Target Your Audience By Listening To Them

By 'listening' to your customers, you're better placed to engage them with relevant marketing content. The more relevant your content is to readers, the more leads and conversions you'll generate. When you use the insights gained from social listening you can tweak your marketing strategy and with the help of greatcontent make it even more successful.

Social listening and your audience

What is social listening?

Social listening is all about monitoring your presence on social media. To be effective, it needs to be accurate, regular, and done in real-time:

• Accuracy: There are too many online conversations to try and track them all, so use keywords and phrases to fine-tune your monitoring process for accuracy.

• Regularity and immediacy: Check your media platforms regularly so you pick up activity straightaway. You need real-time responses to make a real impact.

Understand your audience

To create content that converts, you need to know who you're writing for and what your audience wants. Do this by listening to what is being said online. Find out what Google and other search engines are being asked. Delve into which topics are being 'hotly' discussed. Create a social listening strategy to gauge your audience and discover:

• its demographics - gender and age groups

• where it's located - nationally or internationally

• whether it shares common interests

• which jobs or professions it's engaged in.

Listening to the media

Tracking your brand online is the quickest way of seeing what people are saying about it. Positive reviews from happy customers show you're on the right track while negative comments should be seen as constructive criticism. Ask yourself:

• Are my products being photographed on Instagram and Pinterest? Which products are being photographed? Why are they being photographed?

• Am I receiving Twitter posts that I can quote in my marketing materials? Are the posts adding credibility to my products?

• Am I trending on Facebook with likes and followers?

Creating your own conversation

Focus on your social content

You may already be tracking your company's Facebook and Twitter pages for likes and followers. You may even be communicating in some form with your audience. Take this further by tracking which pieces of content your audience is sharing and, when creating your content, bear in mind that infographics and videos get much more traffic than blocks of text. Listen to what is trending in the world of your brand and build a new story around it to catch your audience's immediate attention. When you social listen in real-time, you're ready to respond to 'hot' topics and create new content almost instantly.

The power of influence

The power of influencers is definitely a hot topic and one you should be aware of (in 2019 there were nearly 13 million influencer posts sponsored by brands on Instagram alone). When influencers talk about products and brands their followers trust them as their opinions are not generally paid for. Tap into existing influential influencers while keeping an ear out for new ones (happy customers?) via your social listening. Once you've found one, forge a collaborative relationship with them. Work as a team to create content and then listen in as they successfully promote your products.

Develop market success with these social listening tools

With the right social listening tools in place, it's easy to monitor your social media platforms and analyse the data. Use these top five tools to start listening in now:

• Awario

• Brandwatch

• Mention

• Keyhole

• Hootsuite