5 Ways In Which Social Listening Enables Agile Research

The market research industry, like many others, has been driven by the increasing need for data and insights to be delivered faster. Researchers, in turn, have been challenged to speed up the process of gaining insights, without compromising the quality of the data collected. The quest to achieve the same has led to the increasing importance of smaller-scale studies, and the eventual adoption of an agile research mantra for gaining consumer insights.

So, what is Agile Research?

Agile market research is the application of agile software development methods – iterative thinking, product sprints, development of minimum viable products (MVPs) – to the practice of market research; thereby enabling teams & organizations to test, iterate, and launch concepts, products, or campaigns quicker and more effectively using a more customer-centric approach.

What is the benefit of Agile Research Methodology?

As opposed to a few large research projects in a year, teams that deploy agile market research methodologies end up delivering faster and far more focused projects to support the marketing and product development efforts of the organization. Thus, leading to a faster growth and innovation.

Furthermore, the agile research methods help in delivering new products to the right customers faster, validating new business ideas before crucial investments, and keeping a real-time pulse on the existing & addressable market.

What makes this possible is the real-time consumer insight, captured using social listening.

51% of marketing leaders worldwide obtained incisive information through social listening tools during Covid-19. With close to 4 billion active social media users as of July 2020, social media listening can potentially unlock access to a large pool of primary data.

But, what is Social Listening?

Social Listening is the analysis of social mentions from across varied data sources around specific topics; including the brand, product lines & services, competitors, category, and other topics that might be of interest to the target audience. Efficient use of this data can give a full picture of the public perception and understanding of the organization and the category itself.

Why Are Organizations Eyeing Social Listening Tools?

1. Real-time Actionable Insights

Social listening drives market research in a more scientific way. The social media listening and monitoring happens in real-time. Thus, the feedback and insights that come in are in real-time as well.

2. Speed and Convenience

Social media monitoring tools analyze the information at a much faster rate than their traditional counterparts. And the automation of such social listening tools not only makes the entire process extremely convenient, but also eliminates the need for a massive team.

3. Accuracy and Efficiency

The responses collected from social media listening are unprompted, thus representing the true thoughts and feelings of the consumers about the product or service. This makes the data far more accurate. 

4. Affordable 

The social listening tools are fast, simple to use, and eliminate the need of a large team; thereby reducing the capital investment in hiring and training the team. Thus enabling agile research at an affordable cost.

How Does Social Listening Enable Agile Research?

1. Helping you nail down the STP: Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning

Consumer insights, their desires & aspirations, and their perceptions are not easy to understand. And your perception of an idea or a message may not always resonate well with the consumer. But social listening tools filter data based on, inter alia, sentiment analysis, demographics, and influence scores. Thus giving an understanding of the audience’s needs and wants. This further helps you make informed decisions about market segmentation.

2. Setting a competitive benchmark

Competitive landscaping is arguably the most important piece of brand management. Every business owner wants to understand how they fare against others within the industry. With social listening, the process becomes all-the-more exciting, as you not only get to monitor your brand in real-time, but also your competitors.

3. Evaluating brand health

You can gauge your brand’s strengths and weaknesses by monitoring social media conversations in real-time as well as historically. Some common parameters that can be monitored are:

3.a Share of Voice (SoV): SoV is a measure of the market your brand owns compared to your competitors. It acts as a gauge for your brand visibility and how much you dominate the conversation in your industry. Social listening tools evaluate SoV based on mentions and reach.

3.b Sentiments: The tools provide a sentiment analysis for your brand as well as that of your competitors’, which is useful in determining brand strategies.

3.c Demographics: Demographic split, based on geography, gender etc. help you identify the consumer segments that are most / least working for your brand.

4. Harnessing both Quantitative and Qualitative data

Social listening tools are most helpful in data-driven decision making. While quantitative data might give an insight on which campaign / hashtag is getting maximum engagement, qualitative data will help understand if the sentiment of the engagement is positive, neutral, or negative.

5. Managing your online reputation

All social listening tools provide an instant alert as soon as someone mentions your brand. As a brand owner, you can leverage this to take an appropriate action to manage your online reputation. While engaging with neutral and positive mentions is a good practice, the most important use case, however, is addressing negative feedback and queries before they turn into a crisis situation.

Thus, in a period as critical as this, when the world has moved to digital for just about everything, brands need to be truly agile in responding to consumer behavior changes and more. And fortunately, there are some amazing social listening tools – such as Google Alerts, Awario, BrandWatch – to drive agile research in the current scenario.