Turning Digital Listening Into New Business Opportunities

The New Way of Marketing

Family conversations, hangouts, and our daily tasks have somehow made their way into connecting us to the virtual world. We have stopped having conversations in person in exchange for having conversations with our phones. Some of us are using online translators to speak and respond to one another. This has created a new social communication in which we have become almost dependent on. The more consumers become more dependent on the virtual world, the more businesses need to utilize social listening in order to track, understand, and respond to the conversations that are going on across the internet.

What Is Social Listening

Your everyday scrolling through Instagram or Facebook could potentially lead to you understanding what your customers want—one post or video could change your view for the better. As we spend our time looking through our potential customers’ page, their interests, and likes we want to use a CRM system (customer relationship management) to organize this information and understand their needs. 

Social Listening is tracking, analyzing, monitoring, and responding to conversations across the internet; it’s virtual research that has become one of the core principles of marketing through social media. It enables us to connect ourselves with people from all over to understand and analyze their way of living. In turn, we can use that information to better respond to them and give them what they actually want. There are free social listening tools such as  Google Alerts, Hashtagify, Social Mention, and Tweetdeck which make it easier to get connected. Social listening gives us the opportunity to measure the performance of our social media, content creation strategy, and conversations to see what kind of impact our content has on our audiences' engagment. This requires spending a lot of time online, scrolling through different social media platforms, looking at different kinds of accounts, observing the comments and likes on posts, and keeping track of followers. This is the way we do marketing research in the 21^st century.

How Social Listening Meets Influencer Marketing

YouTube, most popular with the 18-49-demographic, has transformed itself over the years by becoming the 2^nd largest platform today. According to Hubspot, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, 5 billion videos are watched every single day, and it has some of the highest referral rates of all the social platforms. One of YouTube’s sensations, James Charles, went from having three million subscribers on the platform to thirteen million in less than three years; views on his videos are constantly increasing—one video he created with Kylie Jenner reached more than 24 million views. The nineteen-year-old created an eyeshadow palette with Morphe, a makeup brand, which was sold out in a matter of minutes. The approach Morphe took by partnering with James Charles is an example of Social Listening by doing their research digitally for their next big creation; they tracked and analyzed his following, monitored his conversations and views on their brand, and saw the exponential growth in his subscriber base. 

They identified that his biggest fans are young makeup lovers, analyzed which of his videos featuring Morphe products had done well with his following and which had performed poorly, and learned about his opinion about their brand’s products. According to Hubspot, 67% of people are more likely to purchase the product if their friend or family member mentioned it on social media; word-of-mouth has become the heart of marketing on social media as it has created the definition of being an ‘influencer.’ Before creating the palette, Morphe decided to give Charles his own promotional code that he could mention in his videos; “use code James for 10% off” has become so popular that he even created his own merchandise with the saying on it. Morphe saw James Charles’ influence, as his videos had reached millions, and decided to offer him a deal that would allow them to create a new product, The James Charles Palette, for their consumers.

Going forward, tracking and monitoring this success, looking for mentions on social media, hashtags for the palette, likes, shares, views, as well as engagement for this particular product are important next steps for Morphe. The product could later lead to new business opportunities that will help generate more leads and aid in setting strategic benchmarks for the future. They knew that Charles’ word-of-mouth influence would lead them to millions in sales as well as help increase their brand awareness with their customers. 

Influencer Outreach

It is just as important to connect with influencers who aren't micro-influencers yet to generate leads as your interaction and communication with them will be very genuine and real. All the influencers that are big started as micro-influencers and have built up from there; they have to start somewhere in order to increase their followings, so why shouldn't you be the first to introduce them to the internet world. You never know, your way of connecting with them might be their way of connecting with the world.

At first, you might not be able to connect  with someone who has millions of followers, but building your way through by connecting with others will help you become more educated and experienced in this area of marketing. Start small, identify and message some of the influencers you are interested in working with, try the word-of-mouth approach by telling your friends about it, network inside and outside your area to build the community that will help you shape your brand better, and will later enable you to reach those influencers.

It is important to know which influencers you want to connect with as their audience should somewhat match with your’s. This requires searching and scrolling through different social media platforms, saving pictures of the ones that might intertwine with your brand, and brainstorming ideas of how you would go about approaching them. Some influencer management tools include FollowerWonk, Kred, and PeerIndex, which can help you better search for influencers in your industry.

The Eye of Social Listening: Customers ALWAYS Take The Center Stage

Both brands and influencers revolve around customers and they should both use social listening to understand their desires. Brands search for influencers that share similar audiences and goals, then the influencers reach out and connect with the potential customers, and collaborate with the brands to reach back out to the customers. It's a cycle that needs one another to exist. In the end, customers are the ones we are trying to satisfy.

The Eye Diagram represents the brand, influencer, and customer relationship. The pupil represents the inner part of an eye, therefore, it represents customers who rely on influencers’ recommendations. The next layer, or iris, represents the influencers reaching out to their followings. Finally, the outer part of the eye represents the brands who reach out to influencers. The most critical idea to take away is that brands need to reach influencers to reach the consumers. 

21^st Century Research

Social Listening is one way we can explore the new ways we need to navigate the virtual world as marketers. It now helps us connect and respond to all the ongoing conversations across multiple channels to further discover the different courses of evolving and growing. Utilizing social listening translates into the better creation of products and messaging for our consumers, which will lead to developing original content and maximizing profits.

Is your current way of marketing as fun as this digital age method?

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