How Social Listening Drives Market Research?

Every company indulges in an extensive market research procedure. As they should. Proper market research is key to how successful a business is. This activity helps you understand and plan the most crucial aspects of your business. You may want to know about your campaign effectiveness, competitors, or customer segmentation. Even for this, market research is the way to go. However traditional approaches to market research have their limitations. Most businesses are now shifting to more modern techniques of doing market research. Social listening is one such tool and we are here to explain how social listening drives market research.

Why Social Listening over Traditional Techniques?

When we say traditional techniques of market research the most obvious options come to mind. Options such as surveys, focus groups, interviews et cetera. The disadvantages of all these options are almost the same. They reflect the feelings and opinions of a small sample group. The researcher might not ask the right questions. Sometimes participants may feel shy to voice their true thoughts or say what they truly feel. Sometimes consumers may answer the survey, without even knowing about the product or having formed any opinion of that product or service at that time.

All these factors can lead to a very skewed perception of your business’ performance or success rate.

Real-Time Actionable Insights

Social listening drives market research in a more scientific way. Social listening to social media conversations happens in real-time. So the feedback and insights which come in are in real-time as well. For traditional methods, the data collected for research may become outdated by the time the whole process is wrapped up. While on the other hand, social listening companies have access to current information.

Speed and Convenience

Social listening analyzes the information at a much faster rate than traditional methods of surveying and reporting. This tool also makes the entire process extremely convenient. There is no need for a massive team to run the tool and make sense of the insights. The tool makes most of the work automated.

Accuracy

With social media listening, the responses from the consumers are unprompted. As netizens, we often talk about our experiences with brands on social media without being actively asked. These words truly represent our thoughts and feelings about the product or service. Listening to these makes the data more accurate than the data collected via traditional market research methods.

Affordable

One of the primary reasons why social listening is booming as a technique for market research is that it’s affordable. Owing to the fact that the tool is fast and simple to use, it doesn’t need other inputs such as a large team to operate it. In traditional methods, most of the work is done by individuals. This means a lot has to be invested in setting up the team, training them, and then carrying out the process.

How does Social Listening Drive the Market Research Process?

The most interesting ways social listening can supplement your market research is by:

1. Helping you Know your Target Segment

Your reality might not be the same as your customer’s reality. What you may perceive as an excellent marketing message may backfire. Social listening tools filter data based on sentiment analysis, demographics, influence scores, and a lot more. This allows you to know your audience’s wants and needs. This also helps you make decisions about market segmentation based on the detailed analysis.

2. Setting a Competitive Benchmark

The first thing any business owner wants to know is how they are going as compared to others within the industry. A major chunk of traditional market research reports is dedicated to competitors. With social listening, the whole process becomes even more exciting. In addition to you being able to monitor your brand in real-time, you get to monitor them as well.

3. Harnessing both Quantitative and Qualitative data

Data-driven decision making is the way to go. Checking up the numbers before you invest or implement a change is always the right thing to do. However, numbers alone do not always tell the whole story. Let’s look at an example. Let’s say your brand has been running a marketing campaign across all your social media accounts. You are using a brand hashtag (say #ABC) for the campaigns. While looking at the metrics you see a massive engagement score for your brand’s hashtag #ABC.

Now, simply looking at the numbers you arrive at a conclusion that your campaign is doing really well. But in fact, if you were to look into the qualitative side of it, you would see that most of the engagement your hashtag has been getting is negative. People are not happy with the campaign and they are commenting negatively on your posts.

Social listening helps you put things in perspective as it presents the quantitative and qualitative sides of analytics together.

4. Getting Actionable Feedback in Real-Time

You can gauge your brand’s strengths and weaknesses by monitoring social media conversations in real-time. And since you get an alert immediately every time someone mentions your brand, you can just move into action and manage your online reputation. The most important application is that it helps you prevent negative feedback from turning into a crisis moment well in time.

Artificial intelligence – the force behind tools like social listening is evolving each day. And even at this nascent stage, it is powerful enough to help businesses and world organizations predict trends and make decisions. Hopefully, this article helped you see how social listening drives market research and is the best-suited method in the current age of technology.

Ways to Bolster your Market Research with Social Listening

Most marketers swear by the need to conduct appropriate research before any product launch or campaign. But let’s be honest, who has the time to go through a full-throttle market research process? As we understand, market research in its true sense is a long-drawn-out process. It involves using elaborate qualitative and quantitative methods to obtain information and generate reports about market trends, spending habits within an industry. Once obtained, these will help you determine current and future strategies for your marketing. However, given the wealth of modern techniques and tools, collecting data for market research isn’t that difficult anymore. Social listening tools make it very easy for market researchers to derive brand-specific insights.

Time and again we come across brands that are out of sync with their customers. You cannot run a business successfully if you do not understand customer needs. The Loyalty that Lasts report says 43% of marketers are looking for a deeper connection with customers. Market research helps you build this connection. This process of listening to social data and drawing insights isn’t all about drawing hefty graphs. You actually tap into your customers’ heads to understand their ever-changing needs.

How does Social Listening aid the Research?

Artificial intelligence tools like social listening make it possible to both collect and interpret data using a single platform. This tool starts collecting global streams of data and then picks out the nuggets of relevant content that cater only to you. Social listening tools help you understand industry trends and also provide you with insights specific to your brand.

The benefits are many. You can access high-quality data, dedicated analytics, segment marketing, sentiment analysis, and more from the same dashboard without any effort needed from you in the process. The algorithm runs smoothly, collects the data, and presents a readymade report with clear and actionable insights.

The use cases don’t stop at that. Once you have a detailed report, you can track influencers, and map customer journeys. Its real-time feedback helps you improve customer experience. Forbes reported an interesting example of how social listening to consumer data helped the online home-goods store Wayfair. They collected and analyzed data to gauge customer experience and to see how they could offer a better customer experience. They used these insights to build an app that invited people to upload the pictures of any furniture item they really liked, wherever they might find it. The Wayfair App would then conduct a search and bring up all close matches to the item from its stocks for the customer to choose from. The brand saw a 50% increase in customer retention that year.

The data you collect, whether through traditional ways or by using the help of AI tools, can be analyzed in a thousand ways. It is important for you to know how you want to use the data to help you meet your goals. Obtaining actionable insights using a social listening tool is really easy and simple. What’s more, it definitely pays off.

How to Use Social Data to Enhance Your Market Research

Market research has come a long way from surveys and questionnaires. AI and Big-Data-driven tools are the big guns supporting quality research now. However, there is still a disconnect. This could be because the transition from traditional ways to modern tools has been so rapid that there has been little clarity. Social data can be used to access various data streams depending upon the insights we want to derive.

Social Data and Market Research

Among the many ways, the top 3 uses of social data include:

Social Listening

Monitoring social data and extracting insights sums up the act of social listening. This is a complete tool in itself. Social listening tools can be used to observe what consumers are talking about, their views about the product/brand/industry and expectations about the functionality of the product/service. This use of social data helps you capture real-time, spontaneous opinions that are hard to come by when customers consciously fill out surveys. The best part about social listening is that it pulls out data from not just social media platforms but also other review forums and websites too. Also, it can be used for more than just monitoring your brand. Comprehensive competitive analysis, industry trend analysis, buyer persona analysis can all become easier with tools like this. All these features make this the best bet for any marketer looking for an enterprise market research tool.

Search Data

Search data helps us gain information about the searches made on search engines. The search volume and trends complement our social listening set up and help with keyword-based social listening. Identifying information gaps is also made possible via search data analysis. A brand trying to increase its presence on a search engine can fill in the gaps where information is needed for keywords, especially when there isn’t much existing data available.

Social Ethnography

Social ethnography can actually help with traditional researches. Listening to how consumers profess their sentiments online can help marketers strategize to interact with them. So how does social ethnography work? With the necessary permissions, tools can help you map the activities of individuals on social platforms. You can draw insights from their activities, their interests, the kind of topics they engage with and the way they express their opinions. Further questions can be based on these insights for traditional surveys. This method has proven to be useful especially in the case of the medical industry. It also eases the process of connecting the dots between the self-reported behavior (when filling out survey forms or in focus groups) and the spontaneous responses. We have found this technique to be able to present a more wholesome picture of the interests of your targeted audience.

The techniques discussed help provide an additional layer of deeper understanding and insight into the minds of your customers. Besides traditional techniques, these help to uncover real-time and spontaneous data which in turn paves way for quality insights. Social data and market research go hand-in-hand when it comes to uncovering unprofessed details of customer needs and expectations. These tools are of great help in achieving insights unattainable via primary approaches alone.