiment analysis and deriving business insights from it. Using social media listening, we can derive actionable insights and answer to questions like:

What do consumers think about my brand?
Which feature of my product/service is being discussed the most and why?
Which department is performing poorly and what is the exact issue?

However, this is not all. Social listening can help you meet many other unique business necessities too.

Uncover Buyer Personas with Social Listening

When trying to impress your audience or potential client, you can’t go making assumptions in the air. You will need to put in an effort to know your audience before you start planning your content and marketing strategy. The consumer will have to be made aware and educated about your offering and its USPs before a purchase can be expected. It is obvious that content should include topics that interest the readers and stay relevant to them. Social listening can help you gain some idea about the topics which interest your readers. By analyzing the chatter, social listening identifies the topics that the target audience relates to and shares on a regular basis. This can provide pointers to the kind of content you need to develop.

Identify an Established Market

It can be tough to identify prospective places to advertise your product on social media. Talking about your product and sharing content on your business page is not enough. Imagine how much simpler it could get if you could find a group of people who really have a need for your product. It’s like an established market, and you get to capitalize on the opportunity. Social listening helps you identify and connect with such leads to people or even some groups, this could enable you to maximize the return on your efforts.

Social Listening to identify Brand Advocates

When you are monitoring your brand and listening to the chatter that develops around it, it would be easier for you to connect with your supporters and critics. While criticism helps you gain insights, as we discussed earlier, social listening tools can help you identify your brand advocates. Using the tool, you could reach out to the people who commented positively about your brand or product. Establish a positive interaction with them based on their score as influencers, making it painlessly easy for you to engage with them and to enroll them as members of your extended family.

Shields You against Competitors

Using what’s possibly the most wondrous of social listening’s features, you can listen to the chatter about your competitors as well. How does that benefit you? Being aware of your competitor’s strategies can help you stay one step ahead. Knowing about their success or failure affects your own plans and strategy for growth. You get to learn from their mistakes and take a leaf from their book when their business does something right.

Social media is vast which makes it impossible for you to look at all the brand mentions you received. And analyzing each comment manually to check the sentiment without a social listening tool is simply unthinkable. Look for the right tool which meets your needs by looking at its various features. Do manage your brand reputation right, using the social listening tool’s ability to update you on every social mention in real-time and stay responsive to your consumers.

Social Selling – A Social Listening Use Case

Social selling has become quite the buzz word of late. Think of direct selling (and all the processes related to it) but just online on social platforms. Social selling has been allowing salespeople to zero in on their prospects, build a rapport and relationship with customers, offer advice and close deals without the dread of cold calling.

What is Social Selling?

Gone are the days when a customer would solely depend on the salesperson for product information. The modern-day has brought with it social media platforms, online review communities and even discussion boards across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Quora, Google Reviews et cetera. Consumers have learned to look up information and be more informed than ever. This is where marketers step in with social selling. As consumers seek information online, sellers pitch to educate the masses using these very social platforms.

If your company has a business page on social media platforms or a business account on review sites then you are already engaged in and aware of the basics of brand awareness and social selling. Social selling isn’t the same as spamming your potential customers. Social selling is more about gaining information about your audience and educating them about your product in turn. It encompasses attributes of gaining access to the contact information of your audience, building a relationship with them, educating, promoting and advising the right buy after understanding and appropriately judging their interests.

Social Buying and Social Selling

If you are still wondering why your brand should care about social selling and how best to go about it, you may want to consider the fact that most of your competitors are already there. Also, any sales member would tell you that no one likes cold calling nor do consumers like being pestered with calls about a product they’re not interested in.

Social media management tools like social listening help your salesmen to track topics of interests and hence discover new leads. Understanding the interests and activities of a potential customer makes it easier for the salesperson to converse with them, build a relationship and convert a lead.

Secondly, in the 21st century, almost every other person is active online. Everyone is aware of e-commerce and they look up and discuss the products they want to buy. Besides the regular pre-purchase information-gathering, people also share their post-purchase experiences. In a world where social buying is already flourishing, why would one hesitate to sell? Social media platforms are practically an entire package. They provide you with the platform to advertise on, promote, sell or educate people before they purchase, helping them to gather insights from post-purchase reviews and so on. Social selling is essentially the entire business process under a single umbrella.

Best Ways to do Social Selling

Social selling is no different than your traditional selling. It is only a smarter way to do it.

A Strong Social Selling Team

Like we pointed out earlier, no salesperson really likes cold calling and hounding customers. In fact, a recent report by CSO insights and Seismic stated that access to social selling tools like social listening, social engagement et cetera lowered the sell-cycle time and increased the conversion rates for B2B professionals. Powering your sales team with social media tools helps them gain insights into the persona of your target audience and personalize the pitch.

Engage Personally

Imagine being really interested in a product and wanting to know more about it. Your sales guide is a robot who only responds with very basic information. It has no personal recommendations, no casual relationship building capabilities and no sense of offering a human touch at all. Honestly, you wouldn’t feel the company is making a great effort to sell to you. You won’t feel like a particularly valued customer.

This is exactly the case when you employ social bots to engage and chat with your customers. Have a team to respond to your customers and ensure that the team is vigilant. 40% of millennials expect a response within 1 hour after they have posted a query.

Social Listening and Monitoring

Social monitoring and social listening are the two crucial tools to successful lead conversion. The first thing before you try your hand at social selling is to try and know more and more about your target audience. Customer insights are key to successful campaigns, advertisement, promotion, and the resultant personalized sales pitch. Social listening is essential even after sales. Tune in to listen to what the customers are talking about you, their recommendations, their pain points and try to reach out to them where necessary.

In the world of web 2.0, online marketplaces are abundant. Building a strong relationship with your audience has never been easier. It is the best time to capitalize on this and start your journey with social selling.

Assess Your Brand Reputation on Social Media Networks

It takes years to build a reputed brand name; however, one negative review could ruin it and leave a wreck behind. Keeping track of your brand reputation becomes vital to avoid such an unpleasant crisis.

It’s a known fact that customers who are happy may not leave feedback, but the unhappy ones today take the time out of their packed schedules to share their experiences with others. It’s only natural for a potential customer to trust the first-hand review more than any marketing material put out by the brand itself. So, how do you manage your online reputation? Is it possible to keep your customers happy, at all times?

How does managing Brand Reputation Work?

Managing online brand reputation is about tracking negative comments and reaching out to connect with such a customer to resolve their issues. You will also need to track the praise or positive feedback for your brand. Encouraging happy clients to engage more positively with the brand on social media is a really clever way to manage online brand reputation.

Carefully following your competitors can tell you about their social media reputation and the strategies they use to maintain it. Overall, brand reputation management allows you to tell your side of the story and helps people to recognize you and to connect with you. It is a very good way to influence the sentiments surrounding your brand.

Many businesses invest in social monitoring tools to keep track of the chatter. But, how do you gather insights into your brand reputation without the appropriate tools to analyze that data? Only social listening tools help you track brand mentions, analyze the key pain points, identify brand advocates and keep a check on your competitors. Social listening tools come as a complete package for your online brand reputation management.

Channels of Online Reputation Management (ORM)

A professional path to brand reputation management would require a 360-degree approach. The main channels which help manage your online presence include:

Paid Media

Featuring your brand on any digital space that has been paid for falls under this category. PPC ads with Google AdWords, paid ad campaigns on Facebook, paid business accounts on Instagram are some examples under this category. Paid media offers a quick way to gather views, spread brand awareness, gain new customers and build relationships.

Earned Media

Any talk or mention of your business/brand by third-party websites, for which you haven’t spent any money, is called earned media. When your brand is doing exceptionally well, praise in the form of earned media helps you establish a positive brand reputation among the masses. Brand mentions on other websites, positive product reviews, influencers reposting and reviewing your products are all a part of this category.

Owned Media

Every company has its own way of promoting their products digitally via website pages, blogs et cetera. All of them fall under the owned property head. The more regularly you update and maintain your owned properties, the better the awareness you build. A healthy brand reputation can be achieved using owned media diligently. Updating your blogs and optimizing your website to adapt to various device configurations are some ways you can attract an audience to visit your site and raise awareness and education about your products/services.

Social Media

Social media is by far the most popular and important form of media in today’s world. The number of social media users grows each day. Social media offers a platform for a continuous evaluation of your brand’s performance online. It also provides a channel for two-way communication with your customers, critics, and admirers. Engaging people via social media is one of the easiest ways to gain your customers’ trust. It bears repeating to say that social listening tools help you monitor the sentiments around your brand and enable you to take preventive action to avert a possible crisis.

Social Listening for Brand Reputation Management

Social listening is the key to leveraging your social branding via networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and the like. Social media listening is a smart tool if you use the features it offers to assess and improve your reputation online.

Monitor the Right Content

Before you start looking for the chatter around your brand, have clarity on what you are tracking exactly. Are you looking for the chatter around the brand name? Alternatively, do you want to know about the chatter surrounding your product or your industry? Some companies might track the news around high-profile employees working with them. You could either choose to track information related to one of these or indulge in a wholesome experience of tracking everything related to your brand.

Integrate all Your Social Media Platforms to one Tool

Tracking social media mentions isn’t an easy task so why not make it simpler? Tagging all your social media accounts to a single social listening tool lets you hear the chatter from all of them. It is also is easier to connect with and engage people across all these platforms via one dashboard.

Social Engagement – for Successful Brand Reputation Management

Social listening tools generally enable you to respond to customers and engage with them. Establishing a strong brand presence isn’t too difficult if you actively respond to your customers. A devoted brand makes its customers feel empowered and privileged. Gaining the customer’s trust is the stepping-stone to positive word-of-mouth reviews. Customer care need not be a one-way process, where you reply only when the customer asks for it. Seeking regular feedbacks via social media polls, website/live chats and surveys also goes a long way in establishing you as a responsible brand.

Managing brand reputation can be a tricky task, but it is not rocket science. With the right amount of patience, planning, and execution, your brand could become one of the most trusted brands in the industry.

Social Listening for the Pharmaceutical Industry

Global life expectancy has gone up by 9.365 years since the 1980s. Credit for this goes to better awareness among the people and the improvement in healthcare technology and the availability of new and better medicines. The pharmaceutical industry has witnessed dynamic shifts over the years, in its unfailing quest to eliminate diseases from the world, has seen it evolve and improve itself time and time again. Through the history of medicine, there have been many changes starting with microbes changing their DNA, infections developing drug resistance, changes in technology, changes in regulations from governing bodies. Pharma companies need to adopt a dynamic business model to deal with these changing needs, to stay focused on their target customer and get the attention they deserve. Social listening for the pharmaceutical industry is here to help pharma companies build a new and modern business model.

Consumers are More Knowledgeable Than Ever

There are some very obvious differences between ancient times and now. Doctors do not use leeches to cure hemorrhoids anymore. People don’t believe that epidemics and pestilence result from the wrath of God. Today’s patients are empowered with more knowledge than the passive patients of yesterday. The World Wide Web has made healthcare information more accessible and social media has provided an additional platform where patients and their families talk to each other and share information and best practices. In this environment, pharma companies need to leverage their marketing efforts with social listening.

Importance of Social Listening for the Pharmaceutical Industry

The modern man uses many more medical tools than ever. The electric thermometer and electronic sphygmomanometer (BP machine), and glucometers to check sugar levels are now being supplemented by meters to check the pulse rate, the number of steps taken in a day, the number of hours spent in REM sleep and many others. Computer-aided design is helping chemists try out new formulations which are made available to us at lower prices. Chemists are also trying to design composite pills which are tailor-made to individual customers, containing all the medicines they need to take in a day. However, it is time for pharma companies to diversify the use of technology within their business model and invest their research and development efforts. They also need to know more about customer needs as well as expectations, for which the answer lies in social listening.

Modern times, Better Services, and Higher Expectations

Food, water, shelter, and health are the most important things to a human being. Companies from these industries are improving their customer services and doing that ever so well. More and more companies prefer listening to their audience to be well aware of what requirements are to be catered to immediately. When competing against savvy brands, social listening helps you know how to modify your working model to tend to the problems at hand in the most effective and economical way.

Social Listening for the Pharmaceutical Industry – A Quick Glance

Listening to the needs of your audience
Monitoring the overall chatter and sentiments building around your brand
Competitor analysis and global opportunities
Tracking industry keywords to stay updated about the regulations and news (new formulations/patents etc.)

Listening to Customer Needs

As of now, we have no clear guidelines from regulatory authorities like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of any obligations or enforcements laid upon pharmaceutical companies to report adverse events (AEs), which are identified through social channels. But, many manufacturing companies fear that being involved in extensive social interactions would bring up more adverse drug experience reports online and would require them to conduct a number of costly investigations into each of them. However, there’s no doubt that companies could use social listening as an effective research tool, which provides them with a lot of information, without requiring heavy financial investments.

Brand Recognition

Consumer conversations concerning you present a picture of how well your brand image is perceived, as you measure your brand’s share of voice, customer sentiment, brand switching behaviors, patient journey, patient and health care provider unmet needs and other pressing business concerns. Customer expectations shape their opinions. Managing customer segments becomes easier once you know their thoughts on how well (or inadequately) you meet their needs. Social listening for the pharmaceutical industry is absolutely essential for more than one reason. Besides monitoring brand equity, marketers use social listening to keep track of any misleading information, which is undeniably an opportunity. Managers can create campaigns and spread awareness about the actual facts and alleviate the damage caused by any false information doing the rounds.

Competitive Analysis and Global Opportunities

The pharma industry is highly competitive. Social listening for pharmaceutical industry lets you listen to the chatter around your products, campaigns and about the products and reception of other brands too. Positive or negative comments around other brands could help you strategize and improve your own performance. Identifying the gaps and moving to fill them and meet customer expectation will help you overtake your competitors, and even to outgrow their market share. Pharma companies can also listen for region-specific health problems around the Globe and learn about any gaps in service being experienced in a particular region. For instance, if you are working on a formulation which could help fight the Ebola or Nipah virus, you would want to establish your presence in a place where people need those medicines. Social media listening gives you region-wise information. Suppose you see none of the other pharma companies are serving the patients in, say Mali. It means you have identified an opportunity for global penetration, making Mali a new market for you.

Stay Updated

It is true that in some sense the world comes alive on social media. Millions of posts, impressions, engagements, comments, and interactions take place every second. Social listening aids in gathering all the relevant chatter. Listening for trends and updates from your industry will help you keep abreast of any news of a change in the regulations within your industry. In the world of web 2.0, social listening into the chatter will that you never miss any crucial piece of information.

The Ultimate Use of Social Listening for the Pharmaceutical Industry

Having laid stress on social media and the platforms providing these facilities, we would want to lay emphasis on the fact that most of the time, a patient’s digital diagnosis begins not with Facebook or Twitter. It begins with Google and the health-related chat forums available online. Interestingly, social listening does not limit itself to the chatter generated on social media. Social listening for the pharmaceutical industry should be enabled with both active and passive listening and there are tools plenty which provide such a platform.

Research and development, online reputation management, and consumer insights are all important aspects of the efforts to grow your brand further. Additionally, for the pharma industry, the risk of bad PR is high with adverse drug reaction events. Social media listening is an effective crisis management platform. Being vigilant will help you address any situations before your product and brand name get maligned beyond repair on the Internet.