A Comprehensive Guide to Marketing Services
If you’re a small to mid-sized business owner, you almost certainly don’t have enough time in the day to get everything finished to your satisfaction. Often, the day-to-day operational demands that come with running a business make it difficult to focus on the broader strategic picture — something that is essential for growth. In order to create a truly high-performance enterprise, it’s sometimes necessary to contract with outside agencies for help with key creative and technical tasks. By working with a trusted agency, business owners don’t have to work outside the limits of their own expertise and have more time to focus on their own high-value tasks. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the most important services offered by today’s top creative agencies. Marketing research In order to validate their hypotheses, marketers need to collect hard data, and this comes in form of data collected by a marketing research agency. This research may occur through focus groups and brand awareness studies. Many brands partner with a marketing research agency to help complete these tasks and conduct primary market research. By working with a consumer insight agency or focus group research company, brands can gather the kind of data that helps identify the strengths and weaknesses of their products and services, while also better understanding their target market. Additionally, a usability testing company can help a company determine how an intended audience interfaces with a product or service, while Florida research companies specializing in market data can assist with consumer profile services and qualitative research services. This gives their clients a broader picture of who their audience is, and how those audiences are responding to products, services and marketing campaigns. Creative services Creative work is the heart of effective marketing and branding. Whether it’s print advertising, sales materials design, collateral design or annual report design, creative work is the conduit through which audiences and brands connect. Most small to mid-sized businesses don’t have the budget or expertise to deploy an in-house creative team. That’s not an insurmountable hurdle, however; by contracting with a copywriting company, outdoor marketing agency, tradeshow display company or packaging design agency, brands can realize their creative vision and better connect with their customers. Digital marketing We’ve reached a point where the terms “marketing” and “digital marketing” are almost interchangeable. Most of us live, work, communicate and play online — which means that businesses need to do their utmost to connect with people in the digital realm. This is accomplished by the following techniques such as email and content marketing and various forms of pay-per-click marketing services or display advertising services. By working with a digital marketing consultant, a content marketing agency or an email marketing agency, brands can help ensure that they reap the rewards of a digital approach. A new and critically important trend is voice technology. Given the staggering adoption numbers for smart speakers and digital assistants, forward-thinking brands should also consider pursuing voice development services from an Alexa app company or a top Florida digital marketing company. Strategy Great marketing campaigns all begin with a smart, overarching strategy. This strategy should encompass everything a business does in terms of marketing creation and distribution, including various content types and channels. Marketing data analysis conducted by a marketing strategy agency can play a key role in this process, as it provides a sound foundation on which to build campaigns and test assumptions. Businesses may also wish to focus on more niche areas by employing an audience segmentation consultant or social media strategy company, both of which can play an integral role in helping brands identify and engage with ideal audiences for their products and services. Today, a comprehensive marketing strategy must cover a wide variety of channels, reflecting the nature of how audiences live, work and consume content today. This means that working with a multi-channel marketing company that specializes in this kind of approach is often a smart idea. Media buying When it comes to good marketing, distribution is just as important as creation. You can have the most compelling campaign in the world, but if nobody sees it, what good does it do? That’s where media buying enters the equation. The right media strategy services or media planning agency can help ensure that your marketing content gains maximum exposure through every relevant channel, including print and TV. Digital, too, is an important piece of the media puzzle. A digital media buying agency that specializes in this channel can help ensure your campaign gains traction, while an attribution modeling company can provide you with measurable data that confirms whether or not particular marketing or advertising approach is effective. In today’s changing world, it’s also important to ensure that your media campaigns reflect the viewpoints of all consumers, which means that it makes sense to work with a multicultural marketing agency that has the perspective to connect with all audiences. Web development services Maintaining fully-functional websites with smooth and intuitive user experiences should be a key priority for just about any business. Websites serve as the public face of a business and also often play an important role in generating revenue. If a business can’t be trusted to offer the public a professional and reliable website, prospective customers may wonder about the quality of the products and services they will receive. However, not every business is equipped to maintain a reliable, user-friendly digital presence. In such cases, it makes sense to partner with a web design company or website development company that can handle every aspect of creating and maintaining digital properties. Additionally, a good content management company can help ensure that businesses place high in organic search rankings by following the principles of search engine optimization and content marketing. Continuity is also critically important, as downtime can result in lost revenue and angry customers. An Orlando web development firm offering website maintenance services can help local businesses ensure that their digital properties suffer from minimal technical interruptions. By partnering
Why Building a Fence Is the Best Recipe for Restaurant Success
Marketers and advertisers have always sought new and better ways to understand and target their audience. If you can do this well, your odds of success increase exponentially. Technological tools have revolutionized this process, giving us unprecedented insight into who our audiences are, and ultimately lead to how we can best identify and reach them. And for restaurants, few of these techniques are more relevant than geofencing. Build the fence, and the customers will come. Geofencing explained The premise behind geofencing is simple: Businesses can specifically advertise to people who are within a specific geographical area. By using certain technologies, a boundary is created, and everyone within that boundary serves as the target audience. So how does it work? Geofencing uses well-established location-based technologies, including GPS and Bluetooth, to identify people within a certain area and communicate with them. While the technology isn’t new, it has come to play an important role in marketing and advertising because of another invention — the smartphone. The technology is particularly useful for businesses such as restaurants. Your typical example of restaurant geofencing would feature an eating establishment creating marketing material (for instance, a limited-time coupon) and sending it to everyone within a specified geographical boundary via their mobile device. As soon as someone enters the specified virtual boundary, the coupon is transmitted via push notification. Let’s take a look at how this works in closer detail. A restaurant proprietor wants to generate more walk-in foot traffic. Instead of relying on signage or offsite advertising, she employs restaurant geofencing to create a virtual boundary around the establishment. When people carrying smartphones enter the boundary, they automatically receive a coupon for a free appetizer that expires in sixty minutes. Because the recipients are already in close proximity to the restaurant (and because people are biologically programmed to respond to feelings of urgency), they are much more likely to redeem the limited time offer. Restaurants can also choose to switch up the offers on a daily (or even hourly) basis, responding to changing conditions inside the establishment. If a restaurant has a shipment of pricey and fast-perishing bluefin tuna to sell, it’s a simple task to create a special offer and send out a new push notification within the geofence. It’s also a great idea to be flexible and use geofencing to capitalize on changing conditions outside the restaurant. If the weather is gorgeous, send out a push notification and remind everyone about your beautiful outdoor seating area. The benefits of restaurant geofencing We’ve discussed the positive effect restaurant geofencing can have on sales through location-based targeting. Yet geofencing provides a few other benefits, including the ability to collect more data. When customers redeem geofenced coupons or offers, restaurants can track other metrics, including the amount of time spent inside the restaurant, the level of repeat business and the type of food and drinks ordered. Restaurants can also use data gathered to create more highly targeted and personalized promotions, something that should improve the diner experience and lead to lots of repeat business. The takeaway Ultimately, restaurant geofencing can be a highly useful tool that helps establishments better understand the demographics of the area and the preferences and behavior of those inside. While that’s a recipe for success, it’s also important that you lay the proper groundwork for your geofencing campaign. That means encouraging people to download your smartphone app (geofencing works via app, after all) and setting a reasonable boundary. You can experiment with distances, but it’s generally recommended to stay within a mile or two for maximum foot traffic. Want to learn more about how geofencing can integrate with your brand and benefit your overall company ROI? Contact our digital marketing team today!
3 Tools Every Brand Strategy Agency Uses to Increase Conversion
A strong brand strategy agency knows there are a few tried and tested tools that will boost conversions across every industry. At BIGEYE, we pride ourselves on championing multi-channel marketing so our clients can meet their customers’ needs on any device, across any platform, and raise the collective benchmark for digital marketing best practices. These are the three tools we use to help our clients transform their brand within months – guaranteed. 1. Segmentation is more important than ever While content is still king, a one-size fits all model will quickly overthrow the throne. Partner with a brand strategy agency like BIGEYE to fully understand your audience and the different segments shopping for your products. Create custom content for each segment and use tokenization, analytics tagging, social sign on, or self-identification to recognize and adapt to your site visitors by serving them content relevant to their needs. This will increase customer loyalty and boost the likelihood for conversion. Segmentation will also help you understand what types of customers are most valuable so you can budget your marketing dollars around their potential. 2.Invest in omni-channel marketing It is rare for a customer to enter the marketing funnel and complete a conversion in the same visit, or on the same device. Investing in an omni-channel marketing strategy allows you to anticipate the natural jump your visitors will make between devices and across channels throughout their customer journey. In addition to anticipating your customers’ needs and increasing the likelihood of being able to serve compelling content, retarget, and ultimately convert your site traffic, omni-channel customer engagement also boosts retention, which can increase your lifetime value and returning site traffic. According to Invesp, brands with omni-channel engagement retrain 89% of their customers compared to 33% for companies who do not invest in this strategy. 3.Don’t make assumptions about your competition or your customers When clients ask us why a brand strategy agency will help them succeed, we often highlight assumptions they may be making about their competitions or their customers. It’s natural for product and brand leaders to make assumptions based on their own experience using their products day by day. Having a fresh pair of eyes set up the a/b testing, seek answers, and translate data into actionable insights is one of the most valuable outputs of working with an agency. Amp up your conversions by working with a brand strategy agency today. Contact our team of experts to learn more about how we have helped brands like yours grow and scale for success.
Why Knowing Your Audience Is the Key to Marketing Segmentation
Only 2% of visitors convert their first visit to most sites. But using marketing segmentation to retarget that remaining 98% can boost conversions by 70%, according to Invespcro. And it’s much easier to accomplish than you think. Establish a relationship with your customers using audience analysis Understanding who you are talking to is the foundation of strong marketing segmentation. Initiate a relationship with your target audience by acknowledging that you understand who they are, empathize with their needs, and have products and services that can solve their pain points. Start by pulling quantitative information about your site traffic such as socio-economic demographics and referring sources, then layer on the behavioral information you can glean from third-party data outlets such as social media and lead forms. This information will allow you to paint a picture of who your customers are, where they spend their time online, and what they need, so you can use this data to create a flawless marketing experience. Translating this data into actionable insights is the most technically challenging part of the marketing segmentation journey, so we recommend partnering with a trusted digital marketing agency like BIGEYE to get you started. When all else fails, ask: Using choice-based marketing segmentation If you are a small business owner or just beginning to flesh out your marketing segmentation strategy, let your visitors simply tell you who your target market is by having them self-identify. As an example, you may feature a drop-down menu on your landing page that allows visitors to share what industry they are in to receive personalized content or encourage them to opt-in through gated content and lead forms. Once your audience has identified themselves, you can accurately speak to them and provide meaningful content without doing as much upfront audience segmentation work. Build marketing segmentation campaigns that fit your audience’s needs Once you know who you are speaking to, begin creating content that is specific, timely, and relevant to your audiences. Use marketing segmentation tools such a retargeted display ads, search, and social media campaigns to ensure your brand stays top of mind and relevant. While hyper-personalization is important, it’s equally important to recognize that site visitors may flow in and out of different personas and audience types as they move through the customer journey or as their individual needs evolve. Work with an agency to find the right blend of targeted content and universally relevant information or use A/B testing to validate you have the right mix. Qualitative research such as interviews and focus groups might also help you understand whether your content is hitting the right tone for the right individuals at every stage of the marketing experience. Contact us today to explore how BIGEYE has transformed brands like yours using these powerful tools and receive a free consultation and audit about how to get started.
4 steps You Need to Take to Nail Your Brand Positioning This Year
A staggering 64% of consumers cite shared values as a reason to choose or stay with a brand, which is why clear and effective brand positioning can make or break your organization’s success. Whether you have a strong position within the marketplace, or are a budding entrepreneur building your brand, these four steps will help you nail your brand positioning as you grow. 1. Understand where you’re at today Partner with a top Florida marketing agency like BIGEYE to audit your digital presence and tell you what’s working and where you can improve. Chances are, how you think you’re positioning yourself may not be as clear to your target audience as you think. Getting a fresh, outside perspective will allow you to step back and objectively confirm how you want to be seen is how your brand is being perceived. 2. Know your audience Start by creating a mission and vision statement as part of your brand foundation that clarifies who your audience is and what you want to help them achieve. Clearly define how your product provides value and stands out from the competition. Next, set short and long term goals that track your customers’ responses — not just your bottom line. Target specific success criteria such as NPS, engagement, or repeat customers to ensure your brand is resonating with your audience. 3. Learn everything you can about your competition Identify direct and indirect competitors, then map out their strengths and weaknesses. Think beyond your obvious competition to draw inspiration from related industries and success stories. As an example, an all-inclusive resort might look to similarly priced AirBnB properties, hotels, other all-inclusives, or cruise lines as each of those alternatives offers overlapping features and benefits that the all-inclusive resort hopes to use when engaging their ideal customers. And remember: you can learn something from even your least successful competitor. 4. Create your value-based positioning strategy Once you know what you’re trying to achieve and for whom, you can start implementing a strategy that will help you achieve your goal. Use your mission and vision statement to create a multi-channel marketing strategy that exposes your brand to your audience at every stage in the customer journey. A holistic brand positioning statement can help you ensure your messaging is consistent across channels and inspires action. Once you have a strategy in place, you can begin testing what works and refining your brand positioning over time. Contact us today to learn more about how we have helped brands like yours refine their identities and make a splash in the marketplace.
The value of visitor stitching
Harvesting data from visitors to your website has long been one of the most effective ways to understand your audience. It’s also an invaluable tool for calibrating your content to increase its relevance to your audience, and creating personalized marketing messages that can be delivered in a more targeted fashion. Yet because this is an evolving technology, gaps have remained that have limited the efficacy of data-rich insights. One of the most notable of these roadblocks is the “multiple device problem.” This describes a situation where a single user visits a website using multiple devices — for example, a phone, laptop, work computer, tablet etc. Because this traffic originates from a variety of sources, it presents a problem in terms of compiling a data-enhanced profile of site visitors. In other words, if you can’t recognize these disparate sources of traffic as coming from a single person, you can’t build an accurate and comprehensive user profile — you’ll have multiple profiles that only show part of the overall picture. Why visitor stitching is the solution Resolution of this problem requires that all devices connected to an individual user be integrated into a single, comprehensive profile. While conventional data analytics express multi-device traffic as coming from three different people on three separate visits, there is a technique that resolves this problem: Visitor stitching. Visitor stitching eliminates the need to manually integrate multi-device traffic (a time-consuming and expensive task) by providing an elegant real-time mapping solution. The technology works like this: Identifiers belonging to an individual (such as email addresses or social media user names) are recognized and then mapped in real time to multiple devices. This creates a new, comprehensive user profile that incorporates all of the data being held in separate, non-integrated user profiles. Now, instead of a distinct profile being generated for each user every time a new device is used, a single profile contains all the user data generated across every device. Why visitor stitching offers a critical competitive edge Data analysis is the key to understanding who your customers are and what motivates them. Fully leveraging data also offers a serious competitive edge, as personalized marketing and targeted offers lead to more conversions and greater consumer loyalty. Data from McKinsey shows that personalized approaches can generate revenue gains of 10 to 30-percent while creating enduring loyalty. Visitor stitching plays a key role in helping you take full advantage of the power of data. Without the ability to track users across multiple devices, you’re only seeing part of the picture. By creating a comprehensive profile that integrates all visitor data across every device through the process of visitor stitching, you can understand consumers on a deeper level and quickly anticipate their needs. The takeaway If you’re not getting the most out of your data analysis efforts, visitor stitching can play an essential role in helping you better understand your consumers. Once you have a clear-eyed grasp on who your audience is and what motivates them, you can deliver highly-relevant, personalized marketing that wins converts and creates more revenue. For more information on how to understand your target audience and effectively interpret your consumer data using visitor scripting, contact our team professionals today.
Why marketing to generation Z isn’t as easy as you think
Most of us might struggle to remember a time before smartphones and tablets controlled everything from our fitness routines and navigation systems, to our budgets and day-to-day communication…but we can still remember. Generation Z, on the other hand, won’t. Generation Z, the age cohort directly following Millennials who were born after 1992, is the first wave of true digital natives. They’re growing up with iPads at the dinner table and Facebook profiles before they are even born. As digital marketers, this may seem like a golden opportunity to attract potential customers before they are even consumers; but getting this generation’s attention might be a lot more difficult than you think. Here’s why. While the “always on” mindset has made it easier to communicate, learn, and share information, it has also had some unintended effects. The more information we have, the more our minds need to filter out. Many studies have shown that the constant barrage of information, and subsequent choices that go with it, reduce our collective happiness. In Malcolm Gladwell’s famous book on decision making, Blink, he suggests that unlimited options lead us to doubt decisions we’ve made by trading the gut feeling or rationale we originally used for a barrage of “what if’s” and “might have been’s.” Other studies show similar results when patients are faced with too many medical treatment options when investors are faced with too many stock options, when consumers are faced with too many selections at the grocery store, and when eligible suitors are faced with too many dating prospects online. Quite literally, digital natives are spoiled by choice. Our brains seek to correct this cognitive dissonance by filtering out information faster. Attention spans have become shorter and decision-making has become truncated by the constant mental jump between clicking, reading, watching, sharing, and acting on the information in front of us. As Pulitzer Prize runner-up, Nicholas Carr puts it, “the redirection of our mental resources, from reading words to making judgments, may be imperceptible – our brains are quick – but it’s been shown to impede comprehension and retention, particularly when repeated.” Members of Generation Z likely do not even need to think about the filtering process as they switch between devices or channels, and flawlessly overlook or absorb certain information — but it is changing how they learn and make decisions. By filtering out larger quantities of information faster, this generation is losing a degree of depth when engaging online. Content that wins this generation’s attention is pithy, memorable, and short … not nuanced, detailed, and thorough. While this isn’t inherently “good” or “bad,” it does present a unique challenge for digital marketers. Video clips, snack-sized content, and catchy taglines that are easy to remember and share are replacing the white pages, case studies, and product catalogs that older generations know and love. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that one of the best ways to reach Generation Z is through YouTube. According to a recent AdWeek study, more than 95% of Gen Z said they can’t live without YouTube. Of those, nearly 80% said they have a favorable attitude toward celebrity endorsements. In other words, they are looking for someone to tell them which products or experiences to spend their time and money on. In a world with nearly unlimited research potential, sometimes it’s nice to just let someone tell you what the right answer is. And YouTube does that in a very compelling, digestible, and entertaining way. In a similar study by Business Insider, Generation Z ranked YouTube reviews, product demos, and unboxing videos as some of their favorite forms of content, suggesting this insight is especially relevant within the consumer space. YouTube is one of the most powerful tools for digital marketers when trying to break through the information clutter. To guide your YourTube content strategy, we recommend asking whether your videos pass the “M.I.S.S.” test. Are they: Memorable? Informative? Short? And shareable? These four principles will help craft content that Generation Z will engage with and enjoy. That isn’t to say that your video content shouldn’t also be accurate and insightful. While Gen Z’s attention span may be shorter than previous generations, that doesn’t imply that they don’t have the intellectual breadth or depth to synthesize complex ideas. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Because Gen Z has grown up with floods of information, they are more adept at scanning for accuracy than previous generations. Fluffy jargon and obtuse information won’t get past these consumers. Use this knowledge as a challenge to distill the most critical information about your products and brand in a transparent, crisp vision of what your organization is all about. If you are unsure how to boil down your brand value proposition to the basics, or create videos that will delight and inspire potential customers, we’re here to help. Contact us to learn more about how to leverage YouTube to your advantage and attract your next generation of brand enthusiasts. It’s easier than you think but more important than you ever could have imagined.
Programmatic Advertising 101: Why nerdy trends are profitable
What is Programmatic Advertising (PA): Programmatic advertising tools use complex analysis, forecasting, and regression algorithms to crunch millions of data points to find trends within certain customer groups. Once trends or behavioral patterns have been identified, the tool serves and optimizes content to your ideal audience in real time. As new data continues to be logged, your programmatic advertising spend will adjust accordingly so your advertising dollars are always being spent in the most efficient and effective way possible. Demand software using programmatic advertising input can bid on and serve everything from display advertisements, to social media ads, to videos, and retargeting campaigns. We’ll give that an A+ for mathematics application. So, What’s in This for My Customers?: Because PA platforms can track customer behavior, demographics, cross-channel activities, interests, and trends, you are only serving content that is of real interest to your ideal customer base. Programmatic advertising can also optimize content placement based on day, time, geography, and seasonality so your campaigns will reach your audience when they want or need it. That’s right, we said your ads could be both specific and timely. Trust us – your customers will thank you later when they are clicking on your content rather than closing it out. And, What’s in This for Me?: It might go without saying but: the harder your ads work for you — i.e. the more efficient and relevant they are to your customers — the more likely it is they will yield sales. A strong PA program also frees up your team to focus on other initiatives, such as generating killer content or building other areas of your cross-channel marketing strategy. Instead of wasting time haggling over bulk ad buys, trying to analyze your display placement mix, or negotiating with media vendors, PA software does this for you. Getting Started: Programmatic advertising isn’t just for “big corporations.” If the IDC’s adoption rate tells you anything, it’s that PA is a universal tool that can benefit any industry, any type of business, and any size operation. With that said, setting up a program that’s tailored to your needs can feel a little daunting if you don’t have an established analytics team. In fact, unless you already have an in-house team who has worked with programmatic advertising in the past, the quickest path to success is partnering with an agency who can get you started. Setting up your PA parameters is the hard part — the software will take care of the rest. To make this easy, your agency will help you define a budget and cross check your content to ensure your first ad bids, and subsequent optimization efforts, are successful and ready to scale for success. When you’re just starting, you will set clear, measurable goals and work with your agency to understand the expected return on investment of a certain bid so you know exactly what you’re getting. Even though PA alleviates a lot of planning pain for your team, it’s important to track and optimize everything … including your optimization efforts. We’re here to help. Learn more about all the data tools our team recommends and how you can harness the wealth of information customers are freely and happily giving to make content more interesting and engaging than ever before. On our website you can explore our services, read case studies, and get a preliminary evaluation about how programmatic advertising could transform your digital presence today.
What is OpenAP and how it can help you reach your target market
For several years, we’ve been reticent to encourage clients to invest big bucks in television ads because the audience simply isn’t narrow enough to make the return on investment — which is often quite low after you factor in production overhead and distribution costs — worthwhile. While television was once a premium medium for advertisers thanks to high levels of viewer engagement, we have seen a sharp decline in effectiveness because viewers can easily tune out commercials when content isn’t relevant to them by turning their attention to their mobile phones, tablets, or laptops. For the digital marketer, this was an opportunity to prove why relevant and timely content is so important … and cash in along the way. For media distributors, it was nearly a death sentence. The good news is that many major television companies have been aware of this issue and actively seeking ways to revitalize one of the most hallowed marketing channels in history. This spring, Viacom, Fox Networks Group, and Time Warner Cable finally came up with a viable solution. Instead of banking on the few big-ticket commercial opportunities to keep their coffers afloat (think: multi-million dollar placements during the Super Bowl), they have banned together to help small- and medium-sized businesses affordably reach their target audience. Together, they launched, “OpenAP” – a new data platform that aggregates information from a variety of providers so advertisers can securely and collaboratively place ads within desirable demographics. Think: first-time home buyers, urban couples, pet owners, and more. Executive Vice President of Data Strategy for Viacom, Bryson Gordon explained the vision to Media Village in a recent interview: “It’s about the secure sharing of those consistent audience segments across publishers. The advertiser or the agency will be able decide who can see the segment and how it gets shared with the publisher before activating it across their inventory. It also gives the individual networks the independence to use their own proprietary datasets in conjunction with industry accepted measurement services, such as Nielsen and comScore.” His vision is important for two main reasons. First and foremost, it makes television advertising relevant again. For example, CNN historically runs advertisements focused on Baby Boomers because this generation comprises the majority of their viewership. Young professionals watching the news while getting ready for work yawn through advertisements for retirement planning, bladder control medication, and 55+ residential communities. The network’s blanket approach to advertising makes it easy for one of the most valuable, growing sources of disposable income in the market to simply tune out. OpenAP makes it possible to tailor these ads so Baby Boomers still enjoy relevant content, without alienating new or emerging demographics. Targeted content for targeted segments finally makes television advertising relevant for the individual, not the majority. Second, because networks can merge their own data with shared data and link to other measurement tools, television ads will be measurable in a new and important way. Because advertisers previously had to rely on the “spray and pray” model when exposing content on television, it was hard to quantify how effective an advertisement really was because only a fraction of viewers might actually represent qualified leads. By limiting exposure and tracking performance, planning and measurement will naturally improve. This is one of the first exciting breakthroughs the television ad space has seen in years, and it perfectly complements our belief that the future of customer-centric marketing hinges on a robust and choiceful cross-channel marketing approach. We’re excited to see TV getting back in the game and are here to help you craft your first segmented, trackable television ad. Get in touch with our media and strategy teams to learn more!
Hello from the other side: What is social listening?
Social listening is one of those magical, marketing buzzwords that seems to hold the key to customer information, new sales, and social engagement. But what is it? Whether you’re a new digital marketer or a seasoned business owner, understanding social listening (and knowing how to use it) can be a powerful tool in your toolbox. We know that wading through the myriad of marketing blogs and platforms can be daunting, so we’ve stripped down the jargon and confusion to give you the real deal on social listening. What is social listening? Social listening is a common marketing practice that involves auditing and collecting information your customers are saying about your brand online. This may include capturing comments about your brand on social media, cataloging reviews, combing through news articles, or monitoring blog posts. Often times, companies will score each comment based on whether it’s positive or negative, and whether it’s coming from an influential source or an insignificant channel. Social listening can give business owners insight into the types of brand associations their customers are organically building by considering who is speaking most frequently (i.e., mommy blogs vs. trade journals) and what their conversations are about. What do you use social listening for? Knowing whether your customers and prospective customers have a positive or negative opinion about your products, and what other products they’re comparing them to, can give you a clear picture into whether you’re effectively communicating your unique value proposition. Understanding who your customers are talking to and where they are discussing your products can also help you target a better, more valuable audience and serve them information and content where they are already surfing the web. This information allows you to address customer service issues, generate leads, and encourage viral sharing depending on how you respond to your findings. Social listening gives you an inside look into your customers’ mindset and helps you interact when them in a more authentic way. Start listening in now Although there are many tools that can help you conduct your own social listening, such as Hootsuite, the best, most reliable option is to partner with a social marketing agency. Agencies often have access to multiple listening tools, so you’ll get a broader, more holistic picture of the conversations taking place. Every good social marketing agency also has a team of experts monitoring and interpreting data as it comes in, so you can quickly and appropriately respond to positive or negative turns in the conversation. They can make recommendations on how to best respond, and tailor your future marketing campaigns to your customers’ needs. Buzzwords aside, social listening is truly and incredible way to understand your customers’ psyche and learn how to interact with them. The process is easier than it seems, but immeasurably powerful when put to good use. They say that we have two ears and one mouth for a reason; and this maxim is especially true on the internet as you combat the endless stream of clutter and noise that might otherwise distract your customers…so contact our team of social strategists today to get listening and start learning!