We are very well aware of the leader in the Indian market for instant noodles. Nestle’s Maggie Noodles, A few years ago, the brand faced backlash due to excessive amounts of lead in its products.

What did the brand do to understand what the market was talking about and develop a comeback strategy?

Social listening is the Answer.

Brand listening is the process of actively tracking consumer sentiment and opinions about a brand or product. This is accomplished by actively monitoring their mentions using technology and social listening for keyword tracking. These discussions reveal how the market perceives the product which ultimately helps derive future strategies.

There are many social listening tools on the market.

But for now, we shall discuss the interrelation between social listening and content strategies.

7 Ways to Use Social Listening To Optimize Content Marketing Strategy

It’s 2023, and content is something people consume more than a healthy diet. The point is, brands need to be consistent and relevant in terms of content creation. This is essential to engaging customers and being recognized.

So what kind of content should one produce?

Social listening will display the market’s collective emotion for your brand.

Hence, the content that goes out in the future has to be in response to this perception. The market could be delighted, enraged, disappointed, or enthralled by the content.

Social listening can be utilized in the following ways to create the ideal content strategy:

Using Social Listening Tools, you can hear your customers.

Discussions are inevitable. Everyone talks about what they bought and how they feel about it. It may be challenging to analyze the conversations that flow through word of mouth. But social media is the next favorite rant platform for consumers.

Trendy apparel with pop culture references and customized prints was available from brands such as Bewakoof and The Souled Store.

Social media listening tools are important to track social media conversations to get customer feedback. This helps in creating a strong content strategy. It could either resolve the queries or work on what is working for their customers. Using this data, one can derive content strategies. These strategies will cater to the feedback that has been discussed online.

Monitor Your Competitors

Indeed, every brand has its own unique way of doing business, which creates competition. However, it is essential to know what your competition is doing. You can either learn from their mistakes or adopt what is working for them. Social listening enables a brand to hear how consumers perceive their competitors. This can be done easily through relevant social listening tools.

It allows a business to discover the future plans of the competition through its current content strategy. Such instances aid in making quick decisions to be ahead of the competition in several ways. One example of such competition in social media monitoring is the topical play of brands. Everyone else in the market joins in on the gains by posting on the same trend. A recent example is the out-of-home (OOH) posts from Zomato and Blinkit.

Identify Trends

As the space for communication keeps expanding, opinions keep growing. This leads to different trends in the market. A consumer is going to try different things, and every business has to stay up-to-date. This is where search engine optimization plays an important role. Relevant keywords need to be incorporated into the content strategy to know where the tide is going.

A social listening solution is a holistic term. It will assist you in learning by observing what marketing is doing to join the trend and stay current. Twitter is one of the hottest platforms that shift trends on a daily basis.

For instance, when Elon Musk tweeted about cryptocurrencies, the concept grew more popular. This generated content around the same topic.

Read Also – 10 Ways Social Listening is Helpful in Improving SEO

Influencers Can Teach You

Every niche has its own set of influencers, and they all have a particular reach. For instance, Kyle Jenner and Virat Kolhi influence a large share of the market. Social media monitoring tools will help you quickly find these influencers that affect your market.

How does social listening play a factor with influencers? What is it that the influencers do or say that works out for them? What do they talk about, and what kind of content do they prefer in certain contexts? The answer to these questions will open new opportunities. These will help a business optimize its content marketing.

Gather The Valuable Insights

A social listening solution is an act of listening to what the market has to tell you, directly or indirectly. This process offers a ton of insights that help create a content strategy. You can gather information on the prospects for the future. These could be likes, dislikes, what is obsolete, and so on.

For the real estate industry, concepts like green developments and tech-backed operations are emerging. Security systems like MyGate are now taking over advanced-level security systems to protect infrastructures. while developments with complete solar energy prove to be the future. These are the things that are spoken about in the market. Addressing these insights is a godly practice for making profitable changes in a business.

Develop Your Content Strategy

After creating social listening strategy, it’s time to create a new content strategy based on these findings. Content that has sourced information in sync with the audience’s type and preferences will be beneficial.

Develop ideation aligned with the current sentiment, the latest trend, and the essence of your product. Ensure this strategy is based on the best-working outlets. For instance, the results of social listening analysis talk about the millennial market. The millennial market wants to give up plastic. Your strategy needs to include content with the same tone to be beneficial.

Create, Publish, Distribute, Test, and Learn

When the strategizing and creation phases of content creation are complete, begin publishing it on the appropriate mediums.

A few of the mediums that publish and distribute content are listed below.

• Social media
• Email marketing
• WhatsApp marketing
• SMS marketing
• Print ads
• Influencer marketing
• Press releases

Content analysis after deep social listening will show what factors work best for your medium. Once done, evaluate the progress and response to your content. Learn about what worked and what went wrong. Finally, evolve by fixing the faults and continuing the areas that produce results.

What Are the Potential Benefits of Including Social Listening in a Content Strategy?

As part of a holistic discussion, social listening is critical for a content strategy. But how does it specifically affect the overall health of a content strategy?

The answer to this question is remarkable and social listening helps marketers create successful strategies.

• Social media listening can talk about public issues for CSR activities. Many problems around the world are discussed on social media platforms. Brands can pick problems relevant to the product and cater to the needs. This is a step to eradicate the problem. The Indian food delivery service Zomato had been a part of the singer Post Malone’s concert in India. They did this to execute their “Feeding India” initiative. These are the ways in which a brand can stay in touch with the sentiments of its customers and provide for society.
• Social listening demonstrates a campaign’s performance. It provides a comprehensive and detailed report on marketing collaterals in real-time. This also decides the fate of the marketing budgets. Such insight helps with the efficient allocation of funds and efforts.
• Another factor is industry trends. New technologies are constantly introduced in the market that simplifies business operations. A couple of the most outstanding examples are Instagram reels and targeted ads. These formats completely changed our approach toward the digital marketing ecosystem. Keeping up with the changes that the internet brings ensures a profitable content strategy. This can be achieved only through social listening.
• Social listening also helps in staying up to date with the news and events that take place across the world. For example, there are many events in Mumbai, like the Kala Ghoda art festival, the Lil flea, The Urban Art Festival, etc. These are the events that are relevant to specific products. Businesses can create relevant content revolving around these events to gain engagement and viewership.

Conclusion

Many new businesses forget to execute intricate tasks like social listening while coping with mainstream operations. However, it is critical to realize that social listening as a method is one of the more detailed aspects of marketing. It is vital for any professional to dive deep into activities as a content marketer. This can help with mainstream operations. Also, it can tap the opportunities that lie beneath an unexplored dynamic.