Content Growth Hacks: How to Use Social Listening for Effective Market Research

Research may be the most enjoyable aspect of marketing and product development (and the most work). While research is critical to any business process, getting the most out of it frequently necessitates the use of the most resources, which is rarely sustainable, and often daunting.

As a result, research initiatives are either insufficient or overruled. Fortunately, today's marketers have the option of introducing new research methods in favor of a fully digital approach. With social media as the world's largest archive of market knowledge, there's every incentive to shift research there permanently.

For this, we have the so-called social listening that consists of monitoring your brand's social media platforms for customer feedback and direct mentions of your brand, as well as discussions about certain keywords, subjects, competitors, or sectors, followed by an analysis to gather insights and act on those possibilities.

Let's take a look at how this market research method can help enhance your content growth:

· Find Out What Your Customers Think About Your Brand

People frequently use social media to communicate their experiences with brands. Their feedback can provide you with a comprehensive picture of your brand's trustworthiness and repute.

You can find out if your clients are satisfied with your brand. You can also determine their least and most favorite aspects of your company, thus the opportunity to collect unfiltered data is one of the best elements of applying a social listening tool.

· Measure Campaigns Effectiveness

You can use social listening to gather information about what people are looking for. It can also assist you in determining the effectiveness of your marketing.

Monitoring the campaign's engagement from the outset is a wonderful approach to do this.

When you track the changes in the volume of mentions of your brand before, during, and after a certain campaign can help you figure out what has been working so far, and what be improved. You can examine which campaign settings need to be changed based on the engagements. This will assist in the future optimization of your marketing strategies.

ü We can all agree that there is no better way of determining the success of a campaign than to collect data directly from your customers!

· Assess You Competition

While social listening can help you learn more about your brand, it can also be used to snoop a bit on your competitors and their performance.

Through social media, you'll be able to find honest comments about them, which can help you understand what makes them unique, and the reason behind their success. Also, this might help you figure out where you stand in the market.

When monitoring their applied methods, you can determine the strengths and flaws of their branding initiatives. Therefore, you can know what works and what doesn't for them. This can even aid in the development of your branding tactics if you keep theirs in mind.

· Shape Your Target Audience

Usually, audience segmentation can be represented only by a user's geographic location, age, and gender, but this action goes beyond this as it helps you understand why they are attracted to your company and their online behavior. When you shape your target audience you can customize your approach and make informed decisions based on the information you have.

When you use social media analysis tools to dig into the groups and subgroups of your audience, you may discover a lot of useful information, such as when to launch your next campaign, the best social platform to engage audiences on, and the topics and imagery that are most likely to connect with them.

· Identify The Right Trends

Just as your brand, your audience will not remain the same over time since their interests and desires will shift over time. As a result, it's critical to keep track of industry trends and adapt your content accordingly.

You may use social listening to keep track of what types of products or content go viral and use that information to base your next campaign, or blog posting (a way to create User-Generated Content, UGC).

Google Trends and the Trending Section on Twitter is a great way to know about what people are talking about or interested in. Social listening aids to get more specific internet trends, so you can narrow your focus to a specific niche or even individual Internet communities.

Pay close attention to the number of times your keywords are mentioned in your industry to spot trends. If that number suddenly rises, a new trend is likely gaining traction.

Final Considerations

Although traditional research methods have their place, social listening competes on a level that places a greater emphasis on cost-cutting and resource efficiency in areas where traditional research may lack flexibility and experimentation. If both options are available, make social listening a supporting method for data collection so that information obtained continues to help you meet your business objectives over time.