Intelligence is understanding your customers
The key to learning about how customers relate to your brand is through insight and engagement — generate a dialogue with them surrounding your products and services.
Conversations that prompt and increase “likes” and “retweets” are just at the surface in how consumers perceive your company. Nik Harta, leading marketer and founder of Yolo Communications explains the importance of using technology for social listening and then qualitatively interpreting the data into social media intelligence to accelerate marketing strategies and customer engagement.
Voices of Innovation
Social media intelligence can help steer the future of your brand by uncovering the different ways that people are actually using your products and expose any new use cases.
This sampling in real-time also reveals any issues that consumers are experiencing and the emotional drivers between them and your brand. Your next generation products can address these findings in line with new trends and also help with creating customer retention strategies by avoiding customer pain-points. “From the millions of voices, tune in to the ones driving the future,” says Nik.
Accurate Insights
Nik stresses the importance of diving into a consumer’s world without preconceptions or intrusions to accurately learn the real needs of your customers, what purchase cycles consumers pass through and exactly who are the people talking about your brand including the advocates and influencers.
Social intelligence addresses these points by allowing social users to be broken down beyond demographics into focus groups to enable customer segmentation for highly targeted social media campaigns. Text can be combed and interpreted by emotion, sentiment and the situational circumstances out of which consumer commentary praising or complaining arises.
Audience Participation
Social media intelligence can not only help you decide on launching a new product or product revision but can also help you shape it. Nik encourages brands to, “invite the wisdom of the crowd to excel in the marketplace. Allow them to participate in social innovation.”
Learn how users would think about a new product, what features they expect and where they would go to buy it. You can generate responses to new concept ideas anonymously to gauge acceptance.
Nik suggests identifying and reaching out to social media users in your target groups: “Use social media as a specialist panel to recruit participants for interviews and trials, from hard-to-reach or geographically dispersed communities.”
Tailored Messages
Social media intelligence platforms help to identify and interact with influential followers with a specific credibility to underline your message. It’s also important to weigh-in on where consumers are discussing your brand and the differences in the various channels that can help shape your messaging and predict which social media venue may play a role in the near future.
Communication is always a two-way street and social media intelligence allows you to pinpoint emotive language and tone consumers really use about your brand and capture and distill the user-generated storylines that align with your brand’s value set. All of this is valuable intel in producing your creative and search optimization strategies.
Social Knowledge
“Social media intelligence provides a real-time understanding of consumer perception, awareness and overall sentiment of your brand and product lines, allowing you to keep abreast of developing trends to create products that people are interested in to ultimately drive sales,” concludes Nik.
Through social media your customers are really the ones that tell your story, so stop, look and listen in.
– Reproduced by kind permission of Joy Macko, Apache Tah Creative (ATC) –
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Follow Joy Macko on Twitter @joymacko