As a marketer, you can never know enough about your audience. Because the more you know about their preferences, interests, and pain points, the easier it is to engage and convert them. That’s where audience listening comes in, as a way to monitor what people are saying on digital media channels such as websites, news outlets, blogs, and on social media through social listening about your brand, products, or competitors. So, what is audience listening and how can you do it effectively to get a deeper understanding of your audience and the perception of your brand?
What is audience listening?
Audience listening is the process of monitoring what people say on digital media channels about your brand, your products, or your competitors. By monitoring brand, product, and competitor mentions online, you can gather highly relevant consumer insights that help you define better audience personas and digital marketing strategies. It’s a quick and easy way to get specific insights into your audience and develop your audience research further, and is a key component of many digital marketing strategies.
How is audience listening different from social listening?
One of the most common and effective ways to conduct audience listening is to monitor social media conversations. This is known as social listening and is specific to monitoring conversations and themes on social media platforms. Audience listening, on the other hand, is a broader type of content monitoring across multiple platforms like websites, forums, news outlets, blogs, as well as social media channels.
What are the benefits of audience listening?
You can gain many benefits from audience listening that will help you stay on top of developments in your market. For example, it helps you to:
- Track and document what people are saying about your brand or organization on social media and other online channels like websites, forums, blogs, and news articles.
- Track competitor mentions, updates, innovations, and product launches online.
- Develop new ideas for your digital marketing activities, messaging, promotions, and content.
- Understand audience needs and motivations so you can enhance the relevance and impact of your digital marketing content and messaging.
- Adapt products, services, and propositions to suit existing and emerging customer needs.
What are the most effective audience listening strategies?
Before crafting marketing messages or campaigns, you should gather insights into the values, needs, preferences, and behaviors of their target audience. “People love to talk. So, if you really want to get inside people’s heads, don’t guide them too much, don’t lead them too much, let them talk. If someone says something, let it breathe. You might want to ask, tell me more about that and you’ll be surprised where it goes,” said Heather O’Shea, Chief Research Officer of Boutique Market Research Consultancy Alter Agents in a DMI podcast. To do this you can leverage the most effective audience listening strategies — tools and techniques that help organizations tune in to what their audience is saying, thinking, and feeling which include:
- Market research
- Surveys
- Behavior analytics
- Ethnographic research
- Social media
- Market research
Market research allows brands to gain a better understanding of their customers. To do this you can tap into research developed by credible third-party companies such as eMarketer, Euromonitor, McKinsey, and Nielsen. These can be free reports or might require a fee or subscription to the platform. Some of them can even be used to conduct new research specifically for your business for a fee. Because it’s less expensive, marketers will generally use pre-existing industry or market reports as it’s a quick way to get credible well-sourced data. However, as it’s a public resource, the data is less likely to bring new insights specific to your business needs. And keep in mind that your competitors will have access to the same research. The more specific the research is, the better, because this will help you to successfully communicate with your target audience.
- Surveys
Surveys are used to collect specific quantitative or metric-based data related to your business, product or a trend you are interested in. Surveying your current audience can be a cheap and convenient way to carry primary audience research. Because you are asking your existing audience, the information collected is highly relevant. In fact, these customers are most likely to drive insights into similar customers who you can market to. Surveys, to an extent, can be conducted as part of live focus groups or interviews. You can then develop content around that research such as whitepapers, blogs or eBooks. Bear in mind that your metric data can be gathered alongside qualitative data such as audience opinions and views on certain topics, brands and products. Both quantitative and qualitative data are valuable when conducting audience research, so it’s good to have a mix of both.
- Behavior analytics
You can use analytics gathered from all platforms to use behavioral psychology to understand how people act online. A good example is Google Analytics, which measures people’s behavior and engagement with your website and mobile app. Google Search data provides insightful sources of consumer behavior and keyword data provides an insight into what consumers are thinking, because you can see what they are asking search engines. Looker Studio, a free, web-based tool from Google allows users to create and share interactive data dashboards and reports based on Google Analytics data. This type of behavioral analysis removes the guesswork from your research and provides quantitative metrics in terms of how often people look for certain keywords or phrases throughout the year in certain locations which can provide insights.
- Ethnographic research
Ethnographic research involves getting out and observing users in their own environment. This helps you see how users interact in their normal day-to-day lives instead of in a controlled environment, such as a laboratory or focus group. This type of research can be very powerful when combined with digital research.
- Social media
A big part of audience listening is social listening. You can use your social media analytics and platforms to analyze data about your community of followers, their likes, engagements, and connections. Doing this can help you to start creating a picture of who your current customers are. You can also research social media to look at audiences that follow competitors and understand more about their profile. Using hashtags on social media can be a great way to understand trends and sentiments around one topic that you think interests your audience. This goes across all social media platforms that have useful analytics tools, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. There are also paid social intelligence services such as Zoho Social or Hootsuite that include data visualization and analysis. They help you to gather the data from several social media platforms in one place and monitor conversations so you don’t need to jump between tools.
Conclusion
Mastering the art of audience listening is essential for building meaningful connections, fostering trust, and delivering messages that truly resonate. By tuning into your audience’s needs, feedback, and emotions you can adapt your approach and create more impactful experiences. After all, the most effective communication starts with understanding.
Source: Digital Marketing Institute
