As a CMO or Brand Manager, it is vital to learn as much as you can about your high value markets. As a graduate student in Northwestern Medill’s Integrated Marketing Communications program I have been exposed to many cutting edge thought leaders in the industry, and will share my thoughts about why the combination of quantitative data analysis needs to be paired with qualitative social listening to reveal key insights and strategic inspiration for your company.
Active social listening can yield valuable
time sensitive insights leading to strategic inspiration. According to the article Get More Value Out of Social Media Brand-Chatter by Susan Fournier and Bob Rietveld, it is
becoming more common for companies to have their ear to the ground when it
comes to social media, but it begs the question: what actually happens from
there? Often times findings may be
reviewed, but is ultimately filed away. Listening social just to say you’re doing it is not
going to magically produce any results.
To actively listen is to take in the information, analyze it, and turn
it into useful insights. According
to Fournier and Rietveld, “Sometimes the correlations are low between what
you think you know and what social listening reveals. But that doesn’t mean you
should jettison the listening data; it just means you need to consider both
sets of findings simultaneously to decipher the true story.” In addition to being a must-have, social listening is inexpensive,
with a high dollar-to-insight ratio.
Now that’s something that should be music to your ears.
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| Image Source: Sales Force Marketing Cloud |
The article The Art of Listening Completely to Social Data by Erick Brethenoux discusses how listening completely to social data is essential to truly understanding your consumers. According to Brethenoux, “The most crucial step to targeting your marketing efforts is vetting consumer data carefully through marketing analytics technology and a disciplined eye.” Active social listening can reveal emotional triggers that are the driving force behind consumer behavior, however listening to what makes one single person tick on a given day is not particularly helpful. Some companies view social listening in this light, and therefore discard it as useless. However, pairing active social listening with Big Data driven insights to reveal what collectively makes a group tick is huge. From here, a strategy can be crafted to provide a personalized meaningful experience that really speaks to the consumer.
- Listen Broadly - Get to
work on actively listening to social 24/7, and be prepared to pair your
findings with data analysis. Don’t
slack off, don’t fudge your results, and don’t discard what you hear because it
does not align with what you had envisioned hearing.
- Analyze Data – Put Big
Data to work for you, but don’t use those findings alone. Get ready to combine these findings
with your social active listening.
- Take Action – Combining the qualitative
results of active social listening plus the quantitative data analysis is a
great jump point for you to strategize.
Make the most of your findings by providing a meaningful, personalized
experience for your consumer that engages them and drives them to action.
Big Data analysis can help to transform what was once indistinguishable noise into insights. This is a great start, but don’t kick your shoes off and put your sweatpants on just yet. Where there is noise, you have to listen up! Combine your new found filtered insight with active social listening, and you can paint a vivid picture of not just where you are headed, but where you need to go.
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