Empower my brand
Empower my brand

Solve Marketing Problems with Social Media Listening

“Talk a little less, listen a little more and you will be a lot wiser.” – Eric Gibbons

Active listening can do wonders, especially for brands looking to amp up their marketing strategy. Brands often struggle to engage in thoughtful communication which can boost their online presence. If you are looking for a smart way to strengthen your marketing tactics online, engaging your target audience is a must. And it all starts with social media listening.

Solve Marketing Problems with Social Media Listening

Why should You Care about Social Media Listening?

Before we get into the technical aspects, let’s understand why you need social media listening through a simple example. Let’s say you own a famous bakery and one fine morning while you’re baking some delicacies, you overhear two of your customers. 

“I love the chocolate chip donuts here.”, one says, and the other one replies, “Yeah, I love them too, but I don’t like the protein crunch bars. They are hard as rocks!”

You begin to wonder if every customer feels this way about your protein crunch bars?

So you make some attempts to gather more customer feedback about these bars. You start to ‘listen’. Based on what you hear, you implement changes that people love! It works. 

Soon you see your clients queuing up in your store to buy the new product you made. They are talking to others about how your bakery made a crunch bar based on their recommendations. 

And this is just a small example showcasing a small business. Depending on your size, people could be talking about your brand or your service or your organization’s work culture, and your customer handling! Social media has made it easy for people all across the globe to discuss you. Social media listening could help you understand these sentiments and comments. It helps you find the right marketing solutions for each problem. 

How does Social Media Listening help Solve Marketing Problems? 

The example in the previous section offers a little insight into how social media listening works. It helps you track and analyze brand mentions. The analysis of the data gives you insights into the complex issues surrounding your brand image.  

This concept is different from social media monitoring. The latter deals more with numbers, while social media listening is looking beyond numbers into your clients’ online mood. If you fail to acknowledge their pain points, you are running the risk of becoming a forgotten brand. 

Here’s a look at the different marketing problems that social media listening can help you with:

Drives Engagement

Customer engagement is the magic key for boosting your ROI. Learning about your target audience, the trends within their demography, and engaging with them is the best way to build a relationship. France-based cosmetic company Clarins Group used a social media listening technique effectively to improve customer engagement. The result? They generated over 450 consultations in the first month itself. 

Better Customer Service

Most brands struggle to understand customer needs and meet their clients’ requirements. Indulge in social media listening to analyze user reviews and assess audience sentiments. These methods will help you to know about your customer’s preferences and give them what they want. The customized Detroit style pizza by Pizza Hut was a real inspiration and this concept enhanced their sales to a considerable extent.

Boosts Brand Value

Building a robust online persona is essential to see a spike in your sales volume. Lays used social media listening to engage with their audiences in a way in which they encouraged them to vote for their favorite flavor for Lays. And it worked like magic and boosted their sales. #DoUsAFlavor campaign of Lays became quickly viral and boosted their brand image. Such campaigns are only possible when you know your customer, their age group, the kind of campaigns they respond well to et cetera. 

Market Research and Competitor Analysis

With social listening, you can track mentions which do not tag your official page. It could be on a blog, a social media account, or a news portal. Social listening tools like Auris also have the provision to listen to mentions for your competitors and do a comparative study. 

This helps you gauge your share of the market and note your weaknesses and strengths. You also learn about your competitor’s weaknesses and their strategy. 

Advertising and Content Personalization

Striking the right conversion and at the right time is a daunting task for most entrepreneurs. The use of social media listening can help gauge public sentiment and trending keywords. This can help brands fine-tune their messaging or advertisements to match the insights received. 

Social media listening strategies effectively spruce up your marketing plans. Use the right techniques to build your digital den and cut through the noise.

Social Listening and Trend Research

We all know it is more important to listen than to speak. The same need applies to brands today. Listening to your audience so you can deliver better products, services, and customer experience holds the key to your success. Social listening to your audience allows you to analyze popular trends and thus engage better with your audience. You increase the chances of creating a positive brand experience with increased customer interaction.  Social listening and trend research become essential when you’re trying to start a conversation. Trend research is even important if you’re trying to produce engaging content.

Social listening and trend research

Why should you use Social Listening for Trend Research?

To market a product or a service you need to know the influencers, the trends, and the industry news. To get a better understanding and specifics of your industry challenges or opportunities trend research is imperative.  

Social listening to these industry trends lets you know what people are talking about. Most importantly it also tells you the answer to the ‘why’! Why are customers talking about a particular topic? Why are they buying or not buying it? Social listening for this “why” is the key to stay on top of the competition. It is also the way to increase engagement, improve your product or services and grow your business faster and more efficiently. 

In this era of hashtags, you can connect faster with your audience by listening to customers’ pain points or tracking key challenges within your industry.

How to Research Trends?

Trend research is mostly like market research. Only it becomes easier due to the fact that trends these days are all over the Internet. Carefully listening to online conversations makes it easier to track trends. And in today’s day and age when trends keep forming and changing every other week, automating the trend research process is critical. Here are some easy techniques to help you out:

Set up Alerts

Trends these days are mostly set on the internet. And like the attention span of most internet users, these trends too are short-lived. So to make sure you catch up with these trends in time you can set up alerts. You could use tools like Google Alerts or a social listening tool like Auris. When you’ve set the keywords, Auris sends you alerts in real-time. This feature also helps you to prevent any PR crisis moments in case of a negative review. 

You could also consider tuning in to the various RSS feeds to gather articles of interest around your industry. However, these may not always report the ongoing or upcoming trends.  

2  Follow the Key Influencers from your Industry

By following top influencers of your industry based on social listening, you can stay updated with the latest trends. Working with an influencer on trending topics also helps you build a more authentic relationship with your audience members. In fact, social listening tools help you identify the right influencers for your brand. This helps you to increase your brand visibility and engage with a larger community.  

3 Use Social Listening 

Keep up to date with trending hashtags, keywords and connect with your audience based on their sentiments. Tracking all such information from social media might sound impossible but it’s not. You can understand the tone of conversations by using ‘conversation clusters’. Auris works on an algorithm that reads into the comments by forming word pairs and gauging the sentiment. This is how it finds out the areas of interest, the keywords being used, and the overall sentiment. 

Staying updated with these trending keywords and hashtags can be useful when engaging with your customers. Auris word clouds also display the top hashtags which can help you in connecting with your audience faster. 

Utilizing social listening tools to monitor conversations and what people are talking about online can be a powerful aid. Once you have the data, you can plan campaigns around it to connect with your target audience. This way your content feels more personal to them and personalized advertising bears great results. With the right approach towards social listening and trend research, you can create a much better experience for your customers and gain a loyal follower base.

Improve your Brand Messaging with Social Listening

Businesses always look to enhance their sales and profits. For this, it is important for them to adopt techniques and strategies that can help them have better reach, more market share, and enhanced customer service. Over the years, businesses, brands, and marketers have devised ways that can help them gain an edge over their competitors. An emerging trend is the improvement of brand messaging with social listening. Recent reports show that at least 51% of leading marketers worldwide use social listening platforms to gain more information about their customers. 

Brand messaging with social listening

What does Social Listening Entail?

Put simply, social listening involves two steps – 

  1. Gathering data related to your products, brand, keywords, and competitors on social media
  2. Analyzing the obtained data to improve brand messaging, customer satisfaction, product and service quality, and more

Importance of Social Listening for Brands and Businesses

A killer digital marketing technique is the only way to increase revenue in times like these when everyone’s hooked to the Internet. Everyone is ready to jump on the bandwagon of success. But it is trying out new and improved techniques that can put your brand in a better position. 

Closely following ‘social’ inputs about your products and brand as well as your competitors will do just that. You can use the information acquired to modify and improve the message that you send across to your audience. Regular incorporation of customer feedback and inputs into your brand message will enhance customer satisfaction and engagement. A brand that listens to what its customers have to say will make a larger revenue than one that doesn’t. 

How to Improve Brand Messaging with Social Listening?

For brands willing to gain an edge over competitors, social listening is vital. There are many ways in which social listening can help build better brand messaging. 

Engage Customers 

The customer is King. Keeping customers happy is vital to success in business. And that doesn’t end with delivering a great product. You need to interact with your customers as often as possible. Social listening helps you know your customers better and their interests. This makes it easier for you to interact with them. When you know the demographics you are targeting and their interests you can speak their language. People like it when a brand takes out time to interact with its customers. It improves goodwill and builds a loyal customer base. 

Handle Crises

Not all talk on social media will be positive. If customers are dissatisfied or unhappy with a brand or product, they may discuss the same on social media. You must track these hashtags, mentions, etc. to know the pain points. In case of a crisis, you can use social listening to initiate damage control procedures for your brand or product. Brands like Nike, Johnson & Johnson, and others have done a great job at addressing PR disasters. 

The key here is to communicate and let users know that the crisis was unintentional. Make them believe that you are committed to delivering the best and will learn from your mistakes. 

Product Appreciation 

No product or service is perfect. Aiming for perfection can become a wild goose chase. What you need is a product that fulfills your customer’s requirements and puts your product ahead of your competitors. So, when you have a product/service in the market, you must watch out for what your customers have to say about it. 

If they do not like a particular product or service or want some changes, they will share it with their friends and acquaintances. Follow mentions and hashtags on social media to get an idea about the pitfalls of your product or service. Consumer insights are one of the most powerful R&D tools. You can use these insights to improve the product/service and deliver a better customer experience. 

Competitor analysis

Analyzing your products and services isn’t enough in a competitive market. You have got to know how your competitors are doing and what their pain points are. If you can address the problems that customers are facing with their product, you can easily offer an improved product to customers. Your existing customers will appreciate this and it will also be welcomed by users unhappy with your competitors’ products. In short, you gain a better market share when you use social listening. 

Being a leader in the market isn’t easy, especially when the competition is at its peak. You have got to be proactive. Pay heed to your brand and product mentions on social media. It only benefits your business operations. Developing your brand messaging with social listening will help you outrank your competition and expand your market share.

Top Social Media Trends for 2021

Social media marketing has become the hottest marketing trend, especially since the lockdown. Popular brands use multiple social media platforms to reach out to their target audience. If you don’t want to get lost in the digital shuffle then you must have your social media strategies up to the snuff. The top social media trends for 2021 listed below will help you build a robust social media strategy to eclipse the competition. 

Social media trends for 2021

What are the Trending Social Media Trends for 2021?

The number of Facebook posts shared each minute was 2.5 million back in 2013. It increased by 22% to reach 3 million posts per minute in 2016. Is there a way you could stay ahead of your competitors in this blitzkrieg? Here are the most important trends that will help your brand content stand out in the noise of social media.

Customer service

Smart entrepreneurs make use of social media platforms for customer service. You can gain a lot of information about your users from popular social media channels like Facebook and Instagram. The use of social listening tools is on the rise so you know what your audience members like.  Customer service and the experience get better when you know your audience – and their demographics, interests, etc. Flex your intuitive muscles and think of smart strategies to improve your customer experiences. Real-time consumer insights are your superpower.

Content personalization

Personalization has become a trendsetter, and this trend will continue this year. If you are still wondering how then think about the last time you browsed for a product online, and how the ads for the same items were shown to you the next moment on Facebook or Instagram? In fact, according to recent research conducted by Accenture, eighty-three percent of consumers are willing to share their personal data to have a more personalized experience. Knowing your customer has never been so essential. Listen to your customers to deliver or advertise to them according to their needs and wants. This also increases the chances of conversion. 

Ephemeral content will be popular

Whenever you open social media, you can see a plethora of ephemeral content. A recent report from CNBC talks of how Instagram stories alone have 400 million daily active users. This year the ephemeral content that disappears in 24 hours will keep gaining popularity. 

Memetic messaging 

We have all seen the rise of emojis. Memes are the new emojis. So much so that big brands are using memetic messaging in their campaigns. Memetic messaging has gained popularity, and this trend will continue to soar this year. According to the latest social media behavior survey by Ypulse, around seventy-five percentage of people aged between thirteen to thirty-six years share memes regularly. 

Demands for video content will increase

We all appreciate engaging content and videos are the best when it comes to that. Video marketing has been on the rise. And it is expected to grow this year too. According to Hubspot, 81% of businesses already use videos as a marketing tool. Don’t know what should be the content of your upcoming video? Research and find out! Social media listening will tell you what your consumers see, engage with, and talk about. 

Smart social media strategies can elevate your marketing process and can improve conversions. Listening to the trends and what the audience is reacting to will help you make that smart move. Hopefully, this guide for the top social media trends for 2021 will help you.

Grow and Track your Brand with Instagram Analytics

Are you always checking the numbers on your Instagram page? While the idea is not wrong, this may not entirely be the right way to track your performance online. Tracking Instagram analytics isn’t hard. With the right tricks, you’ll be able to determine where you stand as a brand. Are you looking to increase your engagement rate? Optimize your posts and stories? Here’s a look into a few strategic moves to help you get more out of your Instagram analytics tool.  

Instagram Analytics

 Are you using Instagram Analytics Tools to the Fullest?

Some basic metrics marketers use include reach, engagement, likes, and comments. Yet there’s more to Instagram analytics.

Analyzing your Audience

Once you understand your audience, you can get better at content creation. With Instagram metrics, you can understand your audience better. It will also help reach out to more potential leads.

The free native Instagram insights tool helps you understand your audience by telling you some basic demographic information. Tools like social listening can tell you more about what your audience thinks about your content online, how they respond, and what clicks with them.

If you are using the free tool, analyze the content you are creating based on the following criteria:

  • The highest performing posts in terms of comments and engagement
  •  Type of posts that are performing well. Example: Photos, Videos & Carousel

For paid tools, platforms like Auris send you a detailed study on your dashboard and a report so you don’t have to manually go through the small stuff to understand what works well. 

Optimize your content based on how well it performs. Additionally, you can make some tweaks every now and then to see what works and what doesn’t.   

Increase your Chances of Discovery with Hashtag Analysis

With each hashtag, you have the opportunity to increase your reach and acquire new followers. Hashtags are one of the most effective organic growth strategies. But, it is imperative for you to use relevant hashtags. This way you can target your audience. It doesn’t make sense if you use popular hashtags that are not relevant to your business.

When using Auris, you will find that the system tracks popular influencers from within your industry and studies all comments around the keywords. This in turn helps the tool to determine the trending posts and hashtags. Hashtag analysis takes time but AI-based tools make the process automated to make it easier and much more beneficial.

Make use of Instagram Analytics for Stories

Instagram story analytics help you track your audience and optimize your content accordingly. Similar to how you check post insights, you can evaluate your story’s performance as well. Click on the Insights tab at the rightmost corner of the profile. You’ll be able to view the basic details like the number of impressions, profile visits et cetera. 

You can make use of an external analytics tool to better track the performance of your Instagram stories. It displays several metrics that you can use to measure the success of each story you post.

The following insights are what you need to reach your audience with stories:

  • Retention rate
  • The best time to post the stories
  • Number of unique accounts reached
  • Number of impressions

The popularity of Instagram is soaring every day; this allows businesses to make the most of it. 60% of people say they discover new products on this platform. Instagram is a powerful tool to reach out to new audiences and increase brand awareness. It is also a great way to establish a community of followers. Understanding what your audience wants and giving it to them is the key to sustaining your presence here.

Ways to Create a Strong Social Media Plan

Every business should mark its presence on social media in today’s day and age. If you aren’t on the bandwagon yet, you’re not doing it right! Putting a strong social media marketing plan in place helps you deliver better results with higher efficiency. However, the real challenge lies in creating a plan which is concise, realistic, and dictates a clear path to attain goals. 

Social media plan

Why do you need a Social Media Strategy?

Gone are the days when social media was simple and straightforward to use. With advancements in AI, even social media algorithms are changing now and then. And keeping up with all this might seem a little overwhelming but it is important. 78% of salespeople are able to outsell their peers with the help of social media. How? 

Here’s a look at how a solid social media plan can help you achieve similar results. 

Ways to Create a Strong Social Media Plan

Here’s a comprehensive step by step plan to help you get started. Consider the following points to create a winning social media marketing plan:

Establish Strong Business Objectives

The primary determining factor for the success of any business is to set up goals and objectives. You cannot measure your success rate without having attainable goals. Start by listing at least 3 goals for your marketing team. Work on these goals one by one and implement them as a part of your social media marketing campaign.

One way to go forward is to stick to the S.M.A.R.T way. That is by adopting specific, measurable, attainable, and time-bound goals. For example, you could have goals like “Getting 20% more traffic to your landing page within the next quarter”.

Know Your Target Audience

Knowing your audience and their preferences are vital for a solid social media marketing strategy. Knowing the likes and dislikes of your target audience helps you understand what they react to, and how they engage. This in turn helps you understand their buying behavior. Taking a lead through the customer journey requires some planning on your part. 

  • Know their demographics, interests, average income, age group. Promoting funky content for a wireless headset to an eighty-year-old gramophone enthusiast would not be of any use. 
  • Make use of social media analytics tools to get valuable information about your followers. AI-based tools like Auris help you delve deeper into the chatter online. Read into the sentiments of the public and formulate your strategy accordingly. 

Choose Your Social Media Networks

Finding out which social media platform is the right fit for your business is also a critical part of your social media marketing plan. You don’t necessarily have to be on all social media platforms. Choose the ones that best suit your business type and strategy. You can do this by evaluating each of the platform’s demographics.

Let’s take Facebook and Instagram as an example. Gen – Z is mostly active on Instagram, whereas baby boomers are more likely to be on Facebook. Depending on your target market, choose one that can yield the most benefit.

Make sure you optimize your social media accounts with the right photo and cover images, bio, URL, etc. Analyze your competitor’s profiles and create an optimized profile for your business.

Curate Compelling Content

Content is king, and this saying never gets old. Engaging content in the form of images, videos, blog posts, infographics, and so on is what holds on to your audience’s attention. You don’t want to use too many irrelevant pieces of content that do not sit well with your brand message. 

To help you in all of this, you can opt for a social media listening tool. Listening to what your audience members are saying or what’s trending can help. A look at your competition can also help you get inspired. And automation tools help you with market research, competitive analysis, or actionable consumer insights. 

Track and Analyze Your Data

Last but not least – the most crucial step in determining the success of your social media marketing plan. As basic as it may sound, tracking and analyzing the data and then making tweaks is important. 

If you miss out on this step, you’ll probably lose all the hard work you’ve done in the previous steps. Social media analytics help you keep track of your online performance. You can also opt for real-time analysis with social listening. This in turn helps you prevent any PR crisis situations in advance. 

Additionally, platforms like Auris help you understand your performance across varied platforms and give you a comparative study. Use data like this to build an integrated social media plan.

Social media is a significant marketing tool for businesses of all sizes. Businesses cannot succeed in social media marketing without a well-documented strategy. And now with all the help available through AI-based platforms, you can really hit it big.

How to Choose the Right Marketing Automation Tool?

Marketing activities in 2021 have reached a new level. Yes, we are talking about marketing automation. Most marketers can vouch for the way marketing automation tools smoothen out the process flow of daily marketing activities. But if you’ve been busy doing the same activities manually, you probably did not get a chance to experience it yourself. In that case, this is the right place to start. 

Marketing automation

What is Marketing Automation?

As the name suggests, marketing automation involves using software to automate the repetitive tasks of daily marketing activities. 

One very popular example would be automating social media posting. Most marketers do not have the time to plan, design, and upload a social media post daily. However, it is a task that needs to be done. Social media automation tools allow you to upload all your designs and schedule them for particular dates and times in the future. Once you’ve done this, the tool keeps uploading without any intervention required. 

What Can Marketing Automation Tools Do?

Marketing automation is being hailed as one of the next big things and for good reason. The marketing automation industry is expected to unlock a capitalization of over $6.4 B by 2024. So what can the tool help with? 

  • Automation tools can deliver specific needs based on whether yours is a B2B or a B2C  brand
  • It helps you with better targeting
  • It helps you nurture leads and then convert them
  • Overall it helps you save precious time and do the work efficiently
  • Improves your marketing ROI

How to Find the Right Marketing Automation Tool? 

There were more than 7000 marketing automation tools in 2019. We can only guess the number for 2021. Among all these tools, finding the one your brand can benefit from could become quite a gamble. But here’s a checklist that can help you narrow down your search. 

Your Needs

The first thing to consider is simple. What are your needs? Are you looking for a tool that can help you manage marketing activities? Or are you looking for one that could help you auto-respond to comments and mentions? 

There are multiple tools automating multiple marketing functions. Some examples include Auris, Hubspot, MailChimp, etc. 

Your Budget

Your budget also plays a role when it comes to selecting the right tool for you. Generally, there are multiple tools providing similar solutions and services. And each has a different package. Auris, for example, provides a free trial version, a package for a small business all the way to a package suited for an enterprise. 

And most marketing automation brands follow a similar pricing strategy. Most of them offer a free trial version. So if you’re unsure about making the investment, you can always ask for a demo before taking a call.

User Experience

With software tools such as these, the user experience counts. A tool that isn’t easy to use and understand is only going to make your task even more complex. The interface should be easy to understand even for a person with no experience in using such tools. 

Apart from the interface, customer support matters too. If you’re using a new tool, you’ll most likely have questions. Or you might need some assistance to set it up. Having a readily available customer support team makes it easier for you and your team. 

Features

Like we mentioned earlier, choosing an automation tool depends on your needs. While this is one of the most important things to consider, it helps to keep an open mind. Say you want to automate your social media posting regimen. Tool A charges you $15 per month and automates the posting process for up to 50 posts. Tool B charges you $18 per month but automates the process for an unlimited no. of posts. Additionally, tool B also offers to automate message responses. Which do you think would be a smarter investment? 

Tools that help you with your core problem are great. But it doesn’t hurt to receive extra features at the same price range! Some tools allow you to integrate with multiple platforms. This too counts as a welcome feature. 

Marketing automation tools have been helping business owners find the right market segment to find the right influencer! A little research is a minimal investment that can help you scale your marketing efforts. 

A Guide to YouTube Channel Auditing

Almost everyone knows about YouTube’s phenomenal rise. This video streaming platform now has over 2 billion active users. And over 73% of the US adult population has an account on YouTube. Besides these stats, there’s also the fact that video marketing is growing in popularity and importance. 92% of marketers believe videos are an important part of their marketing strategy. I’m sure there’s no doubt why YouTube is such a lucrative platform for marketers to promote content and find leads. Popular brands like Lego and Disney have used the platform to communicate their message and engage with their audience. However, creating a YouTube channel to reach the right audience also becomes a great factor for the success of this strategy. YouTube auditing is one way to do this! 

Youtube Auditing

Why do you need YouTube Auditing?

Besides being the most used video streaming social platform, YouTube also works as a powerful search engine. Think about it! We use YouTube to look for all kinds of things, sometimes even for the most basic things. 

And similar to the other search engines, YouTube requires SEO too. You need YouTube auditing to improve your YouTube SEO strategy. Without that:

  • You won’t be appearing on video searches, and
  • You won’t be able to reach the right audience. 

Are you New to YouTube Auditing?

No worries, we’ve got you covered. It’s not even as complicated as the term “YouTube Auditing” sounds. It simply means a way to measure if your videos are delivering on the objectives. It also gives you a deeper understanding of the audience. 

  • How do they perceive your brand?
  • Do they like the content?
  • What content do they prefer most?
  • Would they be willing to become potential customers?

On average, 500 hours of new YouTube content is uploaded every minute. Following a few simple strategies can help your content stand out. 

1 Your Brand’s Current Status

Before you jump into any kind of content-creation process, it is important to understand where your brand currently stands. This is where you need to track your key performance indicators or KPIs. 

For YouTube, the primary KPIs would include the current watch time, views, and impressions et cetera. When you know this data, you’ll be able to formulate which metric to focus on and take action. 

Beyond these, use social media monitoring/social listening tools to gauge the audience’s perception.

2 Update and Improve

Once you know all the details about your audience, view time, impressions, demographics you can take action. 

Take a look at what people think about your brand. Based on these sentiment reports, you might need to consider a couple of actions listed below:

  • Rebrand or reaffirm your brand’s message
  • Improve the quality of your content 
  • Produce more of what worked in the past and cut out what didn’t
  • Start including CTAs in videos that have scope
  • Create watchlists and organize your videos in a way that helps your potential customers go through the journey and convert.

3 Optimize your Content

As I mentioned earlier, YouTube works as a search engine. Optimizing your content will help you reach out to the right audience and a wider audience. 

You can use free tools like Google Keyword Planner for your keyword research. If you’re still facing difficulties while researching topics that are trending, try listening to your audience. They’ll tell what they’d like to view. Social listening tools like Auris help you track trending keywords from within your specific industry. 

Have you tried YouTube Auditing? Hope this guide helps you make those little tweaks to get a better understanding of how to improve your YouTube strategy!

Marketing for Direct-to-Consumer Brands

When the digital direct-to-consumer retail model came up, it disrupted the entire traditional brick & mortar, business model. The direct-to-consumer retail brands were establishing themselves as strong competitors across all industries. However, with the recent pandemic, these brands have had their own set of challenges. One of these challenges is steep competition as every business is seeking digital transformation and presence in the online realm to deal with the loss of direct access to their clientele. Consumer spending has also taken a hit. To keep their business running under such circumstances, these brands have to do what they do best – marketing on social media. Marketing for direct-to-consumer brands, however, also has to focus on the key factor of building strong customer relationships. 

Marketing for direct to consumer brands

Why is Social Media Important for Direct-to-Consumer Brands? 

For any brand trying to reach consumers directly, social media is an obvious platform. Statista reports that about 59% of Americans reach out to a brand on social media between 1-3 times each day. 

And what’s a better way to foster relationships? Your brand’s presence needs to be felt on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. These platforms help you build a two-way conversation with your audience. This in turn:

  • Helps your audience trust your brand
  • It helps you know your audience
  • It helps you monitor your customer’s feedback/needs
  • Discover market opportunities
  • Receive consumer insights to inform your marketing strategy

Social Media Marketing for Direct-to-Consumer Brands

Opting for social media marketing seems like a no-brainer for any DTC brand. 61% of all DTC brands rely on social media as their top acquisition channel. The immense reach, its automation, ability to personalize, variable price models available make it the perfect branding tool. But with more and more players coming into the market, it takes something extra to turn the first-party data into actionable insights. 

Identify Customer Pain-Points

  • Creating a massive brand like Disney or Coca-Cola takes ages. However, with the upcoming direct-to-consumer brands, things could be a little different. People are responding well to genuine content. They are shifting to brands providing authentic solutions to their problems. 
  • Perfect examples of this being Netflix coming up with Netflix Socks which received a lot of positive feedback and attention. Identifying customer pain-points and inspiring authenticity while addressing an issue can be your brand’s unique selling point. 
  • Identifying consumer pain points does not require going through elaborate market research processes. Social media intelligence tools like Auris monitor online content to help you with automated market research insights. 

Nourish Stronger Relationships with Customers

  • More than 86% of companies use user-generated content in their marketing strategy. This helps to leverage your brand image and helps potential customers relate to your brand. 
  • However, reaching a level of relationship with your customers where they would vouch for your brand online requires your effort. Apart from providing a strong product/service, focus on the emotions around the product which makes it more desirable. 
  • Eventually, engage with your customers to make them feel valued. Track industry trends and develop content around them to receive more genuine engagement. 

Personalize your Messaging 

  • We mentioned more and more brands are using user-generated content (UGC)  for marketing. One of the major reasons for this being that UGC makes potential customers relate to the content. It feels personal. 
  • Personalized messages always work better. It can be a marketing email or a little, stylized hand-written note you send with a package to your customers. A perfect example is Roth Martin’s (CEO and founder of Rothy’s) handwritten message to their Facebook fanbase. Its emotional appeal made for a winning strategy.

Social media marketing and making your customers feel valued isn’t as difficult as it may seem sometimes. Especially now, when there are social media intelligence tools to automate most of the tasks for you. Social listening tools tell you everything. These tools help you with segmentation based on demographics. It helps you with content that’s trending. And allows you to improve while tracking and analyzing your reputation online in real-time. 

How to Prevent a Social Media Crisis?

All news travels fast on social media. Remember the photo of an egg on Instagram which became the most-liked image with 18.4 million likes in less than 10 days? That’s the speed and power of social media. This same feature can sometimes give rise to a full-blown social media crisis for a brand. Many corporations have faced backlashes online when a negative review was shared. If you’ve never had to deal with anything like this before, you’ve been lucky. But knowing how to prevent a social media crisis is critical because these are not limited to big firms only anymore. 

How to Prevent a Social Media Crisis

When Nike’s Stock Price Dropped!

During one of the greatest games of Duke-North Carolina in 2019, Zion Williamson, a star player from Duke university suffered a knee injury. This accident happened less than a minute into the game when Zion’s Nike shoe fell apart. 

The event was being broadcast nationwide and the story was being discussed online in no time. Former President Barack Obama and NBA stars like LeBron James posted their well-wishes on Twitter. Social media users began talking and the accident became so publicized that Nike’s stock price dropped by 1.8% the next day!

Nike issued a public statement on social media and jumped into action immediately. They sent over a team to Durham and to their manufacturers in China. A month later, Williamson returned for a game with custom-built Nike shoes. He reported that the shoes felt “incredible”. 

So What is a Social Media Crisis?  

The Nike example was just a small vignette into what social media crises can look like. In essence, any online activity (social media) which can harm your brand’s online reputation can be classified as a social media crisis. 

There could be a storm of negative comments/reviews. It could also be an online movement to boycott your brand. Remember the “Boycott Snapchat” movement in India? It happened when the CEO of Snapchat had allegedly said he doesn’t want to expand to poor countries like India and Spain. 

While it’s true that some crisis situations are not fully within the marketer’s control, there are ways to prevent it. If not prevent, at least curb the effects before it blows entirely out of all proportion. AI-based tools like social listening or social media monitoring are the perfect fit for a brand to identify potential threats. 

Social Media Crisis Management 

Nobody can predict a crisis before it happens. But there are ways to identify the symptoms and take preventive action. Having a proper plan of action can obviously help. 

A Social Media Policy for your Brand 

Sometimes an enthusiastic employee might end up oversharing on social media. Sometimes cases like these expose the brand itself in a negative light and can be the cause of a social media crisis. 

Preventing these crises is easy. Maintaining a solid social media policy for your company with clear guidelines can help employees understand the limitations. Some of the pointers to be mentioned include copyright guidelines, privacy guidelines, brand image guidelines et cetera. 

Securing your Social Media Accounts

Securing your social media accounts is more important than you would think. Ex-employees, hackers, or even current employees can cause trouble. There have been instances when employees took to a brand’s social media accounts to post memes or funny GIFs which affect its reputation. Sometimes, it could be the work of hackers or disgruntled employees, leaving the owner of the account scrambling for cover. A case in point would be the recent likes offered to scantily-clad models by the official Instagram account of Pope Francis.

The easiest way to avoid such crisis situations would be to secure your accounts and limit access to only a few of your team members. Use a centralized system to grant access to members. This also allows you to remove the access when an employee leaves your firm. 

Social Listening Alerts

Another major contributor to social media crisis moments is negative feedback/comments left by customers. Sometimes, internet trolls or competitors too can leave negative comments on your posts. These comments can harm your business, especially when they are left without a suitable response for a long time. 

Monitoring all online mentions without the use of technology is definitely impossible as the number of notifications that come in run into thousands per second. It is difficult to monitor every single mention and the fires could go unattended and the damage could be done before one wakes up. For situations like these, social listening tools offer the best help. Listening to online conversations helps you capture public sentiment at all times. Any spike or peculiarity in the number of mentions or sentiment can be monitored. With social listening, you also have the ability to investigate the issue in depth. 

Tools like Auris send you alerts in real-time, and such real-time alerts help you to initiate action without delay. With social media, a timely response is of utmost importance. The longer a negative review stays online, the more opportunity people will have to view it and form a negative perception. This can cause massive damage to your brand’s reputation. 

Preventing a social media crisis isn’t as big a nightmare as it sounds. With simple steps and the right tools in place, you can avoid these situations well in advance.