Read Time: 5 minutes

How Social Listening Empowers Proactive Engagement With Consumers

 

 

As a multi-location marketer, you always want to increase your consumer base and get more sales. One of the best ways to do this is through proactive engagement, and social listening can help you do just that. Social listening is monitoring your brand’s social media channels for any direct or indirect mentions of your brand, topics related to your industry, and your competitors. 

 

Through social listening, your multi-location business can understand the conversations going on around your brand – not just directed to and mentioning you. With this knowledge, you can participate in conversations happening around your business and proactively engage with current and potential consumers. Within this blog, we’ll break down the different aspects of social listening and explain how it can be used to better connect with your target audience. 

1. Listen for Care & Reputation Management

 

One of the best ways to take advantage of social listening is to use your findings to strengthen your online reputation. For instance, if you receive notifications about an emerging, hot button topic in your industry, you can then jump on this timely opportunity and share your brand’s take on the news before any of your competitors do. If your consumers see you as a leader in the industry, it will help boost your overall reputation and build trust. Listening helps you crush your competition.  

 

Through a social listening tool, you also can mitigate any potential crises with smart alerts and email, or push notifications. If you’re waiting to see what consumers think about a product or service you’re testing, you can set up notifications to listen to conversations around it. If for any reason, the dialogue is negative or there are a lot of complaints about the service, you can get ahead of the negative conversations and address the issues before they exacerbate. Again, if consumers see that your multi-location business is taking the time to address negative feedback, it will improve your overall reputation. 

 

Another way you can use social listening to boost your online reputation is through social media content. If you see social media posts that mention your business positively, you can reshare that content. Similarly, if you know a competitor sharing content that is getting a lot of positive feedback, utilize that information. You don’t necessarily need to share the same content, but you can use that information to inform your content strategies in the future. Social listening helps you work smarter, not harder. 

 

2. Listen for Social Selling

 

Your multi-location business can also utilize social listening to engage with consumers further through social selling. Social selling is a lead generation technique where you interact with potential consumers through social media. Social listening allows you to find sales opportunities quickly. For instance, if your multi-location business is in the fitness industry and you see that someone locally has posted that they are looking for a new gym to join, you can recognize them as a local sales opportunity and engage the lead. 

 

Additionally, you can leverage social listening to see what potential leads say about your brand versus your competitors. Is there an area where your multi-location business is lacking? What do potential consumers like about your business that your competitors don’t have? All of this is insightful knowledge to have and can be used to inform both your sales and marketing teams when they’re social selling, and crushing your competitors

 

While social listening can help you monitor potential sales opportunities, you can also use it to respond to feedback or questions on your local products or services. A consumer may be hesitant to buy a product until their questions are answered, so social listening helps you find these questions or feedback as they appear so you can again respond to them promptly. 

 

3. Listen for Local User-Generated Content

 

One of the best ways to proactively engage with your consumers is to capitalize on user-generated content (UGC). Through social listening, you can discover, save, and reshare local UGC. Resharing consumers’ content is a great way to engage and continue a conversation about your multi-location business. When looking for UGC, it’s always important to request permission from the consumer before resharing the content, which conveniently provides another opportunity to engage. 

 

If your multi-location business is hosting a promotion or contest that requires engagement from consumers, you can also monitor those interactions. For instance, if you want consumers to share a picture of themselves using a specific hashtag, you can keep an eye on that hashtag and engage with the people who are using it. The more you engage with UGC, the more people will see that your multi-location business cares about and engages with its consumers, which will create more meaningful connections. Consumers who feel connected to brands buy from their locations. 

 

4. Listen for Market Research & Intelligence

 

Finally, you also use social listening for market research and intelligence. You can take advantage of social listening to stay up to date with the latest information around your industry and brand. Staying on top of industry trends will give your business an edge, and help set your multi-location business apart from the competition. 

 

Similarly, you can use the insights you’ve gathered around your multi-location business and its competitors to inform your business strategies. What’s the point of gathering all of this information if you’re not going to use it to improve your business? While engaging with consumers is essential, it’s also crucial to continuously evolve your localized marketing efforts to be the best. 

 

Over time, you can also analyze volume trends, sentiment, and share of voice for all mentions around your multi-location business to again help you make informed optimizations to your localized marketing efforts. Listen to your consumers, make proactive changes, see results. 

 

Start Engaging Your Consumers Through Social Listening 

 

Now that you understand how social listening can help you get the attention of your consumers, crush your competition, and ultimately win business, it’s time to find a social listening tool that works for you. 

 

SOCi has a  newly released listening tool. Through this tool, you can discover what local consumers are saying about your locations and competitors, plus activate local engagement across all business locations with localized listening capabilities, sentiment analysis, and user-generated content. SOCi uses natural language processing and machine learning to interpret and classify emotions throughout social pages. This allows businesses to organize customer engagements as positive, negative, or neutral, providing better insight into the customer experience. 

 

If this isn’t enough, SOCi is also the central command for multi-location marketers and the all-in-one platform built for your localized marketing needs. For more information on how SOCi can help your multi-location business leverage social listening, and develop a winning localized marketing strategy, request a demo today!