Social media is an essential tool if you want to understand what your audience thinks of your company. You can leverage its use by listening to what your customers say about;
- Your company
- Your competitors
- Your industry
There are two ways you can analyze and track your customers’ feedback:
Social media monitoring– this involves gathering relevant information and data. You can later use this data to look for trends and insights.
Social listening– this is analyzing the information and data collected. You can later use the results to improve your marketing strategies.
Reasons Media Monitoring is Essential for Your Marketing
Do you find that your marketing strategies fail to connect with consumers? Pay close attention. Here’s why relevant content marketing depends on media monitoring.
Predict Rises in Demand with Media Monitoring
Media tracking helps you track the most current developments in your industry. This then helps you to recognize future demand or interest of your customers for your brand. You can predict the future spikes in demand by analyzing past data and trends from social media and blog posts.
The information gets you a leg up on your competition, and you can position your company in the best way to respond accordingly.
Differentiate Your Brand from Competition
Social tracking is an easy way to know who your competition is and what they are doing in terms of marketing strategies. You can find out how much media traction they are gaining from their latest campaigns and then recognize which ideas work and which don’t.
With this information, you then can create marketing strategies, especially your campaigns differently from your competitors. You can do this by not repeating the mistakes your competitors do and also improving on areas that they are good at.
Create a Powerful Brand Presence
Do people know that your brand exists? Does your target market or target customer understand what your brand is about? Media monitoring enables you to get a feel of what your customers think of your brand.
It also helps you to find and address any misunderstanding about your brand, thus, enabling you to tailor-make your communications to your target customers. To easily connect with your potential customers, ensure that your brand’s voice is consistent across all media platforms you use.
Reputation and Crisis Management
Social listening is a perfect way for you to find out what feedback your customers are giving both positive and negative. You should celebrate any positive feedback you receive. When you receive negative feedback, you should address it promptly.
So having a monitoring tool that notifies you whenever your brand is mentioned negatively would come in handy in helping you deal with a crisis fast. You could have notifications for specific words that point to a crisis to be able to address these issues quickly.
Moreover, being able to respond to questions and concerns from your customers quickly builds your brand’s reputation and creates trust with them.
Use Influencers to Boost Your Presence
Media monitoring enables you to find and follow thought leaders whose opinions are respected in your industry. Collaborating with these influencers in your marketing strategies and campaigns will boost your brand’s awareness and sales.
However, you need to ensure that the influencer you choose is the right one for your brand. Some ways to know whether you have chosen the right influencer are:
- Their media content matches yours
- Their tone of voice on their content is like yours
- They have high engagement on their social media platforms
- They are reliable, honest and credible
Analyze Your Engagement
Media monitoring tools help you to measure and analyze the impact your communications have on both your customers and potential customers. The information received then helps you to better target your campaigns to them.
Thus, media tracking tools are vital when it comes to strategic marketing and decision-making processes.
Generate Content Ideas
In marketing, it is highly recommended to provide insight and create new content ideas constantly to keep your audience engaged. Thinking up new ideas every time can be time consuming and strenuous.
Media monitoring helps you to keep track of the trending topics in your industry, ensuring that you aren’t short of things to discuss. It also helps you keep an eye on what your competition is writing about, thus, giving you inspiration for creative ideas and also what to avoid.
Tools for Social Media Monitoring
There are several tools you can use for media monitoring. These include:
Awario– it helps you to track mentions of your brand, those of your competitors, and your industry in general. It also helps you detect when your content gets plagiarized.
TweetDeck– this is essential, especially if you have more than one Twitter account that you regularly post to. It helps you to follow trending posts, mentions of your brand name, or even feeds from the people you follow.
Keyhole– helps you to automate your posts. It also lets you trace keywords and hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. You can also check brand mentions across blogs, and it lets you analyze sentiments, keywords, and mentions.
Mention provides you with both real-time and historical data. It also lets you create an alert for this data. It helps you find influencers on your Twitter and Instagram handles by use of keyword search.
Buzzsumo– this tool sends you content alerts daily, especially when there is a mention of your brand or when someone created a backlink to your site.
Hootsuite- is known for scheduling posts on social media. It will also assist you in tracking your brand mentions. You can also search for trending topics using keywords.
Leverage Social Media for Your Marketing Needs
More and more companies are now using social media for their market research, to get customer insights, and to analyze their competition. Due to this, media monitoring tools have become a powerful resource for any brand that uses it.
Remember, even if you effectively use the best social tracking tools, if you don’t act on the data you receive, then your company may not see any improvement. So ensure you respond quickly to customer feedback. Also, revise your marketing strategy with the change in customer needs.
Did you find this information insightful? If you did, follow our blog for more tips and educative posts for your marketing strategies
