How Social Listening Can Amplify Your Digital Marketing and Email Campaign Results
Turn Your Audience Dialogue into Business Growth: Social Listening's Impact on Marketing Strategies.
You have a social media content strategy – but do you have a social listening one?
Didn’t think so. You might not even know there was such a thing as social listening. After all, how can you simultaneously be social and listen?
Good question.
This guide covers everything from the basics to how to use social listening to boost your digital marketing strategy.
What is Social Listening?
The Difference Between Social Listening and Social Monitoring
Why Social Listening is Important in Digital Marketing
Improve Your Email Marketing Campaigns With Social Listening
How a Copywriter Can Leverage Social Listening for Your Business
In this highly competitive digital era, standing out from the crowd is getting harder and harder.
Social listening isn’t anything new. But practices have changed significantly in recent years. More consumers use social media to share opinions and feedback in real time.
Social listening measures consumer sentiment – revealing how your audience feels about your brand, products, or services. Used correctly, it offers priceless insights to improve your digital marketing strategy.
As a copywriter, harnessing the power of social listening is one of my main roles. Allowing me to write copy that speaks directly to your audience.
Social listening lets me:
Understand your audience’s needs, sentiments, and preferences better.
Develop a content strategy that aligns with your audience’s interests and behaviors.
Create personalized content for your blog posts, email campaigns, and social media posts.
Improve your email marketing campaigns by segmenting your subscribers based on interests and engagement.
Transform your marketing efforts and schedule a free 30-minute Strategy Discover Call.
I’ll share with you some ways you can use social listening to bridge the gap between gathering customer insights and creating compelling content to engage with your audience effectively.
Let’s begin with a clear understanding of what social listening is.
What is Social Listening?
It involves monitoring your social media channels and online activity for discussion about your brand, product, or service.
You follow, analyze, and respond to online convos your potential customers have about your business. Acting like a private investigator, you spy on your audience. Gaining valuable insights into what they think, feel, or say about your brand.
That’s the first part.
The second part requires dissecting the tone of voice, sentiment, and context of these conversations. By actively, intentionally, and strategically listening to your audience, you amplify your messaging and marketing strategy.
Here are some questions to help get you started with social media listening:
Who is my audience?
How does my audience feel about my brand?
What do they say about my competitors, both positively and negatively?
What unmet needs and frustrations does my audience have?
What goals and desires does my audience have?
What questions do they most commonly ask about my products or services?
Nearly 66% of marketers agree the value of social listening has increased in the last year (1).
Many social listening tools are available to help you in gathering this insightful market research. These tools enable you to monitor keywords, hashtags, trending content, and other mentions of your brand in real time.
The results show how current and potential customers feel about your brand and your competition.
Social listening often gets confused with social monitoring. They sound the same, but in fact, have different purposes when it comes to your marketing strategies.
The Difference Between Social Listening and Social Monitoring.
Social listening includes monitoring and analyzing your audience to gather valuable information that can improve your brand.
On the other hand, social monitoring involves observing and tracking your audience’s comments about your brand. Then respond directly to these comments through social media.
Here’s another way to think about these two:
Social monitoring tracks what people are saying. And social listening analyzes why they’re saying these things.
The goal of social media monitoring is to respond to your audience quickly. The goal of social media listening is to collect valuable information.
Three main differences between social listening and monitoring include:
Micro vs. Macro.
Social monitoring operates on a micro level identifying any mention of your brand on a large scale.
It focuses on customers' questions, concerns, and comments by checking social media channels and platforms for relevant info. And quickly responding to it.
Social listing is the opposite and is done on a macro level.
The focus is on how your audience feels about your brand and the entire industry. Social listening gauges where your brand stands by analyzing:
Customers' conversations
Competitors
Other industry experts
One helps you see a bigger picture, and the other focuses on the details.
2. Short-Term vs. Long-Term.
Social media monitoring is a short-term solution.
It’s a reactive approach. Your audience makes the first move, such as posting a complaint, comment, or question. Then you react or respond accordingly.
Social media listening, on the other hand, focuses on long-term solutions. It’s a proactive approach. You take the initiative to listen to your audience’s conversations and find ways to meet their needs or concerns.
Social listening isn’t about a quick fix for your customers. It’s about finding any gaps or shortcomings and creating long-term solutions.
3. Insights Driven vs. Data Driven.
Social monitoring tells you who said what, where, when, why, and with what impact. It involves tracking and collecting metrics that give you data-driven insights.
These insights include:
Specific mentions
Hashtags
Keywords
Social listening is insight-driven.
Social listening analyzes the data collected through your social monitoring to gain insights into your audience and understand how they think and feel about your brand. You step into your audience’s shoes and proactively respond to their needs.
Bottom line: Social monitoring is looking at your data and social listening is looking into it.
Both serve a valuable purpose when it comes to your online marketing strategies. But since this article is about social listening, let’s stay on track and discuss how social listening impacts digital marketing.
Why Social Listening is Important in Digital Marketing.
Your audience wants to feel heard above all. They want assurance that their interest always comes first in your priorities.
Often businesses forget this when it comes to their digital marketing strategies.
Consider if your online marketing strategy includes:
Reliance on traditional marketing research, such as surveys or focus groups.
Use of a one-way communication model.
Creation of generic content based on assumed interests.
Reactive responses to comments and complaints.
A one-size-fits-all messaging approach.
Strategy development based on your goals and benchmarks.
A sole focus on isolated points of conversion and engagement.
If you answered yes to any of these questions, chances are social listening isn’t a part of your digital marketing strategy.
Incorporating social listening changes your digital marketing efforts entirely. It becomes an “audience-focused” digital marketing strategy.
This means you:
Shift from traditional marketing research to focusing on consumer sentiments and trends.
Engage in two-way communication by seeking audience feedback.
Create content based on real-time feedback instead of generic topics.
Be proactive, not just reactive, in engaging with challenges and conversations.
Tailor messaging to meet diverse needs.
Analyze competitors for gaps in their strategies.
Reflect on social media’s influence on the buyer journey instead of isolating conversions.
So, how does this look in real life?
Imagine you’re a family law attorney posting on divorce, child custody, estate planning, and probate. Monitoring audience interactions lets you address questions and uncover common needs.
Discovering your audience’s keen interest in estate planning might inspire you to create an eBook based on their questions. Offering this eBook as a free download in exchange for email addresses builds trust and rapport with your audience. And allows for ongoing communication.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Each new eBook download expands your email list, allowing further engagement. Regular newsletters offer legal tips and firm updates. And each email offers a free consultation.
Your entire digital marketing strategy was born through social listening.
If social listening can elevate your digital marketing efforts, imagine what it can do with your email marketing campaigns.
Improve Your Email Marketing Campaigns With Social Listening.
With the ever-changing digital landscape, understanding and responding to your audience’s needs has never been more important. Or easier. Thanks to social listening.
Social listening lets your business tap into your audience’s feedback at this moment. It provides intimate access to what your customers think, feel, and say about your brand in real-time.
This feedback helps you make email campaigns that:
Resonate with your audience
Boost engagements
Increase conversion
Incorporating social listening in your email marketing strategy allows for meaningful conversations with your subscribers. You get to talk about topics they truly care about.
Here are four ways to use social media listening to improve your email marketing.
Segmentation and Personalization.
Segmenting your audience is dividing your email subscribers into specific groups based on certain criteria. This could be demographics, past behaviors, buying history, or levels of engagement.
Social listening helps with segmentation by identifying the most relevant trends, topics, and conversations amongst your audience.
Email segmentation results in personalized messaging. A much more effective way to communicate with your subscriber.
However, personalizing is more than using the recipient's first name.
It involves tailoring communication to speak to the needs and preferences of each segment. You want your readers to feel that the email was written specifically for them.
2. Content Inspiration.
This means finding topics that capture your audience’s interests and creating content around it.
When you create content on topics your audience actually cares about you:
Captivate and engage them
Encourage them to open your emails
Increase levels of interaction and conversion
Social listening gives you direct access to your audience’s raw and unfiltered thoughts and feelings.
You can spot trends and popular topics of interest. Pay attention to your audience’s conversations, comments, and feedback. They’ll provide you with a wealth of content ideas. All you have to do is listen.
And because these ideas came directly from your audience, you know there’s interest.
3. Timing and Frequency.
Timing refers to choosing the best moment to send out your emails. Frequency focuses on how often. Both are crucial when tracking metrics such as open rates and engagement.
Social listening reveals when your audience is most active and engaged on social media. More often than not, these are great times to send emails.
Use social listening to:
Understand your audience’s weekly and daily routines and patterns.
Adjust how often you send emails based on engagement levels.
Identify when your audience is talking about season topics or upcoming events.
Sending emails at the right time builds a stronger, more engaged relationship with your subscribers. Both drive better results from your email marketing campaign efforts.
4. Improving Your CTAs.
Improve your CTAs with your social listening insights. Use the information and trends collected to reveal to you the specific action you want your subscribers to take.
You get direct access to uncovering what motivates your audience to take action by analyzing their engagement, conversations, and feedback.
Tips to create audience-inspired CTAs in your email marketing campaign include:
Identify what motivates your audience to take action and what obstacles are in their way.
Leverage trending topics or frequently discussed subjects and incorporate them into your CTAs.
Use social listening to help segment your audience and customize each CTA based on their needs and behavior.
Ask for direct feedback on your CTAs through email responses and social media engagement so you can refine them.
Include testimonials and positive social media feedback in your emails as part of your CTAs.
If you listen carefully, you’ll learn what your audience wants and what’s stopping them. Helping you create CTAs that work.
Social listening is key when crafting a successful email marketing strategy.
How a Copywriter Can Leverage Social Listening for Your Business.
Social listening is a game-changer for your business. It has the power to transform your marketing efforts from “shooting in the dark” to acting with precision.
Are you ready to:
Grow your online business
Refine your marketing efforts
Connect with your audience in a personal way
Develop an email campaign that converts
Then you need to start listening to what your audience is saying.
As a marketing strategist and copywriter, I’m an expert in social listening. Let me connect social insights to personalized messages and strategic content seamlessly.
Start integrating social listening into your marketing by scheduling a free 30-Minute Strategy Discovery Call.
Your audience will thank you.
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