[3-minute read]
Italian shoe brand Milé ran a wonderful campaign in the nineties. The line read: “I don’t speak Italian, but I understand it.” While doing research for this article, it came to mind. So often people hear, but they don’t listen or understand. It’s much the same with brands. If you want to know more about your audience, you need to understand them, know where they are, what they’re up to, and what they’re talking about. You must walk a mile in their shoes. To do this, you must find and monitor the channels they hang out on and gather as much data as you can. When you’ve analysed all the data, you can adapt your marketing campaigns to follow the trends you’ve picked up. You can also tailor your social media content, campaigns, product descriptions, email messages, and customer service channels to suit the tone of voice and education level of your audience.
Social listening and monitoring
There’s a slight difference between social listening and social monitoring. Social monitoring keeps an eye on all your media channels and focuses on specific keywords and campaigns. Social listening is much broader than that. It tracks brand mentions, customer feedback, industry trends, and more.
Brand sentiment and health
Brand sentiment on social media sits at the heart of social analytics. It indicates whether the market feels positive, indifferent, or negative about your brand. NetBase Quid uses net sentiment and passion intensity to determine brand health. Net sentiment measures users’ emotional sentiment on a scale between +100 and -100. Passion intensity determines how passionate the positive or negative emotions are. It matters because a small percentage of very passionate customers normally make the most noise on social media. Sometimes positive, sometimes negative. It’s crucial to know where your brand normally lies and where the spikes are when you measure sentiment. It serves as a benchmark to compare campaigns with. Look at sentiments just before, during, and after you run a new campaign. If you notice spikes, you can work out how people felt about certain elements of your campaign and adapt them accordingly for next time.
Content that converts
The kind of content you post is crucial for engagement and conversion, so you need to get it right. If you search for your brand name and relevant hashtags, you’ll see which content resonates. Check what is shared and liked and which posts get the most comments. You can also keep an eye on topics that people talk about on the Internet that are relevant to your brand but are not directly about your products. HubSpot’s guide on social listening and relevant tools will take you through the process step-by-step guide.
In The Human Brand: How We Relate to People, Products & Companies, Chris Malone states that we relate to brands and companies in the same way we relate to people. Brands that manage to create loyalty amongst their audience succeed in humanising their products and services. They use social listening and, particularly, social sentiment to see what and how audiences relate to content. If you have questions like: Should I run a contest? Offer a special? Ask users to generate their own content? Social listening will give you the answers.
Soft touch on touchpoints
We can’t stress the importance of your customer’s journey enough. It comes down to tracing all the touch points a consumer can have with your brand, and personalising everything you do at every point. It will include emails, newsletters, your website and product pages, social media accounts, and chat functionality. Many brands pay lip service to this in their marketing campaigns. They promise that “your call is very important to us.” You know the drill. Very few of these brands live up to their promise, just try and call or mail or chat to any of them and see how long they take to answer, and if the answer is written by a human being. Something else to pay attention to is tone. It really does not do you any favours running very humorous campaigns on social media and your customer support speaking ‘Legalese’. An answer like, “We have to escalate this to our customer service department,” does not belong with a brand like Nando’s, for instance.
Speaking of walking a mile in your shoes, Truevo’s been around the block a couple of times and we understand that saving money is important to you. We also understand that customer service is much more than just paying lip service, it’s about providing the right information you need, when you need it, in the format you prefer. That’s why Truevo is much more than just a payments provider. We’re a business partner that will go the extra mile for you. Get in touch with us to find out how we can save you money with great customer service to boot. We can’t wait to work with you.
Did you resonate with this article? Feel free to share your thoughts and tag us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
