Proven Ways To Use Social Listening for Lead Generation

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social media strategy

Don’t you want to try some new ways to generate quality leads for business? You will love knowing about Social Listening! Don’t hang around and discover the ways of success by implementing this most trending tactic. 

For business owners and marketers involved in brand engagement and awareness across the web, learning the best tactics to generate social media leads is essential. And this post is curated with all the tactics that they can use to leverage their marketing strategies.

Social media lead generation is considered one of the best digital marketing strategies. They have to keep in mind and work towards achieving the best results from their campaigns.

Social lead generation is an excellent next step if you have done a good job on your website SEO. When you embrace social media lead generation, it helps you find more people interested in your brand and associated products/services. 

So, if you find social media awareness and marketing a good step, this article is a sure-shot path that can bring successful social media listening and lead generation results. 

Before knowing about generating social media leads, learn a bit about Social Listening and Lead Generation.

What is Social Listening?

Social listening is the process that involves tracking conversations around specific topics, phrases, keywords, brands, and industries. This process also leverages the insights to discover opportunities or create content for those audiences. 

It’s observing @mentions and comments and analyzing the brand’s messages via social profiles, blogs, or mobile apps. If you’re only paying attention to notifications, you’re missing a huge group of people talking about you, your brand, and your product. 

Monitoring every social mention and interaction while listening requires analysis and reflection. With the latter, you can:

  • Track overall brand health
  • Create content your audience craves
  • Generate ideas for marketing campaigns
  • Improve your customer experience
  • Drive strategic product decisions

How social listening and monitoring differ?

The critical difference is with monitoring; you compile a list of social media engagement instances to take immediate action—reply, like, or route the message to sales or support. With listening, you will have access to analyze the actual and bigger picture behind all the conversations. This helps you integrate your learnings into a well-planned social strategy.

Why Is Social Listening Important?

Tracking mentions and notifications are essential to an effective engagement strategy. However, analyzing the context and larger trends around those conversations through social listening can give you valuable insight and serve your target audience better.

What social conversations should you listen to? 

Let’s take a look at Twitter. Every day, there are around 25 billion social interactions take place on Twitter. It merely offers a vast consumer edge, their cultural insights and the industry they are interested in.

Not every company can go through each Tweet (or a set of vast volumes of messages) coming for their brand or industry. That’s where listening comes into play. 

By utilizing social listening, you don’t need to treat every single Tweet like a specific task; instead, you only have to take a glimpse at the aggregate collection of social media messages (or Tweets). 

Understand this scenario with an example:

A Social Listening Example

Let’s say you own a restaurant, and you source your vegetables and meat from a couple of vendors. A customer comes in on Monday and orders Pizza. After tasting it, they complain that they aren’t satisfied with the quality. You apologize and give them a refund. Friday, someone else comes in and orders a Pizza again and tells you it’s fantastic.

Next Monday, another customer comes in and orders one more Pizza. They complain that it’s not great, so you give them a refund like a customer from the previous week. 

A similar trend continues for about a month.

If you were to look at these situations on a case-by-case basis, it’d be easy to write them off as one-time issues. This way, you will be quickly able to get the nerve of the problem and resolve it instantly on the spot – that is called monitoring.

But after a month, when you realize all the complaints are coming on Mondays, you can see a trend developing and conclude there’s probably something wrong with the vegetables or meat coming on Mondays. Keeping this in mind, you will go to your vendor and let him know about the frequent issue. By that point, they will focus on the issue and diagnose it to get it resolved ASAP. It helps you gain the customers’ trust and save your money you will spend on refunds – that is social listening.

Social media listening allows you to see things from a bird’s eye view. Being a social media marketer, it would be challenging for you to respond to all the messages one by one.

So, while monitoring and responding to social messages is important, you also need to use social listening to see the bigger picture of what’s going on with your brand on social.

Key Points you need to have in your mind during Social Listening:

  • Learn how sentiment impacts your brand: Use social listening to uncover the larger implications of your brand’s negative and positive sentiment.
  • Listening is always on: Don’t wait for a crisis to happen. Start using social listening right now. This provides users the historical information about how people observe your brand over time. It also allows you to account for product releases, seasonality, and other trends.
  • Understand the “why: When you see sudden shifts in how people feel about your brand, dig into why it’s happening. Ask yourself a few questions like: Does the issue correlates with the new product release? Was your website down for a while? Or were there any news story that broke about your brand? The more you get the “why,” the easier it is for you to fix negative sentiments and capitalize on the business’s positive side.
  • Look for content trends: Social listening gives you an aerial view of the audience’s conversations about your brand and industry. You can easily use this strategy to your advantage by looking at trends and building content around them. 
  • Listen to the pain points: The best converting content is the type that attacks a particular pain point of your target audience. Utilizing social media listening, you can quickly unfold the most common pain points your audience is experiencing and create persuasive content that directly addresses them.
  • Find related phrases: Rather than looking at the keywords and hashtags mentioned with your brand individually, look at related phrases to understand how to better speak to your audience.

What Can You Do With Social Listening?

Now that you have a better understanding of social listening and why your brand needs it, let’s take a look at the ways you can put it to use.

1. Checking Brand Health

The first thing you can do is to track overall brand health. Do it by knowing which part of the campaign has a good response and which one is not working properly. 

This way, you will get to know the areas where you have to work on. This results in a great response and better sales lead on social media. 

You can see the below image to know how a brand’s health can be checked. 

Based on these results, you can improve the areas that can bring more traffic and engagement. 

2. Create Content Your Audience Craves

Content is crucial to implement any social media strategy. If you’re not sharing content your audience wants to see, then it’s nearly impossible to engage and convert them into leads.

Often, the quest for finding the best content to share results from trial and error. Initially, many brands follow the strategy to post various articles, videos, and photos to see what works for their brand. But with the help of social listening, you can identify topics your users and audience cares about and doesn’t need any guesswork. 

Here’s how.

Use an analytics tool such as Trends Report to see which hashtags, topics, or keywords people use when speaking to your brand. This will give you a great understanding of your target audience’s talk and the phrases they associate with your brand.

You can look at the below image, where we have taken articles that directly point to the problems and provide solutions that the audience always looks for.  

Now, let’s move to understand Lead Generation.

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is all about the marketing process that involves capturing and stimulating users’ interest in a product or service. It helps to develop a sales pipeline for the brand.

Lead generation often uses digital channels and has been undergoing substantial changes in recent years from the rise of new online and social media platforms.

In particular, the (vast) information is available online has led to the rise of “self-directed buyers” and the evolution of new techniques to qualify and develop potential leads before sending them to the sales funnel.

Why is Lead Generation Important?

Today, the buying process has entirely changed, and to beat this, marketers need to find new ways to reach customers and their voices. So, in place of earning customers through mass advertising and emails, marketers must focus on being found across the web by establishing continuous relationships with buyers.

What Are The Most Important Lead Generation Tactics?

One of the most crucial tactics is Social media, and there are a significant number of chances to find your prospects. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn can be effectively used to generate leads. Here are other more platforms that you can use to attain qualified leads for your business. Take a look at the below graph to know how your business can grow by using these simple and most proven marketing techniques.

Conclusion: 

To conclude, a well-thought social listening strategy for lead generation can help your brand gain immense awareness, engagement, and more revenue. It works by building your customer base and help you use social media for lead management. 

If you want your brand to be renowned across the web and on all the social networks, you should start strategizing your social listening. This is the best way you can attain the desired results.