Listening platforms; Useful or Strategic?
When talking to marketing executives, the most common complaint that I hear regarding social media listening platforms is that they only validate what brands already know. While validation is useful, it is not strategic. Marketing executives want to gain insights into their customers’ behavior. They don’t want a red, yellow, green dashboard; they want actionable answers to questions like the following: is your marketing messaging aligned to what customers in the global market value? How is your messaging influencing customers at a brand level and at a product level? Are there products that are creating perceptions that do not align with the brand image that you are trying to create? What are the influential organic conversations taking place in the market that you didn’t expect, and what can you learn from them? What emotionally intense themes and topics are trending right now?
When trying to change or influence global brand perception, understanding what’s driving brand perception in different markets is imperative. A biological fact across all cultures is that the part of the brain that makes decisions is also the part of the brain that controls emotions. That is why people buy based on emotion and then justify their purchases with logic. Therefore, is important to segment customers’ conversations by geographic locale, and then identify the emotional drivers moving conversations and measure their intensity so that you can understand your customer’s passions and concerns, and how deeply they will affect their perceptions, and ultimately their purchasing behavior.
Performing this analysis around high-level themes and at the individual topic level will allow you to custom tailor your message to align to your markets’ values and influence perceptions at a brand and product level. By watching the changes taking place in your customers’ emotional response to your messaging, you can make changes to your messaging to align with your audiences’ passions and concerns. By employing these strategies, your listening platform can become more than just a useful tool, it can be a strategic Social Intelligence tool. While there are listening platforms that only provide basic sentiment, there are advanced Social Intelligence tools on the market that are already capable of providing you with these more strategic metrics.
Data Analytics Evolution 