Buyers don’t fall for generic marketing campaigns anymore. They respond better to meaningful and personalized marketing touchpoints.
Think about it: would you rather click on ads of random products or click on ads showing targeted product recommendations based on your search history?
💡 Read Social Listening Guide: Proven Hacks, Strategies, and Tools
Not just ads, personalization can work wonders for building a community around your brand and gaining customers’ trust. That’s where a social listening strategy becomes your silver bullet. Social listening gives you a clear lens into buyers’ preferences and helps build tailored marketing campaigns.
This article will give you six proven tactics to leverage social listening for personalizing your digital marketing efforts.
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is monitoring social media activity for all users that fall into your target audience. It analyzes people’s posts, comments, questions, and overall behavior toward your brand or competing companies.
Tracking this activity can give you concrete insights into your target buyers, such as:
- Biggest pain points and challenges
- Expectations for the ideal solution
- Motivations to use your solution
- Complaints and feedback
Social listening has a macro scope where you can broadly monitor people’s activity and derive insights from public conversations. This differs from social media monitoring, where you focus specifically on your brand-related activity.
Read Complete Guide to Social Listening: Proven Hacks, Strategies, and Tools
6 Proven Tactics to Leverage Social Listening for Personalization
Social listening relies on natural language processing and data mining to extract content from social media and turn this data into actionable insights. You can create more laser-focused digital marketing campaigns with an excellent social listening setup and personalize the buyer experience.
Let’s break down six best practices for using social listening to level up your digital marketing efforts.
1. Get a pulse of your target buyers in real time
Social listening gives you real-time context about your target audience—what matters to them, the topics they’re responding to, their top preferences, and many more insights.
Besides getting to know your buyers better, monitoring their conversations helps you understand customer sentiment. When you know how potential buyers would react to different themes and campaigns, you can tailor your marketing efforts across channels to strike an instant connection with them.
Actively listening to your buyers is also great for identifying where they need help and how you can offer more empathetic support. This pays dividends in the long run by building your reputation as a customer-centric brand.
Here’s a great example by Swiggy about how brands can use social listening to identify customer issues and resolve these challenges through 1:1 support.
The bottom line: you can leverage social listening to develop data-backed marketing campaigns and deliver thoughtful support online.
2. Create targeted messaging to resonate with your audience
Another surefire way to use social listening is to create value-based messages for building your brand appeal.
Let’s look at it this way: when you know potential buyers are fed up with specific problems with your competitors, you can use that to your advantage and deliver personalized messages. This adds credibility to your name and draws attention from the right people.
For example, Floik used social listening to understand users’ biggest frustrations when using Loom. They used these insights to highlight their features and speak directly to frustrated Loom users.
Use these handy tips to use social listening for creating targeted messaging:
- Identify the values that matter most to your audience and their top interests
- Find problems making life difficult for your buyers and what’s causing these issues
- Track trends and global events to understand how your audience reacts to these changes
Besides these three aspects, remember to segment your audience based on their behavior, demographics, and preferences. This segmentation can help in creating more relevant and high-impact messages. You can also use this segmentation to run targeted Facebook ads.
Read 5 Proven Methods to Find Leads Using Social Listening
3. Optimize market positioning and brand reputation
Social listening can strengthen your positioning and establish credibility for your brand. You can track what people are saying about competitors in your industry and use their shortcomings to build a positive perception of your business.
Follow these tips to optimize your positioning:
- Competitor analysis: Gauge people’s feedback for other companies and benchmark their performance through these public conversations.
- Sentiment monitoring: See what users in your vertical are talking about and understand the emotions behind these thoughts.
- Relationship building: Engage with people sharing relevant content or expressing grievances about competitors to cultivate healthy relationships.
- Handling issues: Offer prompt and helpful responses to customer complaints and position yourself as a caring brand.
The goal is to leverage social listening to create a positive and appealing reputation in the market. This will also help in constantly improving your market positioning.
4. Gain crucial feedback to understand customer expectations
Another critical tactic to use social listening is for strategically mapping customer expectations.
What are the most important needs that customers expect from your brand? How are these expectations evolving? Which brands are meeting and not meeting these expectations? You can answer many similar questions based on your social listening setup.
Besides, user feedback on social media, forums, and third-party review platforms can keep you on top of customer needs. This is also helpful in prioritizing these needs—whether a particular product/service is a deal-breaker or a good-to-have. So you can plan your growth roadmap and innovate your offering accordingly.
With customer feedback also comes the opportunity to identify problems creating friction in the customer journey. If you can identify and troubleshoot these issues quickly, you can minimize any damage to your reputation.
Read Consumer Behavior Analysis 101: How to Learn More About Your Customers
5. Enhance your retargeting ad campaigns
A proven tactic for personalizing digital marketing with social listening is planning retargeting ad campaigns. Tracking users’ expectations and concerns gives you granular insights into every user’s activity.
So, if somebody mentions a competitor brand on social media, you can run targeted ads to spotlight your brand as a better alternative. Make this ad value-packed by listing key differentiators that give you an edge over other brands.
Moreover, you can also use social listening data to optimize your ads’ timing. You’ll be aware of when your audience is most active and engaged on a particular platform, like Twitter or when using LinkedIn for lead generation.
Another way to look at it is to use retargeting ads to show potential buyers and first-time customers that you care. If they face any troubles in the buying experience, you can create meaningful ads to explain how you’ve improved the process. This helps in building trust and effectiveness of your ads.
Here’s an example by Madewell, where the apparel brand retargeted potential buyers with personalized product recommendations.
6. Stay on top of market trends and shift gears quickly
Lastly, you can leverage social listening tools to be aware of changing market trends and stay ahead of your competitors. Here’s how you can do that:
- Analyze social media conversations to differentiate between positive and negative sentiments for brands in your industry
- Keep a close check on your competitors and how their audience is reacting to their offerings
- Get predictive analysis based on historical data analysis and get ahead of future trends with proactive strategizing
- Prepare for agile responses by repositioning your brand as per market shifts and making timely decisions
- Get a global perspective to scale your business internationally with the support of public conversations
In essence, you can make your business stronger and more adaptive to market circumstances.
Build a Robust Social Listening and Monitoring Setup with Determ
If you want to reap the rewards of social listening but don’t know where to start, Determ has you covered.
With Determ, you can discover the right channels for focusing your marketing efforts and learn more about your audience’s behavior. The AI Synthia feature will help you identify and analyze user sentiment while you tailor your messages based on multiple metrics.
The best part? Your Determ dashboard combines user activity from all channels in a single place to give you deeper visibility. Sounds cool? Book a demo to learn more!
Eduard Klein is an International Digital Growth Marketer, Blogger, and Online Business Coach with a global mindset. He guides through the process of starting and growing a digital business, and riding the wave of digital technology and marketing without getting swept away.