From the course: Marketing Foundations: Integrated Marketing Strategies

Customer listening tools and techniques

From the course: Marketing Foundations: Integrated Marketing Strategies

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Customer listening tools and techniques

- Your customers are talking about you, but do you know what they're saying? Power is shifting to the connected customer and believe it or not, this can be an incredibly good thing for your brand. The key is to create a formal listening system that turns external data into actionable strategies. Let's take a look at three helpful social listening strategies and how innovative marketers are using them. Number one, Data, Analytics, and Intelligence. Hockey great Wayne Gretzky once said, "I skate to where the puck is going to be, "not to where it's been." According to the cultural intelligence agency Sparks and Honey, social listening and more broadly, cultural listening, is a useful way for brands to understand the impact they're having on the world and how consumers perceive them. Sparks and Honey uses this mindset to open minds and create possibilities in the now, next, and future. Using their proprietary cultural intelligence system, sparks and honey monitors emerging trends and conversations in real time. They use this information to advise agency and client partners on everything from brand strategy and innovation to marketing communications and editorial planning. Another aspect of the cultural intelligence system is the sparks and honey human network made up of industry thought leaders and a collection of global scouts. Annalie Killian, Director of Human Networks at sparks and honey, says, "Our human network "of leaders, influencers, innovators, "and power connectors provides a direct pipeline "to the edge of culture where innovators are working "to create change." Through their work, sparks and honey brings the outside in to help brands enhance business and marketing strategy, fuel innovation and to shape content. Number two, quick snackable content. Southwest Airlines uses social listening to create timely content relevant to specific stakeholder needs. For example, when the Southwest social listening team noticed a lot of chatter on Facebook and Twitter about how airlines handle harsh winter weather, they realized they had a great engagement opportunity. They quickly sent a team down to the Denver International Airport in the middle of January and shot a video showing how they handled winter weather to keep their planes safe all through the lens of the de-icer himself who is jokingly referred to as the bucket man. In her article for PR Web about the experience, Southwest Vice President and Chief Communications Officer offered brands of this advice. Encourage your content teams to explore when looking to create pieces that have utility, entertainment quality or educational value. With a focus on storytelling and producing relevant snackable content, Southwest struck a winning social listening strategy. Number three, Organic marketing. Yoplait used social listening to open an entirely new marketing avenue for its popular Go-Gurt brand. Well Go-Gurt was specifically engineered to be enjoyed both frozen or thawed to offer kids a versatile treat, they soon discovered another unintended but popular benefit. Unknown to Yoplait, parents had begun packing school lunches with frozen Go-Gurts in order to keep the rest of their kid's lunch fresh. This small life hack quickly made its way around parenting blogs and eventually to Yoplait's marketing department. Soon Yoplait was playing up this clever trick, putting it front and center in its freeze, thaw and slurp campaign, and positioning Go-Gurt as the ideal school lunch snack. So as you consider how to make social listening work for you, consider the many tools available to your brand whether it's monitoring comments on LinkedIn or Twitter or using a formalized service like BuzzSumo or sparks and honey, the important thing is to identify tools that meet your branding goals and that bring external voices into internal conversations. From there the opportunities for innovation are endless.

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