Understanding what customers think and staying in tune with industry trends is critical. Online listening (also known as social listening) is a valuable tool that can help you understand how your customers really feel, monitor trends, and stay one step ahead of the competition. When you do, you can provide a better customer experience and foster long-term loyalty.
What Is Online Listening?
Simply put, it’s a tool to analyze and monitor online conversations and comments to see what customers are saying about your brand, products, or services. Online listening examines many different sources, including social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), online forums (like Reddit), customer reviews, and even audio and video recordings.
Benefits of Using Online Listening
Supercharge Your Market Research Efforts
Combining online listening and traditional market research can help you paint a fuller picture to make informed decisions. Online listening can help you after you conduct market research (by building on the data you already have) or before (by illuminating what people are saying about your brand so you can use qualitative or quantitative research to dig deeper). While online listening can’t replace market research, it can add an extra layer to your knowledge, and the more you know, the better customer experience you can deliver.
Travel Back in Time
Wish you could travel back in time to get insights on what people thought about your business days, months, or even years ago? Use online listening to uncover valuable lessons from previous events, product launches or controversies. Don’t worry; online listening is not limited to the past—you can keep monitoring in the future, too!
Monitor Industry Trends
In an era where social media is always on and online reviews seem to move at the speed of light, online listening can keep you in the loop, helping you stay ahead of the curve. By monitoring what customers are saying about emerging trends, you can adapt your strategies, align your offerings, and capitalize on your target audience’s evolving preferences.
Outshine Your Competitors
Online listening isn’t just about monitoring your brand’s reputation—it lets you tap into what customers are saying about your competitors too. When you know where your competitors are delivering and falling short, you can differentiate, develop innovative approaches, and ensure your business is well-positioned to capitalize on opportunities and better serve your target customers.
Get Inside Your Customers’ Heads
Online listening can help you gain valuable insights into what your target customers really want, where you’re doing well and where you need to improve. Best of all, it can provide an unfiltered view of what customers think of your products or services. You can leverage these insights to build tailored strategies to boost customer satisfaction and increase loyalty.
GET BETTER ONLINE LISTENING RESULTS WITH LEGER ANALYTICS
Rather than reselling off-the-shelf online listening tools, our Leger Analytics (LEA) team offers a robust online listening solution that is:
- Customizable: We develop custom code for your project that take your brand’s specific details into account. We can even geo-target to explore results in a specific area.
- Comprehensive: We can scrape all kinds of media sources, including videos, audio and podcasts (unlike other tools that only scrape text). Our experts can advise when scraping certain sources cannot be done for ethical reasons.
- Consultative: While certain online listening tools focus only on how the public perceives your brand, our solution assesses whether your brand is aligned with its positioning.
With our tool and expert advice, you’ll get better insights that empower you to make better decisions customized to your business needs, ultimately delivering a better customer experience and fuelling growth.
INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE ABOUT ONLINE LISTENING?
Our Leger Analytics (LEA) team would love to help you with your next project or chat further about how you can use online listening to uncover better insights.
Fill in the form below to learn more!
Are you a retailer who is interested in learning more about how you can leverage online listening in the retail space? Read our retail-specific online listening article to learn more.
