Social listening, along with excellent verbal communication skills, can make you unstoppable in crafting social media content that not only converts but also giving an exciting and rewarding experience for your audience.
But simply liking comments, responding to questions, and reading through mentions will not turn you into an active social media listener. It requires the right amount of patience, research, and hard work to be able to send them the message that they want to receive.
In this post, we will talk about the ways social media listening can boost your sales and grow your business over time.
Initiate sales leads
When people are looking for the best products and services out there, they already have several options at their fingertips.
For instance, by making just a quick search on Amazon, customers can already encounter plenty of customer reviews that help create their buyer’s journey. Also, more and more people turn to social media.
Looking for recommendations using these platforms already gives them excellent responses from people whom they can trust. Facebook even made the recommendations feature to serve this purpose.
According to https://voymedia.com/, “Social listening allows you to turn these customers into leads. By identifying who these people are early on, you can easily step into the picture and offer your product as a solution.”
Just do not go in for the hard sell though, because this can be a major turn off to your prospects.
Stay friendly and courteous, offer a free sample or trial if you can. Even if your lead would not convert in the end, they will still remember that gesture, which will help form a relationship later on.
Boost awareness
By constantly being aware of who talks about you and what they are saying, you can better understand and protect your reputation in today’s highly competitive market.
After all, it is always healthy that you monitor your brand’s online reputation from time to time.
Social media is one of the platforms where people get to express themselves naturally, without any barriers. Therefore, it is a great place to know how the market perceives your product.
What social listening does is that it gives you a bird’s eye view of mentions, conversations, and sentiments about your brand. You are also aware of the type of trends that they follow. As a result, you can create your content accordingly.
Gain Customers
Social listening allows you to identify your target audience’s core interests, and then come up with a product that is perfectly tailored to meet their needs and desires.
By utilizing an effective social listening tool, you can easily promote your products and find interested customers. When you understand when and where to solve these problems, attracting the right people is far easier than other means.
Social listening allows you to discover the platforms where most of your target audience hang out often, as well as the type of content that they need and love consuming. As a result, you will know how you can improve your customer experience.
Better understand your prospects
Social listening, at its very core, is eavesdropping. The difference, though, is that it is professional and measurable.
In social media, prospects are as honest as they can be. That way, you are sure that the insight that you are getting from them is authentic. Also, this insight that you get is beneficial for improving your sales strategy in the long run.
If you do not know how to position yourself through your sales strategy, you will eventually fall flat. But creating an approach that is based on customer insights will help you boost your conversions in the long run.
Utilize your social listening strategy to come up with highly detailed profiles of your prospects, the language they speak, their behaviors, and types of people that they follow on social media, and so on.
When you have all of this information, you can easily master your sales strategy and then personalize it for different customer segments.
Offers advice and authority
While some utilize social listening to look for customers who are seeking recommendations, others use it for those who offer advice.
Although it might seem counterintuitive at first, having a strong sales strategy is not all about getting a lot of revenues and sales.
Social listening helps your brand become more visible on the awareness phase of a customer’s journey. Look for people who are struggling with specific issues that are also related to your own niche, then connect with them to offer advice.
This works especially well in the B2B industry wherein a lot of prospects are more likely to seek advice, and then network with other professionals in their industry.
You will not be boosting your conversions overnight. However, your brand will be exposed to a wider audience, creating a meaningful relationship that will serve as a strong foundation for sales in the future.
People are more likely to remember you if you are authoritative, informative, and engaging, prompting them to become returning customers.
Instead of having an aggressive sales approach, choose to offer advice and helpful tips instead. Craft a powerful content strategy. As a solution, link out to relevant blog posts. That way, people are more likely to discover your products and services naturally, instead of being forced to.
Create a long-lasting relationship
When you use social listening, you are actually buying yourself a lifetime of customers.
Start to connect and build lasting relationships with your audience so that they know that you are there, listening to their appreciation or complaints.
Also, do not just respond with criticism. Instead, choose to embrace it.
Over to You
Social listening should play a key role in your business’ strategy. When used the right way, it can help you get new leads, form new customer relationships, or improve your value in your client’s eyes.
Therefore, use a strategy like social listening, to your advantage. Whatever kind of social listening tool you use, have a plan beforehand so that you know what to do with the data the moment you have it.