Discovering the voice of your brand, the distinct personality, language, and other affectations that make it unique is a cornerstone of brand recognition. However, sometimes it’s easy to be so focused on what you’re outputting, that you could be missing some valuable input. As such, we’re going to look at a few crucial examples of how listening can be just as important a skill in marketing. These techniques can help you get a better insight on what works and what doesn’t, to improve your future marketing efforts.
Why Listening in Marketing is Important?
Listening in marketing means paying attention to what customers are saying. It’s not just hearing them but understanding their needs, wants, and opinions. While many companies focus on telling people about their products, the smart ones also listen to what their audience has to say.
When you listen to someone, you make them feel important. This is true in everyday life and in marketing too. When companies listen to their customers, they build trust. Customers feel valued and more connected to the brand.
Techniques To Improve Your Marketing Efforts
There are many ways to listen to your customers. You can use online tools to see what people are saying about your brand on social media. Surveys and feedback forms are also great for gathering customer opinions. The key is to use this information to make your marketing better.
Understand the market
First of all, you should ensure that you’re able to understand the needs of your audience. Otherwise, it can be hard to align with them when it comes to the real benefits and value of your products and services. If you can’t understand their needs, then you won’t be able to identify what, exactly, is the best selling point to put forward in your marketing. Understanding your audience, and their demographics, can help you better understand how to communicate with them. The creation of an ideal customer profile can prove a useful exercise in creating an avatar for your customer that you use as a compass in your marketing efforts. Bear in mind that your audience analytics can change, as time goes on, too, and that your brand’s approach and voice might do well to change along with them.
In your target audience’s words
Understanding your customers and your target audience can help you better understand their viewpoints, their needs, their struggles, and the role that your products and services can play as a solution or enhancement. However, getting a step closer, you can even understand the language that your customers use to talk about the kind of products and services that you offer. This can help you improve their chances of finding your products through search engine optimization. Using the right phrasing and keywords to attract your audiences to your website can help you generate a lot more attention to what your business offers, which can lead to real sales, as well. Learning the real language that your audience uses when talking about your products can help you operate with a better-shared voice, as well, rather than use terms and jargon that they might not be as quick to engage with and understand.
Know the trends so you can utilize them
Over time, different trends are going to arise in marketing. Some of them come as a result of changes in how audiences interface with brands, such as the rising popularity of new media and platforms, which is especially prevalent in the digital age, when a new year can bring with it a quickly spreading new social media platform, as well. In other cases, such as SEO, changes to marketing trends can happen as the result of changes to the platforms themselves, like when Google changes major factors in what makes pages more visible in their search engine results pages. Keep a close eye on the marketing trends for the year, so that you can make sure that you’re not behind your competitors when it comes to adopting those trends to make successful change. Of course, you want to avoid jumping the gun to ensure that you don’t land into a fad that fizzles out. Find the balance between being forward-thinking and modern, while not taking any undue risks.
Feel the pulse of the discourse
By paying attention to the more general trends of marketing techniques and methods, you can ensure that you are keeping up to date, technically. However, this goes not just for techniques but for content, as well. By learning the differences between and when to use reactive or proactive PR, you can produce marketing content that is able to address different needs and interactions. Proactive PR, for instance, is all about generating the story that you’re covering. However, by paying more attention to ongoing conversations, cultural trends, as well as interest in your brand, you can make better use of reactive PR. This, in turn, allows you to take advantage of hot-button topics, keeping your brand relevant more easily. There’s a time for both proactive and reactive PR, but a lot of brands try to constantly generate proactive PR when reacting could be easier and just as effective at the right moments.
Keep track of the conversation
With the tip above, you can make sure that you’re able to act on hot-button topics relevant to your niche or industry at any time. However, you can go into even more detail when it comes to reactive marketing. For instance, you can make sure that you’re following specific conversations, as well as any mentions of your brand or products, with the help of social media management tools. By following the right hashtags and phrases, you’re able to more keenly see what people are saying about your brand, even when they’re not responding to or engaging with it directly. You can get honest estimations when you’re paying attention to those who might not notice that you’re listening.
Capitalize on interactions and opportunities
Of course, while the fly-on-the-wall approach, as mentioned above, can certainly help you get some candid opinions on your brand and marketing efforts, you shouldn’t ignore those who are willing to say it to your face, either. If you see the opportunity to have genuine and fruitful interactions on social media platforms, or other public spaces, then you should take it. Not only can you use these platforms to offer support and collect feedback, but they can also act as social signals that your brand is worth engaging with and following in the first place. This doesn’t mean that you have to engage with every single person who comments on your posts, but you should be paying close attention to those channels so that you can see the opportunities worth capitalizing on.
Help people feel heard
Another great reason to follow the above tip of paying more attention to your social media feeds, or any mediums that your customers can use to reach your brand directly, is that interacting with them can offer them something that they won’t get from your marketing alone, nor from just your products or services. You can offer your audience validation. You can help them feel heard, and like their opinions belong. What’s more, you can gather feedback that genuinely helps you improve your business. To that end, you can create an impression of being a brand that genuinely cares. You could potentially go even further and publish things like case studies based on feedback, changes that you made as a result of said feedback, and any resulting changes.
Listen back to your own marketing
It’s important to make sure that you don’t get too detached from your own marketing efforts, especially if you are working with other partners, whether internally or with outsourced marketing services. If you rely on others, make sure that you have the opportunity to give everything that you put out a listen. You want to make sure that your brand, products, and services are represented in a way that feels accurate to your intentions, factually correct, and in keeping with the values and voice that you’re trying to make a part of your brand identity.
Keep an ear out for analytics, too
While we’re keeping the view introspective, then you should make sure that you keep an eye on the metrics of how your marketing is performing, as well. There are various ways to do this. You can use website analytics tools to see not only where your traffic is coming from, but where it goes after, which can help you improve things through conversion rate optimization efforts. With social media analytics tools, you’re much better able to see which posts are and are not working effectively at bringing attention to your brand. From this, you can begin to identify the things that your most successful posts have in common, which can allow you to keep doing what works while shifting away from what doesn’t.
Know when it’s time to change
An important part of listening is to understand not only when the market is responding well to your marketing, but when the opposite is happening, too. It’s unfortunate and frustrating to come to the realization that your target audience simply isn’t buying your messaging, but you shouldn’t cling to errors that you’re not able to do anything about. As such, it’s important to think about when it’s also a good idea to call it and to pivot your branding. It’s not an easy move to make, as you have to risk throwing away any recognition of the old brand, but if your marketing and branding simply aren’t hitting your audience, then it might be a necessary step.
Conclusion
It’s important to take a moment to stop messaging and to simply listen, as well. By paying attention to what your customers are saying, you can build stronger relationships, create better products, and craft messages that truly resonate. Hopefully, the tips above show you the various ways you can listen to the benefit of your brand and marketing plan. Listening isn’t just nice to do; it’s a key part of a successful marketing strategy.
