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Do you think digital marketing doesn’t work? Then you never started from social listening!
- 2. What is social listening and why, without it, web marketing strategies do not work?
- 3. The benefits of listening to the network as a pillar of an online marketing strategy
- 4. By listening to the network you can tell if your web marketing strategies are working or flopping.
- 5. The choice is not IF to listen or not, but WHEN to start listening.
More than 72 percent of companies are dissatisfied with the results of their investment in digital marketing. Is yours among them?
You should know that many businesses are firmly convinced that web marketing strategies do not work and completely challenged about the possibility of being able to improve their online results.
But is this really the case? Let’s find out together…
The truth is that too many companies have been burned: after trying them all, after throwing thousands and thousands of euros to follow the “guru” on duty who promised miracle solutions, they no longer want to know about web marketing.
You, too, have most likely come to this point…. But you still have a glimmer of hope and would like to proceed on your own, searching Google for inspiration to adopt the best web marketing strategies.
Don’t do it:It probably won’t work and you’ll end up wasting time and money, and even this time your ROI will be unsatisfactory.
Up to this point we have given you only bad news. That’s enough, it’s time to move on to the (very) good ones.
If you want to adopt a successful marketing strategy, the method exists and it is to listen to the Network. How? Through market research including a social listening activity!
Online marketing does not work because it continues to be simple “MARKETING” and wanting to impose a message.
Marketing = talking, sending messages, campaigning. It cannot work in a world where it is more important to listen, to receive feedback, to improve!
The great communication strategists, the gurus, all keep racking their brains about MESSAGE and STRATEGY.
All focused on aspects such as:
- The creativity of the message,
- The incisiveness of the strategy,
- The optimization of online advertising campaigns.
Very interesting topics, but they make your investment in web marketing a real gamble.
You put all your chips on what seems to you to be the winning hand and then you make all the superstitious gestures you know, hoping to get something.
In reality, only those who can listen to all the messages and figure out how to get into the conversation win today. And who, when he/she launches a message, keeps his/her ears wide open to immediately take in all the RESPONSES, not only in terms of likes, clicks, CPC, sales etc., but in terms of content, information and feedback.
As Ernest Hemingway once said:
I love to listen. I learned a great number of things by listening carefully. Many people never listen.
The secret is all here: learning to listen. Because in the Internet age, marketing without listening does not work.
A web marketing strategy that guarantees a good return on investment starts with social listening (in Italian, “Listening to the network”), that is, the set of actions and tools aimed at capturing and collecting articles, conversations, posts published online.
This listening activity succeeds in capturing all the information that, directly or indirectly may prove useful for your business.
Get data on your target market, your competitors and, of course, your target customers, with their needs and opinions critical to your web marketing strategies!
Depending on your goal, question, or the information you seek, you may find the answer you need, solve problems, or avoid unpleasantness.
Read also: Business Strategy: why you can no longer do without Marketing Intelligence
The benefits of listening to the network as a pillar of an online marketing strategy
Okay, but why rely specifically on web listening?
Simple. Thanks to listening to the network:
- You learn about your audience. By “getting to know customers” I mean really understanding who your audience is, what they are interested in, what they talk about, what problems they have, what they like about your products. Not through questionnaires, surveys, and brainstorming. But through listening to the things people think and say spontaneously, sharing them online on social networks, forums, blogs and so on!
- Get feedback, FREE. People talk about your company without asking you for anything in return! The least you can do is listen to these opinions and treasure them to calibrate your marketing strategies on the run, avoiding throwing your money away. You will also discover how to improve products and services.
- Optimize your web marketing strategy. If you listen to and get to know your customers, you don’t go groping anymore. Because even you can have the best possible marketing team and rely on the most prominent agency in Italy… But if your consultants don’t walk in your clients’ shoes and can’t think like them, they will only be able to proceed by trial and error.
- You avoid sending the wrong message and, as a result,…
- You shrug off reputational crises! Today, not knowing what is going on is not only a disadvantage, it is DANGEROUS: You risk having everything you have worked for for years ruined by a reputational crisis that becomes a ruckus. Prevention is better than cure.
- Seize the changes in the market. As the marketing guru continues to brainstorm, all kinds of things are happening around him–and that all makes all the difference in being able to make the right move!
- You are always one step ahead of your competition. You can spy on your competitors’ strategies and intercept all the times people are talking about them without them noticing… So you get additional feedback on products similar to yours, which is very useful for understanding your customers better and exploiting competitors’ weaknesses to your advantage!
But let’s look at one last benefit of social listening, which is often overlooked but critical to understanding whether we are going in the right direction.
By listening to the network you can tell if your web marketing strategies are working or flopping.
I told you earlier that normally in marketing, campaign results are evaluated through likes, views, clicks, and-where possible-direct sales.
Missing, however, are some very important results that 99 percent of marketers forget.
When you do a campaign, whether on the Internet or other channels, you hope people will see it and start talking about it, right?
If they are talking about it online, here they are again-you can listen to them! You can gauge how much they are talking about it, how, on what channels, what they are saying, and so on. And if no one talks about it, that’s feedback too!
You can finally come full circle, putting together your data on the internal return, and the external information you would otherwise lose.
Read also: Marketing and Market Research: without Data you waste 60% of your budget
The choice is not IF to listen or not, but WHEN to start listening.
Sooner or later you will have to, because this way of gathering market information and using the huge big-database of the Web is now a reality.
The choice is whether to be among the first to do so, immediately getting information that is inaccessible at the moment to your competitors, or to let them get this data sooner or later and then have to adjust. A rather obvious choice, don’t you think?
So put us to the test, personally test that what we have just told you is true and can help you in a concrete way.
Contact us now for a free consultation!
