September 29, 2020

How Businesses Can Leverage Social Listening Insights to Inform and Improve Business Strategies

Whether or not you've heard of social listening directly or indirectly, you likely know the concept. Social listening is the process of monitoring social media and other online platforms for mention of your multi-location business, competitors, your product, and more. In simpler terms, social listening is listening to the online conversations surrounding your brand, industry, and competitors. Social listening is essential in tracking how your multi-location business is performing compared to competitors. It also shows you areas where there's room for improvement in your localized marketing efforts. If you have a good read on the conversation going on around your multi-location business and industry, you can begin to use those insights to inform and improve your business strategies.

How Social Listening Improves Your Reputation and Mitigates Crisis

Ninety-one percent of unhappy consumers will never return to your business. Without social listening, you won't have any idea why the consumer was unhappy, or what you could do to fix their experience. If your multi-location business does pay attention to what consumers are saying about you online, you will be able to better engage with them in ways that resonate with them. For instance, if a specific business location has recently received a few negative reviews about an employee not practicing social distancing measures, through social listening, you will be able to identify this issue early on and solve the problem before it becomes a viral PR crisis. On the other hand, you can use social listening to find examples of consumers providing great reviews about your business or commenting on their positive experience doing business with your company. You can then leverage these positive comments into customer testimonials, or engage with the happy consumer, in hopes that they will continue to spread a positive message about your multi-location business. Without social listening, your multi-location business wouldn't be able to identify the conversations going on around your business, and therefore wouldn't respond accordingly. Maintaining a strong reputation and responding to reviews on time is an essential component of a robust localized marketing strategy, and social listening can help you achieve this.

Better Engage With Your Consumers Through Social Listening

Social listening can also help you better engage with your consumers. Consumers are craving a local connection now more than ever, and social listening will ensure that you speak to consumers about what matters to them. You can use social listening to elevate social posts, videos, and articles about your brand. If a consumer has created a post about your brand, you can increase your engagement with the consumer by sharing their post or, as mentioned previously, commenting on it. While monitoring the conversation around your multi-location business is helpful, you can also use social listening to further engage consumers through events or giveaways. For instance, do you have a virtual event planned for later this year? You can use social listening to monitor a hashtag around the event, and do a giveaway for three people who entered using the hashtag. This creates more engagement among your consumers while increasing brand awareness at the same time. If your consumers feel like you are taking the time to engage with them and listen to what they have to say, they will be more likely to return and do business with your company again.

Drive New Sales Using Social Listening Insights

One of the most significant benefits of social listening is its ability to help your multi-location business drive new sales. You can utilize the insights and information you've collected through social listening to improve your localized marketing strategy. For instance, if you see that a competitor is out-performing your multi-location business and also notice that they have been hosting various online events throughout the pandemic, this is something to consider. This doesn't mean that your multi-location business should start hosting many online events, but it does mean that you should think outside the box and get creative in terms of localized marketing. If you begin making informed changes to your localized marketing efforts based on what you've found in social listening, you will start to see changes in terms of consumers, and ultimately new sales. Social listening allows your business to generate new leads through listening to consumer conversations as well. For instance, if your multi-location business monitors all mentions of “I need a new gym” or a similar phrase that would be more relevant to your industry, you can respond to those conversations and potentially drive new sales. Your multi-location business can also use social listening to hear what consumers are saying about your own business regarding various products and marketing tactics. If you see that consumers are consistently commenting on your product's quality, it may be time to share the feedback with your product development team. If your multi-location business makes changes or additions to your products based on social listening, you will likely see an increase in new sales.

Getting Started with Social Listening

The importance of social listening can't be overlooked. If you want your multi-location business to beat the competition and win in localized marketing, social listening is necessary. While monitoring the conversation around your multi-location business and its competitors can seem overwhelming, it doesn't have to be. SOCi has a soon to be released listening tool. Through this tool, you'll be able to 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. If this isn't enough, SOCi is also the central command for multi-location marketers and the all-in-one platform for your localized marketing needs. For more information on how SOCi can help your multi-location business build a winning localized marketing strategy, request a demo today!