Top professionals in the industry continuously emphasise that no marketing campaign can attain success if it does not connect with and relate to a specific target audience.
Despite highlighting this topic time and again, brand marketing often fails to identify and speak the ‘language’ of its intended audiences.
Research found that the majority of marketers pour their resources into web analyses and keyword identifiers.
Few endeavour to better understand and grasp the essence of their target audiences by employing core analytic tools such as social listening.
Social listening encompasses those research and monitoring tools that identify and evaluate certain topics and themes, brand mentions, competitor scopes, and product specifics.
Forbes defined social listening as a tool that “allows companies to take a broad look at the discussions occurring on social media around their brand”.
Experts ascertained that by searching for and pinpointing defined phrases and words, marketers can determine the influencers in an industry, track the successes and misses of campaigns, and see how customers perceive and receive services and products.
Recent reports highlighted that social listening analyses and tactics can provide a wealth of information that includes competitor approaches and angles, how well a brand performs in its specific niche, and, most importantly, what customers and consumers have to say.
Socialbakers, an AI enterprise, ran a survey in 2020 to determine how many marketing agencies utilised social listening tools to improve their understanding of their target audiences.
This survey determined that a mere 8% of brands use social listening tools such as Brandwatch, Socialbakers, and Falcon to expand their target audience insights.
Marketing gurus find these results disconcerting as it confirms the notion that content marketers develop content to reflect their values and views and do not consider or incorporate the voice of their audiences.
The latest statistics indicate that marketing is decisively shifting onto social media platforms.
These statistics found that approximately 43% of business-to-business (B2B) and 46% of business-to-customer (B2C) marketers are investing in and exploring how to distribute organic and paid content through social media avenues.
This year also saw a huge percentage leap in marketing spend on Facebook and Instagram advertising services.
Numbers such as these confirm the importance of social listening.
Socialbakers discussed some of the reasons why social listening is such a crucial marketing tool:
- Developing and deploying a successful social media strategy depends on knowing and understanding your audience. Social listening shows on which platforms your customers are most active and how they interact about similar products or services.
- Measures brand performance and reputation. You can relate these findings to revenue turnovers and use them to spot gaps that need rectifying. Addressing gaps usually starts with marketing campaigns and the initial presentation of a brand.
- Tracks key influencers and adapts marketing content to influence these influencers when talking about your brand.
Most companies recognise the importance of target audience information, but few incorporate these insights.
Elevate your marketing content by employing the services of professionals such as Purecontent to integrate analytic audience findings and marketing drives.
