Do You Truly Know Your Customer?

You’ve been doing marketing for a while, and you might believe you know
what your customer wants, but do you? In today’s world, filled with
competitors online, it is crucial to establish knowledge of what your
customers want, as well as stay up to date with what they want.

Introducing Social Listening

You might wonder how you can possibly keep track of customer behaviour.
We have a tool for you. Social Listening. Ultimately, social listening is a
skill your business team can use in order to track customer behaviour,
preferences, and lifestyles.

Social Listening Tools

Here are a few recommended tools your business could begin
using for social listening:

• Google Search – helps discover the most common searches from your customers
• DuckDuckGo – another tool, similar to Google Search
• Google Alerts – provides alerts for business names or any other desired words
• Hootsuite – provides a platform for social media activity tracking

If you’d like to learn more in dept on the tools, I highly recommend
Waxman’s course “Learn Social Media Monitoring“.

Helpful Insights

During one of my college courses I was required to mark a few of
other student’s summaries on the topic. Reading other students’
work is a great opportunity to learn more, as well as discover concepts
that might have gone unnoticed.

The biggest insight I have gotten from reading through summaries is
that social listening can be used for comparing of campaigns. It is a
great tool that can let your business know whether your promotional
strategies are working. This allows businesses to shift strategies
according to the customer responses and behaviours.

Another great insight was on crisis management. Social listening can
help you discover arising issues, through customers “venting” online
via tweets, hashtags, and mentions on social media channels. Addressing
the issues early on can prevent crisis from happening, and this is extremely
important as a crisis from one business can have an impact on the entire industry.

Learning From Feedback

Not only did I get to learn on the topic from reading summaries, but
I got to learn from the feedback other students have left based on
reading the summary I have written.

Here is why feedback is important:

• Feedback can motivate
• Feedback can serve as constructive criticism
• Feedback can help us be better

The feedback I have gotten has made me realize that there is always more
space for improvement, whether it is grammar, formatting, or research.
It is important to use it for motivation to be better, and most importantly
use it as a constructive critisism that serves as a guideline for improvement.
Only then we can truly grow and succeed.

The feedback from the customers is as equally important as the feedback our
teachers, bosses, family, or friends might give us.  Feedback of the customer
helps you improve your products or services  in order to ultimately improve the
customer experience, satisfaction, and sales. Therefore, if you haven’t started
social listening register for a few of the recommended tools, and begin the
journey of always being one step ahead in the industry. The market is yours!