The Art Of Digital Listening, And Virtual Branding

We are all aware of online listening. We use it on a day-to-day basis to carry out business and marketing activities. Most brands use this ‘listening’ for brand tracking, getting customer feedback, engaging with customers, handling issues and complaints on various channels, as well as sharing and amplifying positive comments. This activity is followed by a detailed postmortem analysis, after which the process is repeated again, creating a cycle.

All tasks around listening are customer-centric, but I think it’s time that we gear up to become 'customer-obsessive'. Today’s marketer wants to know much more about their customers, to a level that if they had a choice, they would want to live with their customers to understand them better. With an increasing number of consumers going digital--500 million tweets, 1 billion Facebook posts, 3 million blog posts and 70 million Instagram posts are published each day--we have a possibility of living with our customers, virtually.  

Only a fool will think that it’s about the brand; it goes much beyond. Customers are emotional and expressive: They like and dislike things; they share what they feel; they comment on things, give opinions, and if we want to capture all this and be customer-obsessive, ‘social listening’ comes handy.

Outside-Insight

Today, it is not enough to monitor and listen to only Facebook, Twitter and blogs. You also have to the engage with the extended ecosystem that includes comments and reviews from e-commerce websites and forums. Such listening is essential to gather an insight into the buyer’s journey, and their holistic brand experience. As the future of companies depends more and more on data available outside the firewall of their organisation, this demand has given rise to the concept of ‘Outside Insight’.

This is how to listen smart

There is a possibility to get predictive analysis out of listening. Our buying decisions are usually dependent on several factors. For instance, whether we want to buy a t-shirt, a laptop or a decorative piece, the colour plays a crucial role in such decisions. Nobody understands the importance of colour better than Pantone, the colour-forecasting service. In 2015, Pantone forecast ‘Marsala’ as the colour of the season. Keeping this in mind, Meltwater conducted a search on the colour and the results discovered conversations scouting for products in the trending colour. However, not many brand campaigns targeted the colour. Listening to such insights can help brands incorporate predictive designing and further deepen engagement with their potential customers.

For smart listening, brands must adopt the the SMART principle: Specific, Measurable, and Attainable, Result-oriented & Time-bound, to make optimal use of their listening tools.  

MARSALA COLOUR OF 2015, PANTONE

                                                   MARSALA SEARCH RESULTS, MELTWATER 2015

Maximise relevance, and eliminate irrelevance

Data can be overwhelming, and if not arranged and segmented properly, it may not be helpful in making strategic business decisions. Therefore, Boolean logic that uses operators such as and, or, near, ingress etc. can be incorporated along with keywords to get relevant and targeted information.

Boolean Operators:

Marketers must think from consumer's perspective and device these Booleans to get actionable insights.

“We want to find what are NRI’s talking about in general in India. Based on their interest, we would design content and marketing strategy?," a big real-estate client said.

In such situations, a keyword such as “NRI” may not be mentioned by an NRI in every conversation. Therefore, keywords related to events, likes, dislikes, festivals, travels etc. must be used to get relevant results. For instance, Diwali, Pravasi Bhartiya Divas/NRI day etc. may help.

                                                               MAXIMIZING RELEVANCY

The ever changing APIs

We are a part of an evolving digital environment where API’s (application programming interface) change frequently, from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram. Marketers must constantly adapt to these changes in order to execute their tasks. Similarly, as business demands have become more research-oriented, expectations from listening tools have also risen. Listening tools are also adapting to such requirements and are becoming smarter and sophisticated. However, no listening tool is perfect. A marketer must adopt the SMART principle along with relevant keywords to take maximum advantage of the listening technology.

What can we achieve with listening?

1. Competition benchmarking: Keeping an eye on what consumers are saying about the competitors can help the company analyse their strengths, weaknesses and positioning. This is essential for business strategy.

2. Content Strategy: Discovering current and popular topics to create engaging content relevant for the target audience.

3. Relationship management: Strengthening relationships with existing customers by reducing response times, addressing feedback and complaints in an appropriate and timely manner.

4. Customer acquisition: Following conversations to discover newer prospects to expand the business.

5. Influencer management: Finding an appropriate source for collaboration, inclined with the brand image and product category.

6. Monitoring: Tracking digital activity in the internal and external environment.

7. Workflow management: Disseminating critical information internally and identifying best practices for better workflow management.

8. Predictive analysis: Planning ahead by anticipating crisis situations based on industry trends or forecasting future trends based on consumer patterns.
    

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