What Is Social Listening and How to Add it to Your Sales Strategy

In today’s hyper-connected world, understanding your customers and prospects goes beyond traditional sales strategies. Successful sales leaders are tuning in more frequently to the digital chatter that takes place every day on social media platforms. This chatter, often rich with insights, forms the cornerstone of what we call social listening, also known as social media listening.

But what is social listening, exactly? The process involves monitoring digital conversations to understand what customers are saying about a brand and industry online. It’s about capturing relevant chatter and using that information to discover opportunities or create content for a specific audience.

This approach has become a crucial tool in a sales leader’s arsenal. With 4.9 billion people using social media worldwide, the ability to tap into these conversations can provide an invaluable advantage over the competition. From identifying potential leads and understanding market trends, to gauging consumer sentiment and keeping an eye on competitors, social media listening equips sales leaders with the power to make data-driven decisions.

Let’s explore how to unlock its potential for your sales strategy.

Understanding Social Listening

Before we dive deeper into how this approach can enhance your sales strategy, let’s get on the same page about exactly what it means.

At its core, social listening is a data-based approach to understanding the digital landscape in relation to your brand and offerings. This strategy involves proactively tracking mentions of your brand, competitors, or industry-related keywords across social media and the web. But it goes far beyond merely collecting data. It’s about analyzing this data to spot trends, understand sentiment, and glean strategic insights that help guide your sales approach.

Now, you may wonder how this differs from social monitoring. While they may seem similar, there’s a subtle but crucial difference: 

• Social monitoring is like performing a radar scanning for mentions and responding to customer complaints or queries as they occur. It’s real-time and often reactive. 
• Social listening is more strategic and big-picture. It’s about looking at the same data over time to spot trends, understand broader market sentiment, and inform strategy.

The importance and benefits of social media listening in sales cannot be overstated. Yet only 24% of brands report using this strategy. Given the value social media listening offers, though, it’s worth a second look for adding to your sales strategy. Some benefits include:

• It gives you a direct line to your customer’s thoughts 
• It allows you to understand their needs 
• It helps you discover potential leads
• It enables you to identify influencers
• It allows you to track your competitors
• It helps you preempt crisis by spotting negative sentiment early

Not to mention, social media listening gives you an opportunity to enhance your brand’s reputation by engaging with customers in real-time. One study shows that 53% of consumers expect a brand to respond to their query within an hour on social media, and that figure jumps to 72% if it’s a complaint. Listening on social media helps you meet these expectations, turning potentially negative experiences into positive interactions. Plus, you’d be surprised by how many mentions of certain key phrases can lead to warm leads.

How Social Listening Works

What exactly does the process entail? It can be broken down into three fundamental steps:

1. Monitoring. This initial stage involves tracking mentions of your brand, competitors, industry-related keywords, and other relevant terms across various social media platforms and online channels. The goal here is to cast a wide net to gain a comprehensive picture of the digital conversation around your business and industry.

2. Analyzing. After collecting the data, the next step is analyzing it to identify patterns, trends, and insights. This could involve assessing the sentiment of comments (positive, negative, or neutral), spotting frequently asked questions or common complaints, and identifying influencers or key opinion leaders in your industry.

3. Acting. The final stage involves using the insights you’ve gained to inform your sales strategy. This might mean reaching out to a potential lead, addressing a recurring customer issue, or shaping your sales messaging to better resonate with your target audience.

Social Listening Platforms to Choose From

To execute this process, there are various social listening platforms and tools at your disposal. Here are a few key social listening tools:

• Brandwatch. A powerful tool that allows you to track mentions across the web, analyze sentiment, identify trends, and even gauge the impact of your marketing campaigns.
• Hootsuite. This platform integrates with over 25 social networks and provides real-time updates on mentions, making it a versatile tool for both social listening, social media monitoring, and social media management.
• BuzzSumo. Ideal for content marketers, BuzzSumo helps identify trending topics, influential content creators, and key influencers in your industry. It also provides content alerts and competitor analysis.
• Sprout Social. An all-in-one platform that combines social listening, social media management, and analytics. It offers sentiment analysis tools and helps to identify trends in your industry.

By incorporating listening on social media into your sales strategy, you gain an in-depth understanding of your target audience and industry, enabling you to engage potential leads more effectively and stay ahead of market trends.

The Role of Social Media Listening in Sales

Social listening can serve as an incredibly valuable tool for sales teams, helping you uncover leads, engage with prospects, and improve overall sales performance. Let’s look at some case studies to understand its real-world power:

• Tylenol. Through social listening, Tylenol identified trends related to conditions that their product can help with, which informed their marketing strategy and business growth. They discovered that people with hobbies demanding intense focus, particularly knitters, were experiencing migraines. Using this insight, Tylenol tailored its marketing and SEO strategy to include this demographic, leading to the development of content specifically for knitters and similar hobbyists, which subsequently increased their website traffic.
• Microsoft. The company used social listening to gather and analyze millions of conversations, allowing them to discover unmet customer needs and align their sales approach to better meet these needs.

Learning from social listening insights to refine sales efforts can add a lot of value to your sales team, specifically in these areas:

Understanding Customer Needs

Social media listening gives you an intimate view into the conversations your customers are having online. By analyzing these conversations, you can understand what customers love about your product, what they wish was better, and what issues they’re facing. This allows you to tailor your sales pitch to address specific customer needs, making your approach more personalized and effective.

Identifying Leads and Sales Opportunities

This approach can also help you identify potential leads who might be interested in your product or service. Let’s consider a couple examples: 

• If someone is complaining about a competitor’s product on social media, that could signal an opportunity for you to step in and present your product as a better alternative. 
• By tracking industry-related keywords, you can discover conversations about needs that your product can fulfill, allowing you to reach out to these potential customers directly.

Implementing Social Listening into Your Sales Strategy

If you’re ready to dive into the world of social listening and incorporate it into your sales strategy, let’s explore the steps to make the process smooth and fruitful.

4 Steps to Integrate Social Media Listening in Your Sales Process

Get started with social media listening by following these four steps:

1. Identify Your Goals. Before you start, it’s crucial to understand what you want to achieve with social listening. Are you looking to identify leads, understand customer sentiment, or track your competitors? Defining clear goals will help you focus your efforts and measure success.
2. Select Your Keywords. Identify the keywords related to your business, products, competitors, and industry that you want to monitor. These could include your brand name, product names, competitor names, industry-related terms, and even common misspellings of these terms.
3. Monitor and Analyze. Once you start tracking these keywords, you’ll begin gathering data. The next step is to analyze this data and look for patterns, insights, and opportunities that align with your goals.
4. Take Action. Social listening isn’t just about listening; it’s about responding and taking action based on what you learn. This could mean reaching out to a potential lead, or adjusting your sales pitch based on customer feedback.

Training Your Sales Team

It’s important to train your sales team to use social listening tools and interpret the data they generate. Consider incorporating these elements into team training: 

• Include practical exercises, like identifying leads or uncovering customer sentiment from real-life social media data. 
• Make it an ongoing process, not a one-time event. As your strategy evolves and new features are added to your social listening tool, your team should be kept up-to-date.
• Address your plan for combining social listening and social selling strategies for the best sales outcomes.

Embrace the Power of Social Listening

By offering a real-time, in-depth look at what customers and prospects are saying about your industry, competitors, and indeed, your brand, social media listening opens up a world of opportunities for your sales team.

It’s important to remember that social media listening is more than just a tool or tactic—it’s a fundamental shift in approach. It’s about actively listening to your audience, truly understanding their needs, sentiments, and conversations, and then leveraging that knowledge to inform your sales strategy.

Embrace the power of social listening – your customers, your team, and your bottom line will thank you.