Social listening is a powerful tool that can provide crucial insights to help guide decision-making.
Most businesses know this and may already have some social listening tactics. But does your current social listening strategy drive sales?
Keep reading as we explore how social listening is linked to sales and offer some tips to help you grow your sales by improving your social listening.
Social listening involves businesses monitoring social media platforms for mentions of their brand, employees, competitors, and relevant keywords.
Social listening is an excellent way to understand the mood and needs of your target persona, making it a must-have tool in your marketing and sales kit. Additionally, it's usually something you can do for free.
When properly done, social listening can be a great way to keep customers loyal, discover new customers, successfully develop new products, etc.
Gavin Yi, founder and CEO of Yijin Hardware, says, “Most businesses approach marketing with the objective of being the loudest one in the room. There's a time and place for this, but you must step back and listen first. With better insights from listening, you'll have a better idea of where to focus your efforts.”
Social listening is one of the best ways to leverage social media for sales, as listening more closely to your users and potential leads can be a source of actionable insights. You'll be better able to understand their pain points and desires, which will allow you to identify and address these concerns accurately.
Here's what Rain Yang, Founder & CEO of WoodenAve, has to say about the power of social listening to improve sales: "Social listening allows any business to better understand its customer's needs and adjust its product or service offerings to be more relevant in solving these needs, and subsequently driving sales."
Reyan Mestry, Head of Marketing at TopSource Worldwide, agrees with this view, saying: "Social listening is about so much more than just monitoring conversations for PR. It’s really about learning your audience's needs, pain points and the objections they may have to making a purchase. With these insights, you can tailor your sales strategies, address customer concerns, and ultimately drive more conversions from a ready audience."
Here’s a practical example of how this might work: Perhaps, through your social listening efforts, you observe a segment of your audience discussing a problem your product or service can solve. You could respond by engaging with them directly to present your solution.
Social listening can be an incredibly effective tool. However, for the best results, you need to have a strategic approach. Here are the steps we recommend to:
Target personas are a powerful tool that can help the entire sales process. However, there are so many different conversations happening on most social media platforms that you can't realistically gain insights from them all at once. The better approach would be to focus more intensely on listening to the groups of users who matter the most when it comes to making sales decisions.
Suppose you're planning a B2B marketing campaign, for example. In this case, you certainly may find a lot more success in social listening for sales by listening on a platform like LinkedIn rather than Instagram since more B2B decision-makers are likely to have accounts there than on most other platforms.
As Chris Aubeeluck, Head of Sales and Marketing at Osbornes Law, explains, “Focusing your social listening on the right audience is key to driving sales, and when it comes to B2B, platforms like LinkedIn are invaluable because they give you access to a ready audience of decision-makers."
LinkedIn is such a great platform for B2B lead generation and social listening as you'll be able to follow both the businesses you're looking to attract sales from as well as specific individuals who might be responsible for buying decisions within those businesses.
This may allow for a greater depth of insight into buyer behavior. You'll also be able to build a list of sales-qualified leads much faster.
Having a clear target persona will help you narrow your focus. Next, you’ll need to determine the goals you would like to achieve by listening to this audience. This can help you have some clarity on just which conversations are worth listening to. You'll also be in a better position to evaluate the success of your social listening when you set measurable objectives from the beginning.
As Gary Hemming, Owner & Finance Director at ABC Finance, shares, "Setting clear goals for social listening is the key to driving measurable outcomes. By focusing on measurable objectives like qualified leads and increased engagement, you can better understand which conversations matter and how to turn insights into sales opportunities."
If you're looking to drive sales, the most relevant figures you would likely be concerned with are the number of qualified leads you can garner. The objective of social listening is to gain insights to guide your marketing. If you've done this well, it should be reflected in increased traffic to your product pages or landing pages, sign-ups for email newsletters, and any other conversion events you may have set up.
Once you have a good idea of what group of people you want to listen to, the next step is figuring out where to listen. As we’ve mentioned, if you’re a B2B business, LinkedIn is an excellent resource for social listening.
To make the most of it, you should be look to join relevant groups and keep an eye on hashtags related to your industry.
Be sure to keep your focus narrow by monitoring keywords and hashtags that indicate an intention to purchase. For example, users looking for product recommendations will likely be much readier to purchase, and will be easier to convert.
There are tons of social listening tools, each with pros and cons. Some of these tools offer unique features, and some might be better suited for social listening for B2B businesses than others.
For the best results, you should only consider tools that offer features like sentiment analysis, competitive tracking, and lead generation. As a minimum requirement, these tools should also allow you to configure alerts for targeted keywords or hashtags.
While your overall goal may be to listen and gain insights, engaging with potential leads you may come across in the process can yield even better results.
For example, if you come across a conversation in which your product or service is being compared to others, engaging with the users involved in this conversation may be a great way to get them to provide more details or even to allow you to convince them to choose your products or services.
Jarret Austin, Owner of Bankruptcy Canada shares: "Engaging with potential leads in the course of social listening can turn insights into opportunities. If your product is being compared to others, for example, taking part in the conversation not only helps you gather more details but also gives you the chance to persuade users to choose yours."
Responding to posts and getting involved in conversations isn't the only way to engage effectively with your audience. Sometimes, all it takes is soft engagement, such as liking or sharing their content.
Even though you won't likely gain any deeper insights from this, you may be able to inspire some loyalty and keep your brand top-of-mind.
LinkedIn has advanced search filters that you can use for relevant posts, conversations, and even people or pages.
These filters include things like industry, company size, location, and job title, and are a great way to find your target audience and identify relevant conversations. You'll be able to save these settings, which will make it much easier to keep track of conversations and leads over time.
Social listening has become indispensable for businesses looking to drive sales and build strong customer relationships.
If you follow the tips we've shared in this article, you can use social listening to discover potential leads, understand customer needs, gain insights into your audience's pain points and preferences, and build brand awareness and authority.