What’s your social listening strategy?

While we’d like to think we are all making purchasing behaviors based on our logic, the truth is – we are emotional beings. We will make a decision whether to buy something or not based on our emotions.

But, a lot of companies are focusing on big data in order to get the results that validate the company and products, rather than to pay attention to validating the needs of the customer.

So, switching the focus from the product to the customer, their wants and needs, and their emotions are what is necessary to really reach, and ultimately, connect your brand to your audience.

This is where the art of Social Listening comes into play.

When listening, think about how you are listening

All the analysis, surfing the web, surveys, research on your competition – it all gives us tons of data.

The question is whether we are interpreting the data the right way.

The data from research is cold. It doesn’t recognize emotions. It’s supposed to give us insight into how people will make decisions based on their logic.

Your customer will see the logic in buying one product over another based only on product highlights, and specs, analysis and data.

But, when it finally gets down to the actual buying decision – people will choose one product over another, because it is red; and red makes us feel great.

Buying is an emotional process. The bottom line is to listen for your audiences’ emotional needs.

Maybe we have loyalty to a specific brand because of a particular memory association. These are not the most logical decisions, but they “feel right”. We “feel it in our gut”.

Utilize Social Media to Listen to Your Audience  

To really understand how emotions influence the buying process can be extremely useful, priceless even.

So, instead of executing your social media marketing strategy based on statistics and data – do whatever you can to carefully listen in on conversations about your brand, your product, your competitors’ product. This will ultimately lead you to understand the emotional wants and needs of your target audience.

Know that this isn’t a fast process. Gathering information this way is slower, while also requiring you to really engage with your audience.

Why a lot of brands decide not to go down this path of effectively listening to its audience is because it takes a lot of both time and resources to do it well.

While this may seem like an expensive investment, leveraging the power of effective social listening is crucial to properly understanding your customers.

And when it comes to the method you are going to use to listen in on your customer’s wants and needs – social media is the best platform you can utilize to do this, rather than running a traditional focus group scenario.

Why?

People know that they are being watched in a focus group – this sole fact can influence the results of your research.

Furthermore, the demographics of the people who regularly do focus groups is fairly homogenous. People who like to take surveys will sign up to take surveys; but are those people your actual audience?

Drawing a conclusion from the pool of people that are using social media will result in getting better insight into who your audience is, what they want and need, and, ultimately, which emotions drive their behavior.

Be mindful when listening to your audience 

All of this is to say that data is not enough to base your social media marketing on. You’ve got to back it up with real conversations with real people.

Now that we’ve got this covered, it’s time to be mindful about what kind of conversations are we looking for.

Listen for those who have questions that can help you learn. Listen to those conversations on social media that will give you proper perception of what people really think – unfiltered and unguided.

In fact, be mindful altogether.

Be a fly on the wall without an agenda to change the conversation.

Ask questions to find out more without trying to sell anything.

Be generous, curious, and helpful.

Conclusion

Knowing what content to create and share to attract customers is a result of trial and error but with proper social listening, you can skip this step and know right on the spot what exactly your customers crave for.

With proper social listening, you penetrate into your audiences’ emotions.

And that’s invaluable when it comes to selling your product or service.