Imagine being able to be a part of an open discussion with your future clients and have them spell out their needs and expectations from your product or service! Any marketer would understand the value of being able to know the intimate details of the decision pain points of their prospective buyers. The more you hear them speak, the more you get to know about them. It will also help you speak their language, relate to them and understand them better. Social listening is the act of understanding buyer personas from a distance, as it helps you listen to their chats over social media and the conversations which happen there, practically open for all the world to see.
Social Listening for Understanding Buyer Personas – What is it?
Social media data is available to everyone and the variety of insights that can be derived from it has made market research effortless today. Understanding buyer personas help you know how to proceed with your marketing strategy, what content to put up for B2B marketing, and provides you an insight into the interests of your potential customer. By empathizing with the needs of your customers, you can attain their trust, and build a positive reputation both online and offline.
Understanding a buyer/customer’s persona – by gauging a user group’s demographics, interests, psychographics, needs et cetera can guide your marketing. A very traditional approach to gaining such intelligence would start with you asking your customers to share their opinions and comments, using surveys and questionnaires. Social listening into the chatter generated online eliminates the investment of time, cost and resources needed by such a process of extensive form filling and other means of surveying.
How does Social Listening help?
Essentially social listening is about giving your brand a human face. It helps you detect the needs of your customers and the problems they face. When you engage with your audience and deal with the issues proactively to make them believe you are listening to them and working towards solving their issues, your brand is perceived to be reliable.
Competitor Analysis
Listening to the chatter surrounding your competitors lets you know what their customers are dissatisfied about. You can also learn about the category they are targeting, and what demographics or psychographics they are going after. This will help you model your own niche segment of buyers.
Key Influencers
These days, we find that every industry has a set of key influencers who are very popular and enjoy a great following. It is a wise thing to include their viewpoints while designing your product or marketing strategy. These people influence a whole lot of people, who listen to their opinion and judgment as it roughly reflects their collective opinions as well as their pet peeves. By tracking one person, you will be able to address the needs of many.
Customer Expectations, Needs, and Opinions
Last but not least, social listening helps you track the conversations your customers are having regarding your product. You can learn what they like, dislike or want to change in your product or service. This opinion mining offers invaluable real-time feedback which is a remarkable feature of social listening. This is also what makes social listening one of the best bets into gaining business intelligence without having to invest in surveys and research reports.
In conclusion, understanding your consumer is vital to knowing your defects and to learn about the exact customer expectations your company needs to cater to. Monitoring buyer needs and opinions can also help you to discover new markets you can penetrate into.