Social marketing listening: listening to the network to enhance your marketing activities

Social listening to benefit your company’s marketing activities.

One of the main reasons whylistening to the network is critically important for both SMEs and well-established Large Enterprises is related to business marketing activities and ROI optimization.

Or rather, to money wasted on conducting online marketing campaigns that do not work.

In fact, it is not enough to plan promotion activities that, in your opinion, will yield the best return. You must have hard data, obtained from well-defined market research, so that every penny is put to good use toward achieving business goals.

Today I want to explain exactly how social marketing listening can help your company best invest its resources and how best to do it.

Knowing your target market makes all the difference if you want to design successful marketing campaigns

Let’s assume that your company has a digital presence and that you invest thousands-if not millions-each year in marketing activities on social networks, such as Facebook and Instagram, and on search engines such as Google.

Well, you do very well! But if you want every penny spent on the web to turn into concrete results for your business, do you know what the first requirement is?

It is not knowing how to create the most beautiful posts, the funniest messages or the most viral videos.

Think about it: in the Babylon of social media, where users are subjected to millions of messages all at once, will it make a difference if your message is a little more likable or crisp than others’?

Of course not! However, this is what the social networks want you to believe, because this way you will keep spending more and more and giving them your money.

The difference lies somewhere else, which is in the ability to know the audience you are addressing perfectly .

Being able to find out who they are, what makes them jump out of their chairs, and what they want is what makes the difference today between a successful campaign and a disastrous one in which the only ones to gain are the social networks.

Now I’ll explain more about what I mean and how you can use it to your advantage, but in the meantime, I’ll anticipate that fortunately listening to the net comes to your aid this time too!

If you want to put yourself in your customers’ shoes, in fact, the only way is to get inside their heads by listening to what they care about, understanding who they are and what problems they have.

But let’s go in order.

Read also: Brand listening: why and how to listen to those who talk about your company

The slot machine-style mechanism of social networks and search engines

You may have noticed that compared to the old days, marketing on social media has become much more complex. The cost to acquire a click has increased, and where once one person was enough to handle social marketing you now need an army to keep up with everything.

This happens because the digital giants have managed to create the perfect mechanism that, like a slot machine, the more you play, the more you want to play, the more you spend and the more they make.

Mind you, I am not saying that they are scammers or that you should not spend on their channels. These are probably the most powerful marketing channels we have at our disposal… And which we can no longer do without!

Nowadays, social networks and search engines have catalyzed the attention of consumers, who spend all their leisure hours on their cell phone screens and rely completely on the information they can find online to decide what to buy.

This is now a fact. Companies that do not advertise on Google and major social networks but continue to invest only in more traditional media are out of the picture.

So investing is necessary… But unfortunately, you already know that you don’t just decide to invest a certain budget in Google or Facebook to get the results you want.

You need to be able to launch a campaign with flair, one that targets the right people with the right message, has the right hashtags and properly optimized images.

Once published, your posts will have to compete with thousands of other posts and advertisements from companies like you, vying for a second of consumer attention… So you’ll only have a shot at success if the message is engaging and if it is able to interest your target customers.

To make it more complicated, social networks change the rules on how to advertise every five minutes: new formats, different way of calculating spending, different quality parameters.

Companies are stuck in the vicious cycle where they are forced to spend more and more, but get fewer results, so they spend more because next time will be the good time, and so on.

Exactly like the mechanisms of slot machines, which lead people to be unable to stop, hoping to finally see the coveted golden tokens fall!

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the problem is that I don’t know which half.”

John Wanamaker

Sixty percent of the corporate budget devoted to online advertising campaigns… It is wasted!

Research by the multinational Proxima Group found that companies routinely waste 60 percent of the budget spent online on ads and content that are not seen by anyone and bring no results.

And since an average company invests about 5 to 10 percent of its revenue in digital marketing, losing 60 percent of it means getting screwed out of between 3 and 6 percent of its revenue.

Doing two quick calculations in mind, if a medium-sized company makes 50M a year, that means it is losing between 1.5M and 3M each year!

If that were not enough, research done through gaze-tracking cameras found that only 9 percent of the ads that companies pay for are actually SEEN by the human eye-which by now is highly trained to skip images and text it is not interested in.

So if the few ads that make it to the top have a chance of only 9% to be seen, you’ll understand how difficult it is for the ads you spend money on to get the goals you want!

Read also: Listening social media: what can be heard today and from what sources

Social marketing listening: the weak point of web slot machines

It sounds like a desperate situation, doesn’t it? You are forced to invest in social because you don’t sell otherwise, but the money you invest largely goes to waste.

Fortunately, there is a solution, which not only allows you to enhance the value of your investments, but also makes the social networks themselves help you and even let your advertisements be seen for free.

In fact, if your ads target the right people with a message that manages to interest and engage them, the music changes.

In this case you are helping social networks, ad networks and search engines in their purpose, which is to have quality material that their users like, lots of clicks and lots of traffic.

And so they will help you in turn, showing your ad to a much larger number of people at a much lower cost! What’s more, the same people will share your content for free, increasing its visibility and creating a positive virtuous circle for everyone.

It’s kind of like finding a way to rig the slot machine, don’t you think?

All marketers who have figured this out sweat seven shirts to achieve this idyllic situation. Few really succeed, however, and especially very few succeed systematically.

That is, the fluke happens where the social media manager has the bright idea, usually while in the shower, and publishes a post or video that goes viral in seconds, leading to the brand being cited among the success stories of the year. It can happen, just as it can happen to win even large amounts of money on slot machines!

But if you don’t have a system in place to make this become systematic-or at least very frequent-in the long run, the losses will outweigh the gains made randomly.

And this system, as you’ve probably guessed by now, is having in place a method of constantly listening to the network.

Why does social listening help you maximize the ROI of your online advertising campaigns?

There are 3 main reasons why social marketing listening helps you maximize your online ad revenue. Here are which ones:

• Intercepting people interested in a certain topic and talking about it means understanding who these people are, where they are, and which channels are easiest to reach them with, without throwing away thousands on the wrong channels.
• If you listen to those people as they express themselves spontaneously, sharing thoughts and problems, you can learn a great deal about what they think and what they want to hear.
• In the first two points did you do something wrong? You can find out right away and not when you have spent even the last penny. You can therefore correct the course in progress.

Given the millions and millions thrown away every day, I’d say investing in network listening is a great idea for your business, wouldn’t you say?

Contact us now to learn more about this and understand what we can do for your business with our actionable market research.