Social Listening and Content Marketing: Stairway to Branding Heaven

Social networks have significantly changed our lives and are gaining more and more importance.

The mere number of active users and interactions sounds ridiculous and frightening. For instance, Facebook has 1.45 billion active users daily, while Twitter users get involved in around 25 billion social interactions a day. If you’re a marketer or a business owner, tracking what people around social media and internet in general think and write about your client or your brand has become seemingly impossible. However, social listening tools that can help you do this are also becoming more advanced and sophisticated.
Social listening can be useful to business owners and marketers in a number of ways. Getting relevant feedback about your product or your latest campaign, compressed and presented in the form of just a few most important metrics is something that demanded an insane amount of work just a few decades ago. One of the areas in which you could benefit from social listening is preparing and executing your content marketing strategy. Let’s see how this works in more detail.

Understanding the customer

One of the most general benefits of social listening is getting to know your target audience. The target audience are, of course, actual or prospective customers. Analyzing the demographics, interests and everyday concerns of people who talk about your company and your industry is of huge importance when preparing your content marketing strategy. There are multiple ways you can use this knowledge to your advantage.

Personalized and narrowly-focused content

With social listening tools, you can discover the most common problems and complaints that the customers have about certain products. Focusing on addressing these problems or explaining them away can be a great road to take. This way, you’re engaging in a conversation, helping your customers and branding the product, all at the same time. Furthermore, by knowing more about the people who talk about your brand and your niche online you can create several buying personas and address them separately, with highly-focused content. Getting familiar with the most common interests and worries of the different demographics you’re targeting can give you fresh ideas for your content. Different topics will be appealing to different chunks of an audience and you have to recognize and appreciate that.

Content distribution

Creating relevant and interesting content is crucial, but using the right channels to distribute it is almost as important. Social listening helps you discover which channels would be best for promoting your content. You can check the number of mentions on each social network as well as the sentiment expressed and adapt your content and its distribution according to the results.

Paid advertising

Knowing which content works for which target group and recognizing the most effective distribution channels helps you a lot with deciding which content should be boosted, as well as when and where you should do it. You can find out which posts or types of content provoked the most reactions among your audience and give this content a little push. Moreover, you can track the effect of current events on how frequently certain keywords related to your industry are going to be mentioned. If a topic you already covered in the past is currently hot, it’s worth sharing that story again and boosting it with a few bucks.

Real-time marketing

Being in touch with current events is beneficial not only when it comes to recycling old posts. If there’s a currently trending topic that makes sense to be addressed, tackling it could potentially bring a lot of traffic and draw attention. All the best content marketing agencies are trying to keep up-to-date with the latest affairs. One of the most famous examples of real-time marketing done right is Oreo’s tweet posted during the Super Bowl 2013 blackout. It had almost 15 thousand retweets and is considered one of the best real-time marketing moves to this day.

Audience feedback

Naturally, the fact that you have access to all the possible feedback and reactions to your content shouldn’t be used exclusively for the purpose of choosing which post to boost. These are also indicators whether you’re doing your job well in general and whether your overall content marketing strategy works. You have to mind the feedback in order to check if your audience is interested in the topics you deal with and how they react to the language and voice you use. Social listening provides you with a deep insight into people’s opinions on your content. You have a great opportunity to see if there’s something wrong with your strategy immediately and modify it on the run.

Search for influencers

Another great advantage of social listening tools is that most of them can single out mentions from those who have a significant online influence. This is a great starting point for recruiting influencers who can promote your product or your brand. If you notice that a highly influential person keeps mentioning you in a positive manner, getting them to team up with you shouldn’t be too much of a hassle.
Influencers are expected to be a big factor in content marketing this year, and for a good reason. They’re able to promote and present your brand not in the form of advertisement, but as a genuine piece of their own content. For this, they use channels they own and they address people who honestly like them and trust them. If you’re still not convinced that you should include influencers as a part of your content marketing strategy, you might want to think again. Just have in mind that for every dollar invested in influencer marketing, businesses earn more than six dollars on average.