How to use Social Listening to Identify Likely Buyers

Oct 25, 2018

In this week’s episode of the MegaMarketer Coachcast, hosts Scott Smith and Sara Kathryn King discuss the topic of social listening to help you identify your next likely buyer. They also discuss a number of tactics you can use to drive repeat business and encourage positive reviews.

Main Questions Asked:

• What is social listening?
• What are the platforms we should be thinking about?
• What is conversation growth?

Key Lessons Learned:

Social Listening

• A social marketer should always be on the lookout for new ways to approach and identify new buyers.
• Social listening is essentially putting your feelers out and hearing what people are talking about. It’s way of solving someone’s problem before they even realize it’s a problem.
• For example, someone complaining about their high energy bill is a perfect target for a contractor to connect with because they can probably offer them a solution.
• Spend time on the social networks that have the highest volume of conversation about things that are relevant to your brand.
• What are some tell tale signs that you can recognize because you are a contractor that you can help people with?
• Your conversation isn’t just about your brand, it’s about everything your brand deals with. Just targeting your brand will leave out 90% of the conversation that your customers are having.
• Search your competitors to learn how you can differentiate your business and highlight how you’re superior. You can actually advertise to a competitor’s customers specifically in an indirect way.
• Hootsuite, Brand Watch, and Google Alerts are great tools to help your social listening efforts.
• Knowing your local market is an asset, you can identify what is happening and target it directly and immediately.
• There are different types of conversations that you will generally have on social media. Your customers will probably not rave about the product that was installed, they are more likely to talk about the service they received.
• People complain more than they praise the service they receive. The best way to prevent a large disproportion of negativity is to ask for a good review, don’t leave it up to chance.
• Get ahead of problems and turn complaints into an opportunity for higher and better service.
• Repeat business is the name of the game in contracting, anything you can do to keep people interested and engaged will help you keep customers coming back for more.

Conversation Growth

• You have to identify which platform the conversation is happening on and which one is currently growing.
• You don’t want to spend money on advertising on a platform where your customers are not spending their time on.
• It’s easy to give up if you only try it for a month, you have to give time for people to talk and your skills in social listening improve.
• Pay attention to conversations and engagement drivers around your brand. Certain hashtags can be extremely valuable to your business.
• Hashtags are basically a content well that allows you to see everyone who is talking about that topic.

Influencers

• Influencers don’t have to be LeBron James or Kim Kardashian. A local news anchor or even your wife can be a social influencer that has a valuable reach that you can tap into.
• Social networks are putting more emphasis on authentic connections between people and less on brands, leverage your personal connections.

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Links to Resources Mentioned

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