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.

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.

Social Listening to Healthcare Trends

Social media has recently been all the rage. It isn’t only for sharing pictures, moments, videos, etc. People share a lot of data on social media. Businesses, organizations, and others collect and analyze this data to understand upcoming trends. The data also tells us what people like, dislike, and want from a particular industry. The healthcare sector has been no different. In recent years, healthcare professionals have wondered how the face of medicine would change in the future. Reports show that digitalization had a great impact on the healthcare sector. And with digitalization gaining momentum, social listening to healthcare trends becomes essential.

How did Healthcare and Medicine change with the Pandemic?

The rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to limit social contact. This included visits to the doctor as well. But illnesses and diseases don’t take a break. The situation became critical when major healthcare systems took a hit due to COVID-19. People had to resort to doctor consultations online. But, when that wasn’t possible, people took to social media to get help.

They discussed symptoms, medicines, and self-care plans online. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc. led the way. Healthcare portals like WebMD, Healthline, forums, and chat rooms like patient.info, HealthUnlocked, followed.

With time, healthcare professionals started using social media. It helped them connect with patients across the world and allowed them to diagnose and treat ailments and offer advice online. With this, telemedicine, which was already an emerging trend, became the main option for many. Within a few months of the pandemic, telemedicine is holding promise to become the possible future of medicine.

Social Listening to Healthcare Trends Can Help

One cannot deny that social media has become the new source for data collection, monitoring, and analysis. The entire concept of telemedicine brings healthcare to the online realm. With social listening, it is possible to understand what people are talking about. One can find out what they want from the healthcare sector and what should change. This information can help to create strategies for better service.

Health-Related Queries

First, the focus should be on people seeking medical information online. Data shows that Google receives more than a billion health-related queries every day. Healthcare brands should try and tap into that resource. This will help them reach out to more people easily.

Connect with Consumers on Social Media

Sharing health information on social media sites and platforms must be the focus, next. People talk about their health concerns online. There are Facebook groups of mothers and health experts talking about their own or their child’s health. Analyzing data coming from social media discussion forums can help us gain deep insights. It gives us information about patient experience, symptoms, the efficacy of treatment plans, and more. This data helps understand user sentiment, customer pain points, and more.

Customer Interaction

Healthcare brands should also focus on customer interaction and engagement. But, until recently no one took this seriously. Most healthcare brands have poor records when it comes to responses on social media. Even when they do respond, the timing or quality of their response is so poor that it creates negative sentiments. This causes disengagement and may result in a switch away from the brand.

Brands can use social listening to analyze and understand any underlying negative sentiment. Listening to and analyzing customer reviews and feedback about your brand is the primary way to gain intelligence. Brands must take care before these negative sentiments blow out of proportion and turn into a crisis. Especially, with the changing scenario, the healthcare industry should also be more adaptable. Social Listening to Healthcare Trends is an effective way to ‘listen’ to what users have to say. This will help improve their brand message and help them to interact with prospects to convert them into leads.

How PepsiCo uses Social Listening for Ad Campaigns

Social listening may sound like a tough task, especially if you’re planning on doing it manually. But if you strategize right and use the right tools to automate it, this process can be a cakewalk. Social listening is one of the most discussed trends today and that’s for good reason. Let’s say, a customer Tweets about how exceptional your customer service is, Or, a news channel report covers the excellent metrics that your brand displayed the last quarter. Well! Wouldn’t it be exciting to access all such mentions and data in real-time? That’s where social media listening can help you. Don’t believe us? See how PepsiCo uses social listening for ad campaigns.

A Look into How PepsiCo uses Social listening for Ad campaigns

Who hasn’t heard of the American multinational giant PepsiCo Inc.? PepsiCo usually launches highly successful marketing campaigns leveraging its enormous social media presence. However, things went wrong even for PepsiCo. All those who weren’t living under a rock would have heard of PepsiCo’s ad campaign with Kendall Jenner. The ad campaign gained a lot of attention but, it did more harm than good. This ad campaign did not sit well with critics and they all took to social media to revile it.

Thankfully for PepsiCo, they could control the damage within 24 hours as they implement several social media listening techniques to boost their conversions and resolve any negative PR. Pepsi has a robust social media strategy, and they use sentiment analysis through social listening.

As per reports from Business Insider, within thirty years of its inception, the PepsiCo brand has grown exponentially. A part of this massive success can be attributed to their out-of-the-box concepts for marketing campaigns. So what led to this success story? The answer lies in the story of how well PepsiCo has been able to listen to its customers. Pepsico has been strictly following consumer insights and using social listening for their ad campaigns. Here’s a little more on the exact technique they use.

Understanding the Consumer

Todd Kaplan, PepsiCo’s Vice-President of Marketing, said social listening made it possible for them to really understand their consumers. And that is exactly what has helped them navigate through the crazy year 2020. His team used a mechanism which they termed “culture in, brand out”. They would monitor major cultural shifts and create marketing moments around it.

Quicker Turnover

Marketing plans for the year 2020 were not solid owing to the pandemic and the lockdown. Pepsi’s marketing team usually follows a creative process that takes months. The campaigns start with insights, from the brief to the actual creative process. Pepsi also follows a very formal approach when working with partners.

The new approach saw it all change. For the new campaigns, multiple agencies worked together in real-time. This led to a quicker turn-around.

Consumer Engagement

Pepsi also went big on connecting with consumers and engagement. In an attempt to create campaigns more quickly, Pepsi recreated a 1997 track. With this, they hoped to tap into the undercurrent of nostalgia that was evident in the conversations during the lockdown.

The campaign appealed to many people and generated a ton of organic chatter. After the success of this campaign, Pepsi relied heavily on a similar strategy and brought performances to fans. It also included a performance by Lady Gaga for charity.

The way PepsiCo’s team handled marketing issues during the pandemic goes to reinforce the fact that social listening is a really powerful tool. You need to be using the right tools and in the right way to realize the full benefit.

The Ultimate Social Media Metrics Roadmap

Social media has become much more than a tool that connects people with family, friends, and acquaintances. It also connects businesses and brands with clients and customers. As such, social media marketing has become an integral part of digital marketing. Big or small, businesses and brands try to harness the potential of social media to increase revenue and market share. However, without social media metrics, it’s impossible to know if your campaigns are working.

Actionable data from social media and its users can help you create effective marketing strategies to make the most out of your campaigns.

Why is it Important to Track Social Media Metrics?

An understanding of social media metrics can have an impact on your overall business. If you’re still wondering about the benefits, here’s how it helps:

Measuring ROI

Campaigns are launched on social media with an expected return. You could be running campaigns to generate leads or gain larger visibility. But how do you calculate ROI, exactly? Apart from the traditional measures used to estimate ROI, adding data from social media campaigns is also important. By incorporating these metrics with other measurement tools, nearly 85% of businesses and brands are able to measure their ROI accurately.

Understanding Performance

Every business or brand must know how it is performing. Performance doesn’t only mean counting the number of likes. It includes measuring factors like customer satisfaction, user engagement, grievance redressal, and more. All these factors must be considered while measuring performance. This is possible only when you take into account what users are saying in response to your campaigns.

Making Decisions

Social media metrics go beyond helping you understand the result of social media campaigns. Tracking metrics using tools like social listening can help you identify complaints and growing dissatisfaction amongst users. The metrics will help you analyze the source of negative sentiment. The sooner you do this, the better it will be for your brand’s reputation. You can utilize user input to make changes to products and services for a better user experience.

Understanding Efficiency

It is crucial to audit the efficiency of your marketing team. Whether you have an in-house team or outsource your marketing campaigns, a regular audit is essential. You can use the data obtained from the metrics to do this. If multiple campaigns have failed or given poor results, something isn’t right. Your marketing team might have to revise some of the strategies being used.

Identify Influencers

Metrics tell you a lot about your ardent followers. If an individual or brand actively follows and promotes you on social media, you may want to add them to your circles. This will ensure that you have people outside your marketing team to promote your brand or business and act as your brand ambassadors.

Metrics that Matter the Most to You

When social media marketing was in its early stages, the metrics were very simple. The number of followers, likes, subscribers, views, comments, shares, etc. was all that mattered. The higher these stats, the better a business or brand was. But with time, things changed. It became easy to boost these numbers using inorganic means. These simple metrics have lost their value over time and now we have a more complex way of tracking campaign efficiency. But there’s nothing to worry about. Most automation tools like Auris do most of the analysis job on your behalf.

Let’s take a look at the most important metrics:

Reach

The very first metric to track is the overall reach. The more people you reach out to, the better it is for your brand. Each social media platform has tools to measure reach and you can use this.

Audience Growth Rate

A brand must track how fast its audience (followers, subscribers, etc) grows within a stipulated period. A faster growth rate will give you an edge over your competitors.

Engagement

User engagement is important for every brand. Engagement usually comes in the form of likes, comments, shares, retweets, etc. You can even post content or activities that invite users to engage with your brand.

Social Share of Voice

All mentions that your brand receives count as the Social Share of Voice or SSoV. Better SSoV percentage indicates better relevancy in the market.

Brand Sentiment

It is impossible to succeed without understanding brand sentiment. A positive sentiment indicates user satisfaction while a negative sentiment indicates the need for improvement.

Social media metrics are only a way to analyze the data. Most social media platforms have a native analytics tool that will help you understand the basics. But to really understand customer behavior, and customer expectations you have to dig deeper. Sophisticated AI tools like social listening are leading the way in bringing out actionable consumer insights to marketers. Data-driven campaigns will always help get better ROI and performance.