How Listening to Social Conversations Transforms Your Sales Funnel

Listening to online conversations can provide invaluable information needed for your business to win more sales. Every multi-location marketer is looking for ways to impact their bottom line, and digital conversations are a significant area of opportunity. From helping your multi-location business discover new prospects, to analyzing the competition, there’s a lot you can uncover through social listening. 

Whether your multi-location business is already listening to conversations online or you’re just getting started, this blog will help you turn those conversations into conversions. We’ll kick off the blog by looking at ways your multi-location business can leverage online conversations and wrap it up by sharing how you can easily find and monitor these online conversations. 

Learn About Prospect’s Needs and Concerns

Online conversations are an excellent place for your multi-location business to learn invaluable insights surrounding your prospects’ interests. You can do this by listening to conversations where your business is tagged, but also listening to broader conversations involving certain key terms or topics that are industry-relevant for your business. Through proactively listening to non-branded conversations, you gain a more holistic view of the industry as a whole, and what your consumers need and expect out of your business. For instance, your business can track online conversations around topics related to your industry to see what’s trending or what customers expect. Suppose you’re in the restaurant industry and see increased conversations around contactless pick-up or curbside availability. In that case, your restaurant should look into investing in those options if it’s not already a current offering. However, this is applicable for any industry. Understanding the needs and concerns of your target audience can help your multi-location business prioritize where it should be focusing its efforts. 

If you’re in the health & fitness industry, you might currently be concerned about renovating out-of-date locker rooms, but through listening to online conversations, your business might find that consumers care more about access to online fitness classes. While online conversations shouldn’t be the only thing your business considers when changing a product or plan, they should be a piece of the puzzle that informs your decision. 

Understand What You’re Up Against 

Paying attention to and listening to online conversations can also help your multi-location business assess the competition. Through social listening, you can set up threads to track that include competitor names and terms. So, not only can you monitor what your target audience is saying about competitors, but you can also track new campaigns the competition is launching or what new products and services they’re releasing. All of these can be helpful for your multi-location business to realize what you’re up against, helping you become an industry leader. 

For instance, if you notice that your target audience keeps talking about your competition’s easy to navigate online store, it’s something to consider improving so you can also have a positive user experience. Similarly, if you’re in the education industry and people complain about your competition’s lack of responsiveness when it comes to online reviews, you should ensure that your business doesn’t have the same shortfalls. While it’s always great to differentiate yourself from competitors, knowing doesn’t work for similar companies in your industry can help your business avoid making the same mistakes. In the same light, understanding what makes your competitors successful can help your business as well. 

As mentioned previously, tracking new products and services is essential too. This allows your multi-location business to be the first to know about any recent trends or shifts in the industry. Again, while your multi-location business shouldn’t mirror the competition, being aware of where the industry is headed in terms of new products and services is crucial and allows you to reimagine your business’s offering.

While some shifts will be focused on new products or services, listening to online conversations can also help your multi-location business stay on top of the latest localized marketing trends. For instance, is the competition seeing great success with videos on social media? How are your competitor’s online events performing? When you know what works for similar businesses in your industry, you can mirror the same tactics with different content and see if it garners the same success. If your multi-location business is looking for another way to stay on top of the latest industry trends, SOCi’s Industry News blogs can help! Every few weeks, we release a new blog that highlights the most critical trends and platform updates that multi-location marketers should know. 

Identify New Opportunities and Widen Sales Funnel 

Listening to online conversations can also help your business narrow in on new opportunities and ultimately widen its sales funnel. By listening to conversations happening around your business, you’ll be able to find new prospects. You’re likely already aware of the conversations that tag your business or speak to your business directly – such as through reviews, or comments on your social content. However, are you aware of the conversations that are happening about your business where you’re not directly mentioned or tagged? In fact, 96 percent of online conversations are not directed at and do not mention a brand, which means that they often go unseen. So, if you’re able to tap into these conversations through social listening, you just exponentially increased the sheer volume of people who are aware of and are talking about, your business. 

Similarly, you can track specific industry keywords and find out who might be interested in your business’s offerings. Your marketing team can then pass these leads over to sales, widening the sales funnel. If you already have insight that supports that these prospects are interested in the industry or your specific business, it makes the job easier for sales. 

It’s clear that tracking online conversations for your multi-location business is a must, but with 100s or 1,000s of business locations, how can you do so effectively? That’s where SOCi Listening comes in. SOCi Listening is the elite listening product that gives you VIP access to every critical conversation happening around your business. With SOCi Listening, your multi-location business can gain a holistic view of your business and use data to inform business decisions at the national and local levels. The tool also allows your business to centralize competitive and industry insights at the national and local level and ensure you never miss out on local sales opportunities. 

With SOCi Listening, your business will be able to monitor online conversations effectively, and as a result, win more sales. Request a demo today for more insight into how SOCi Listening can help your business crush the competition and strengthen other areas of your localized marketing strategy! It’s time to stand out as an industry leader, and SOCi is here to help.