How to Use Social Listening for Marketing Campaigns

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Illustration: Mobile Phone, with image of person's hand holding a megaphone, pointed towards a bar graph, incrementing upwards, with different flags on each bar, to represent various social networks

A common use of social listening is for measuring brand reputation and the impact of marketing campaigns. While these applications are essential, social listening has its uses beyond these. In fact, social listening can inform every stage of your marketing campaign – from Planning and Execution to Evaluation.  

In this post, we’ll show you how social listening plays a role across all these stages of your campaign.

Planning: Optimise Campaign Planning

Social listening plays a vital role in the planning stage of your marketing campaign. You can leverage the insights to inform your campaign strategy and build targeted campaigns that deliver an impact. Here’s a look at how you can use social listening to optimise your campaign planning.

Researching Your Target Audience

Combined with insights from your audience analysis, social listening enables you to get a deeper understanding of your target audience so you can plan a campaign that resonates with them. 

Listening in on their conversations not only tells you what they’re talking about, but also helps you understand their interests, wants and needs. In addition, these conversations can tell you how they’re talking about your brand, allowing you to understand what they love about it or what they dislike. 

Some of the questions you can answer are:

  • Are they expressing any pain points that you need to address?
  • Is there a product/service that generates positive traction but has low conversation volumes?
  • Could this product benefit from an awareness campaign?
  • Which platforms and media offer the most efficient targeting opportunities?

The process also helps you discover where your audience is and when they’re active on those platforms, so that you can narrow down the best channels and timings for reaching your target audience. Moreover, social listening even helps you gauge how your audience is engaging with content across multiple channels. This allows you to identify the best formats to use to drive more engagement for your marketing campaigns.

Researching the Industry and Competition

Social listening is a powerful tool for getting a closer look at your industry and competitors. It helps you monitor industry trends on a wider scale so you can gain insights into new consumer habits, behaviours and lifestyles. These insights allow you to fine-tune your message to better appeal to and resonate with your target audience based on the current market. You can even discover popular hashtags or keywords that could be incorporated into your campaign to help boost its exposure.

You can also use social listening to look at positive and negative sentiment drivers in your industry and assess potential opportunities to leverage or pitfalls to avoid. For example, did consumers respond negatively to a recent marketing campaign in your industry? If so, why did the campaign garner negative reactions? How can you use this insight to your advantage?

Social listening allows you to get more specific with your research by narrowing it down to certain competitors. You can use it to look at what they’re doing and see what’s working or what isn’t. How does their content successfully engage consumers?

Social listening is a powerful tool for getting a closer look at your industry and competitors.

During: Real-Time Campaign Tracking

Part of running a successful marketing campaign is keeping track of the campaign as it happens so you can detect possible issues or identify optimisation opportunities. Social listening serves as an effective tool for this, helping you track your campaign performance in real-time. It lets you monitor your brand mentions to see how people are engaging with the content and how they’re responding. 

An analysis of the sentiment around your campaign will give you an idea of whether the reaction is positive or negative and the factor/s driving these reactions. You can then act on these insights in a timely manner by adjusting your strategy to optimise performance. Crucially, diligent monitoring can help you to spot a crisis before it happens, which allows you to take appropriate action before the situation escalates.

The best part about social listening is that it goes beyond simply monitoring your campaign strategy, enabling you to also join in on the conversation and respond to your audience. For example, you could provide timely answers to questions that people have about an upcoming product launch.

After: Campaign Evaluation

Social listening plays a key role in performance evaluation at the end of your campaign. It allows you to measure overall effectiveness by breaking down impressions, engagement, sentiment and mentions generated by the campaign. You can also perform a cross-channel analysis to see what worked best overall in terms of these key performance indicators (KPIs).

In addition, social listening goes beyond these metrics and allows you to measure true impact using qualitative analysis. The conversations linked to the campaign can give you a deeper understanding of what resonated with your target audience. For example, did your campaign video receive lots of positive comments? What did people like most about the video? 

Moreover, it allows you to take a deep-dive into the audience profiles that engaged with your campaign to see if you were able to reach your actual target audience. The collected data and insights from the campaign can then be used to assess what worked well and what could be improved, thus informing your next campaign.  

The brand tracking solution from Convosphere helps you with your campaign evaluation by revealing the “why” behind your campaign KPIs. Our large team of multilingual analysts will closely monitor digital shifts in your brand to tell you not only whether consumer perception has changed as a result of your campaign but also what drove that change. 

Finding the Right Social Listening Solution 

Considering the huge impact that social listening has across all stages of your marketing campaign, it’s crucial that you invest in a solution that can support all these applications. This is where Convosphere comes in, offering you comprehensive social listening solutions to provide you with audience and social data analysis and insights to support all aspects of your campaign activities.

We also help you track your brand performance during and after your campaign to inform your campaign optimisation. Get in touch with Convosphere to find out how our global social listening expertise can help your marketing campaigns.

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