Based on a survey by Gartner, 65% of business decisions made today are more complex than they were two years ago. But so is the business environment.
Whether it’s the fact that there is a huge rise of new businesses (and competition) from year to year, new technologies, or something else, one thing is very clear – the business landscape has never been harsher and making the right business decisions never more important.
💡 Read Social Listening Guide: Proven Hacks, Strategies, and Tools
But there is something that can make any decision-making process much more straightforward – it’s data. Data about industry trends, your competitors, your marketing/PR campaigns, performance, products/services, your brand image, etc.
And in order to acquire all of this data you can hire a couple of dozens of people to search for all of this manually and all over the place. Or you can implement a simple yet powerful element into your business – a social listening tool.
Up now: social listening essentials, data, tips on what to do with them, and one great social listening tool. Stick around to find out how all of these are connected and how they can make reaching your business decisions as easy as A,B,C.
Why Social Listening?
Social listening is the process of tracking specific mentions/keywords and analyzing them to get valuable insights on business opportunities you might be missing. It is basically market research on a much higher and more straightforward level. You learn directly from what your customers share about your product, industry and competitors. What is more, with the right tool, you can get all of this information in real-time. In this way, it’s making it possible for you to act immediately if necessary.
And in comes Determ.
What is Determ?
Determ is a social listening and brand monitoring tool that crawls over 100 million online sources for mentions you’re interested in and delivers them to you in real-time.
How is that different from googling?
Read Media Tracking VS Googling: What gives better results?
Well, it goes much deeper into the matter than just listing the results. You can see the entire context of every mention. In addition, the sources include websites, forums, review sites, and social media, and you can see the reach, engagement, interactions and the sentiment of every mention enlisted.
And for you to grasp all this data quickly, all of this is available in PR reports and presented visually through charts and graphs. This way, you can easily track trends and compare your results with previous periods. Its powerful features, make it an essential tool in any PR and/or marketing department or agency. The data it provides are the perfect starting point for any new marketing/PR campaign.
Here are a couple more ways Determ can help you in the decision-making process.
How Can Determ Help You Make Business Decisions
1. Get a better understanding of your brand reputation
Are you sure you know how people perceive your brand? How do you measure that?
Here’s a tip: checking out the popular media is not enough, because your customers are also talking about your company on other platforms. And they do it lot. So, in order to track these conversations, you will need a social listening tool.
A total of 71% of businesses believe that social listening brings valuable customer insights that they can share with other departments. Shocking? Not really. Social listening is like conducting thorough market research, only better. You get honest opinions, not influenced by pre-set and simulated surroundings like in focus groups and official surveys. You can quickly discover what bothers your customers, what makes them happy, and how they feel about whatever you are working on.
Let’s see what you can find out with Determ.
After you insert your brand name in Determ, you’ll see the source of your topic, its influence, and engagement. Also, you’ll get the context of the mention, and you will be able to check out the sentiment of each result.
Finally, you will be able to filter your results by these metrics and get a better understanding of how your company is perceived on each channel respectively. Also, you will see which words people usually use alongside your brand name, get demographical data and find out which markets mention you the most.
All of this is important when you’re planning a new marketing/PR strategy or trying to make new business decisions. You might want to reconsider your strategy if you find out that they’re mentioned in a negative context or that you’re mentioned on a specific market that you weren’t covering.
2. Identify growth opportunities
Keeping in touch with what’s relevant in the industry is a must if you’d like your business to perform well. The core of social listening lies exactly there – tracking what is going on and responding appropriately. Moreover, it gives you a broader understanding of why something is happening. By monitoring your brand, industry, competitors, and campaigns on a regular basis, it is much easier to predict trends, adapt and, as a result, increase your customer satisfaction, improve your products and grow revenue.
One of the best examples of social listening done right comes from Netflix. Through social listening, they realized that many of their users fall asleep while watching the shows. At first, this doesn’t seem like a big issue. But Netflix saw an opportunity there and introduced a new product called Netflix socks. These socks detect when the user falls asleep and send a signal to the TV to pause the show. In this way, they tried to ensure that the user won’t miss a minute of their favorite show and wake up frustrated and confused about a plot they don’t understand.
The news of this product went viral. Media all around the globe covered the story, and Netflix got a Shorty award for the creative use of technology. This only proves that social listening takes you one step closer to your next success story.
Read 5 Easy Ways to Keep Track of Business Communication
3. Stay updated on everything your competitors are doing
Tracking your competitors’ actions and how customers respond to them is an integral part of every marketing strategy. But instead of scrolling endlessly through their social media channels and websites, you can get all this info through a social listening tool like Determ.
Simply open a folder within Determ and insert all your competitors as topics. You will be able to see what’s being said about them online, whether they’re perceived positively or negatively, and in which markets they’re most mentioned.
Read Competitor Analysis: Stay Ahead of Competition with Media Monitoring
How can this influence your business decisions?
You can find out if they’re present in an exciting market that you haven’t tackled yet. You can also see how their marketing campaigns are perceived, learn from their mistakes and see how they deal with crises. And all of that within a single dashboard.
To top it all off, you can pull out a Competitive Analysis report from your Determ account. This report compares any two topics you’ve set up. So for example, if you’re tracking your brand name and the names of your competitors, you will get a result like this:
4. Get notified when there’s a potential crisis in the making
Here’s a million-dollar question – how many angry rants and crises could have been excellent customer service stories if companies tracked their online mentions? Probably very many.
It’s easy to react when an angry customer tags you in a social media post or sends an email to your customer service. But what if they don’t?
Read 5 Ways Social Listening Can Help You Make Better Business Decisions
With Determ you can set up real-time alerts for any mention you want. So, for example, if you’d like to know whenever your company name is mentioned online, you can set up a real-time alert. After that, you’ll receive instant notifications via Slack, email or your mobile app whenever your company is mentioned. This way, you can react immediately when you’re mentioned in a negative context. On the other hand, you can also create a nice customer story around a positive mention and further strengthen your brand image.
Taco Bell is one of those companies that utilize the power of social listening to the fullest.
They are famous for interacting with their customers and other brands on social media. They are also known for keeping customer service a top priority. So when the company’s social listening team noticed that their customers were very disappointed with the cheese in Quesalupa, they started sending out instructions to restaurants on how to improve the quality and follow the recipe correctly to ensure customer satisfaction.
Reacting to cases like these prevents crises from happening and ensures product quality in the long run.
Read Four Crisis Management Steps to Take to Stop a Disaster
5. Download a report to get a clear overview of everything you need for your business
Determ provides you with a ton of data. But what is more, it also packs all this information into clear and user-friendly reports that you can download within minutes. Based on what you need, you can download a basic or an advanced report or export a competitive analysis.
These reports will give you a clear overview of information like:
- Number of mentions
- Total impressions
- All sources
- Mentions over time
- Sentiment Analysis
- Sentiment by sources
- Locations
- Word Cloud – words used in the same context as your topic, etc.
Based on this overview, you may decide for example, that you want to increase your marketing efforts on a channel with the highest engagement or that you’d like to change the sentiment on a specific social media platform. Either way, this report is where you should start when planning on doing something new.
Read 5 PR Report Templates and Hacks to Instantly Prove the Value of Your Work
To Sum Up
There isn’t a universal business recipe that guarantees that the business decisions you’ve made are right. In the end, it’s all a game of ventures and analyses to an extent. But what is definitely certain is that the more data you have on all your business processes, the more informed you’ll be.
In this context, it is much easier to make beneficial business decisions, and it’s a lot harder to make a mistake. And if there’s one thing that a great social listening tool like Determ can give you, it’s tons of extremely useful data.