Learn how to generate leads with social listening.
Owing to the pandemic and everyone taking to digital, businesses are becoming more aware and conscious of the conversations happening online. That’s exactly why social listening has now become an integral part of marketing processes and strategies.
But most businesses have been using social listening for what the term literally stands for – listening to conversations on social media and the digital landscape. So you’ll see social listening being used to track conversations, manage online reputation, customer support and market research.
But what if we said you could use social listening for lead generation?
Social listening helps you identify ongoing conversations relevant to your business or industry in a timely manner. But have you ever thought how these conversations could actually be an excellent way to find relevant social media leads?
Considering how social listening helps find conversations, trending topics and industry news, and identify potential customers, why rule out the one use case that you can attribute growth to?
How to use social listening for lead generation?
To be able to put the following tips and strategies to work, you need to first get started with social listening. If you are not using a social listening tool already, book a demo of Radarr and explore the potential it unlocks for your business.
1. Improve your customer persona with real-time social insights
Identifying and defining your target audience and ideal customer persona is the one thing that can make or break a company’s marketing, advertising and sales efforts. It typically takes anywhere between a few months to years to identify all the demographics of what an ideal buyer looks like. But to say that the buyer’s likes, preferences, and demographics will remain the same as time progresses, would be wrong.
This is where social listening comes in to help you proactively learn from the changing behavior of your target audience and ideal buyers.
It helps you sift through online conversations across multiple channels to identify new and changing buyer demographics, interests, and behavior. This adds a real-time layer of data onto your documented persona, making them more contextual and relevant to the now.
Also, read the complete guide to understanding social listening.
2. Monitor your competitor’s moves
Every business conducts frequent and thorough research on their market competitors. They take note of what the business is doing differently, how they’re interacting with customers, and what type of campaigns they are running to grow in different target markets. While these insights are surely a great way to tailor your value proposition, pricing, and other aspects to capture consumer attention and entice them to buy from you, what about things that may not be as evident?
Social listening also helps monitor the conversation around your competitor’s brand. It helps you understand the perception customers have for them, identifying the negative and neutral comments that you can cash in on to generate leads. But more importantly, it also lets you keep track of where they’re scaling their time, efforts, and resources so that you can catch up or move faster.
3. Discover new trends and market opportunities in real-time
Ever stumbled upon a trend on social media, a campaign, or a product idea, that you thought you could have tapped into – but now, it was too late?
You’re not alone.
Owing to the increase in the content being shared on social media every day, it is becoming tougher for businesses to keep up with the changing trends. But with social listening that is powered by artificial intelligence, you can do this much faster.
For example, remember when the lockdowns across the nation just began? While some companies were still working out of offices, the concept of remote working had started to pick up at a rapid rate. SaaS businesses that we’re able to identify this trend faster, we’re able to launch products for async collaboration and productivity much faster, leading to quicker customer acquisition.
Those who did make similar products in the coming period did see growth. But the scale at which they grew was obviously slower – let’s call it the first mover’s advantage!
4. Answer the hard questions and offer help
The best way to turn an interested consumer into a lead, and eventually a customer? Offer help and assistance in a timely manner.
Use social listening to discover questions, comments, or complaints related to your brand, your business, your competitor, or a topic that is relevant to what you offer. Add value to the ongoing conversations by leaving answers without expecting anything in return.
The goal is to establish yourself as a business that the consumers can trust. The stronger the trust, the more likely they are to convert into leads.
A few ways things to tune into with social listening to generate leads through online conversations include:
Brand mentions
Industry keywords
Problem-specific terms/ topics
Location-specific terms/ topics
Help-specific terms/ topics
PS. As Gary Vaynerchuk says, don’t be afraid of working towards finding answers to the hard questions, and being the first one to answer something.
5. Use consumer psychology to generate leads with sentiment analysis
According to a study by Harvard, it was found that 95% of purchase decisions are driven by emotions. The study states that emotion is what really drives who, how and why we engage with businesses. This is the missing piece that most businesses have been trying to tap into for years in their marketing and advertising campaigns.
With social listening, you can bring sentiment analysis into the mix and truly understand the intent behind online conversations. When you understand how a consumer ‘feels’, you’re closer to understanding their challenges and how they want to be addressed as humans. This helps you establish a stronger relationship with potential customers and strike conversations that are truly meaningful, leading to a higher number of leads.
6. Identify and engage with the right influencers to reach your audience
Influencer marketing is a big part of growth strategies for businesses across different industries. But one of the biggest challenges that most face is identifying the right influencers for their campaigns and then measuring the impact they have on their audience, and the eventual growth.
With social listening, you can not just track online conversations but also identify those who initiated them. This helps you find people who have a greater influence on your target audience; but also look into the type of influence (positive or negative) they have on them, helping you make better campaign decisions for higher ROI from influencer marketing.
7. Initiate conversations to sell more
Use social listening to reach out to your existing customers as well. Take a look into what they have to say about your business, the product, and how they’re putting the purchase to use.
Leverage the thread to strike meaningful conversations with them. When you engage with them in real-time, you can use these conversations to get feedback on your products, insights on their expectations from your business in the coming time, or to even upsell and cross-sell other products.
What’s more? When you initiate conversations in a meaningful way, you actually also improve the customer experience you offer, leading to a higher word of mouth and referral rate from your existing customer base.
8. Get better at creating content
According to the Content Marketing Institute, companies that understand their audience better and create content as per their needs, generate 69% more leads than those that don’t. But creating content that your audience wants is easier said than done, considering how quickly their interests and preferences evolve with time.
With social listening, you’re able to understand your potential lead’s content preferences and language style better. The insights help you create content that they don’t just want, but will also consume and engage with actively.
For example, if someone is exploring how to get better at social media marketing, and you are a social media listening tool, you need to create how-tos for this audience segment. At the same time, you also need to create case studies that show them how social listening really does get results.
Ready to use social listening for lead generation?
Social media today holds the potential to really help businesses grow – but only when you can keep up with your audience.
Conversational marketing is the way to go in times when consumers are looking for more personalization before interacting with businesses. That’s where social listening comes in to help you tap into the right conversations.
Converting them into leads of course depends a lot on your conversation skills!
Ready to see how you can run prospect hunting campaigns and track conversations to reach your potential customers?
Social listening has helped brands keep track of online conversations, tapping into opportunities to talk to their audience at the right time. But what about conversations that go unseen through what we see every day?
Yes, we’re talking about all the conversations happening online through visuals. The inability to look into what the 3 billion+ images being shared across social media every day have to say, is missing out on critical business insights that can help you understand your audience better.
Though the problem here is bigger – almost 85% of visuals being shared online lack text references to the brands or the products being shown.
A picture is worth 1000 words and considering that the human brain processes visuals as quickly as 13 milliseconds, we believe it’s time for you to give another dimension to your social listening – image analytics.
What is image analysis/ analytics?
Image analysis refers to the process of extracting meaningful information from images being shared in the digital landscape. It means leveraging the power of artificial intelligence that drives social listening, to recognize attributes within an image.
For example, take a look at your iPhone. There is an album in there that has auto-captured the faces of the people in your photos, attributing them to the names of the contacts you have added pictures of in your contact book. That’s a form of image analysis!
Social media listening has mostly been about text analysis – captions, comments, news, tweets, and other formats wherein there is a reference to the brand or the product being shown in the visual.
But when image analysis is applied to social listening, it acts as an extension to the text analysis, applying the same logic to visual content.
For example, instead of looking for the word ‘eyewear’, image analysis helps you identify all the posts that contain visuals of ‘eyewear’.
With the help of image analytics, you can also identify faces within visuals to determine the sentiment behind them, along with demographic data like age, gender and more. It also lets businesses identify elements like logos, activities, objects, and scenes within a visual, and describe it with a statement that represents what it is about.
Social media platforms are becoming more visually driven by the day. While text analysis in social listening will always be important, it’s becoming important for businesses to look into what people are talking about with the help of images too.
Think about the last time you weren’t feeling productive and posted a meme about it on social media instead of using text to describe the mood.
Image analysis in social listening basically helps you capture the complete story by deep diving into what both text and images have to say.
A few other reasons why we believe image analytics is important, include:
Getting a complete picture helps businesses get more insights for better decision-making
Image analytics helps you validate and fool-proof your text analysis when the conclusions are confusing
Insights from images don’t require translations like textual insights do; helping businesses create global-fit strategies
Images help look into context, environment and emotional factors that may be hard to gauge through text
How can brands use image analytics in social listening?
While image analysis is fairly new in the digital landscape owing to the advanced technology behind it, we’re seeing businesses starting to work with it more extensively by the day to fuel different use cases, purposes, and strategies.
1. Track brand mentions more accurately
Some people share their experiences using text. But many others choose visuals instead. The goal of social listening is to track brand mentions; but what happens to the conversations happening through visuals if you’re following the standardized text analysis? You lose out on conversations. That’s where image analytics comes in.
2. Improve sentiment analysis
A lot of businesses are using social listening to track conversations that help them gauge the sentiment of their audience. But think about how accurately you were able to identify the emotions of someone who wrote to you vs someone who spoke to you face to face. Visuals have a similar impact. This is where image analytics comes in to help brands gather insights from both text and image analytics on the sentiment of consumers.
While you may have collaborated with a few influencers for your campaigns, there will be many others who are simply recommending your brand or products to their audience. These could be people you haven’t yet reached out to but have a considerable amount of influence on your target audience. Image analytics helps you identify these visual influencers and also keep track of the impact they are making on your business.
4. Keep track of user generated content
Using user-generated content in your marketing strategies can help boost campaign engagement by a whopping 50%. It has proven to even boost conversions by 10% on campaigns across social media and email. Image analysis combined with social listening makes it easy for businesses to find user-generated content.
5. Protect brand collaterals and trademarks
As your business starts to grow, so do the conversations around it. Not just textual, but visual references too. This is where you need to keep a close watch on how your brand collaterals like the logo, product imagery, and more are being used. With image analysis in social listening, you will be able to detect fraudulent use of your brand collaterals and logo manipulation that can potentially damage your business in the long run.
6. Better crisis management
Crisis management has been a big use case of social listening all these years. If negative textual comments worry you, imagine how much damage can the visual ones do, considering how statistics found that content with visuals is 40x more likely to be shared. Think about the last time a brand’s campaign resulted in the sharing of negative memes across the internet! With image analysis, businesses will be able to manage their online reputation better by digging into what visuals people are associating with your brand.
7. Improve insights on sponsorship ROI
When businesses sponsor events, their brand logo gets featured in plenty of visual collateral. But the brand name does not get explicitly mentioned, which makes it hard for the business to track ROI from such sponsorships. With image analytics, businesses can now look into visuals of articles and posts around the event, and measure the two key important metrics – impressions and engagement.
For example, without image analytics, Coca-Cola would miss out on this mention in Red Sox’s tweet around the event:
8. Identify moments of consumption
Ever wondered how your customers are putting products to use or how they feel when they do so? Image analytics can bring out that information for you, letting you see who, where and how people are using your products. It also lets you, deep-dive, into the sentiment of people when they are using your products.
For example, with image analytics in social listening, GymShark would be able to capture how and where people tend to wear their apparel. In this case, for dog walks and yoga sessions!
If you like to read online or follow social media for micro-content and micro-news, we’re pretty sure you have been hearing all about NFTs the past couple of months now. So we decided to look into how NFTs will impact marketing in the coming time.
Because, imagine JPEG images being sold for hundreds of thousands, and in some cases, even million dollars!
Considering how even industry-leading luxury brands like Gucci are hopping onto the NFTs bandwagon, it’s safe to say that they aren’t only a millennial-fad. It’s a new element in the digital landscape that is going to become a lot more common in every industry.
That’s exactly why it’s time for marketers to get acquainted with NFTs.
What is an NFT?
To start with, NFT stands for non-fungible token; which in its literal sense means that each NFT is unique and is not interchangeable because of the data it holds.
So NFTs are essentially one-of-a-kind digital assets that can belong to you and you alone. Think about it as that limited edition Gucci bag that only one celebrity owns because it is exclusively designed for them.
Right now, the most popular forms of NFTs include artwork, music, videos, tweets and even memes!
How do NFTs work?
In the simplest terms, NFTs are part of the Ethereum blockchain, which is a cryptocurrency like bitcoin or the dogecoin that you saw Elon Musk talk about so much. But since NFTs are digital assets and hold more data, they work differently from the typical coins.
So NFTs live on the blockchain, which is a ledger that keeps track of any NFT activity like when it is bought and how much it is bought/ sold for. The complexity of blockchain is what further ensures that the data stored on the NFTs or the buy/ sell history of it does not get manipulated.
Well, the potential of NFTs and the opportunities that they bring to the table are still being explored across various industries. There is no set use case of them yet and every time an NFT gets sold, the market identifies an opportunity.
But to give you an idea of how big the hype around NFTs is and how many people are talking about it, we tuned into online conversations with social listening using Radarr.
To give you a glimpse into just how many people are talking about NFTs, here’s what our social listening tool pulled in – from Twitter alone.
Twitter conversations around NFTs
In fact, there is an entire #NFTCommunity that is now active across all social media platforms talking about NFTs as an investment or even a business model.
But since NFTs are slightly complex, we’re also seeing some people shy away from getting into the conversation. Just like cryptocurrency, NFTs too have a bunch of people who are excited about their future and those who are absolutely skeptical of it.
We ran a sentiment analysis on NFTs based on the online conversations happening across channels. Here’s what we found:
26.6% netizens feel positively about NFTs and the opportunities it brings
2.9% netizens feel negatively about how NFTs work and how they change the digital market dynamics
70.5% netizens have a neutral feeling towards NFTs
Considering how some feel positively and others have neutral feelings towards NFTs, which can be swayed towards positive with the right strategies, we believe it’s time for marketers to roll up their sleeves and start experimenting.
How to use NFT in marketing and examples to take inspiration from
Marketers across different domains and industries are experimenting with NFTs in various marketing strategies. Let’s take a look at some of the best NFT marketing examples we have stumbled upon recently:
1. Creating exclusivity for retention marketing (Gucci and Burberry)
Luxury brands like Gucci, Burberry, and many others are partnering with designers, artists, and blockchain experts to tap into the NFT ecosystem to keep up with their target audience.
For instance, Gucci has partnered with Christie’s to present its first NFT – a digital drawing for their spring 2021 collection, that is inspired by Aria, Alessandro Michele, and Floria Sigismondi’s film presentation.
Similarly, Burberry announced a partnership with Mythical Games to release a limited-edition Blanko for the game. Mythical Games is known for its popular game Blankos Block Party which features NFT vinyl toys that can be collected, upgraded, and sold.
The luxury brands are chasing exclusivity and leveraging the hype around NFTs for marketing, which seems like a promising strategy in a world that is paying millions to build homes in the metaverse!
2. Building brand awareness with NFT marketing (Marriott)
Marriott is a popular chain of hotels with properties across the globe. The brand is experimenting with NFTs to boost brand awareness around their Marriott Bonvoy Travel Program.
They partnered with three artists to create different NFTs based on travel experiences to use them to build excitement around the travel program. They wanted them to be representative of the experiences the brand delivers to customers.
Marriott unveiled their NFTs at an event during Art Basel, which is a premier modern art show. They hosted an event wherein the winners not just got their own NFTs, but also 200,000 Bonvoy points that they could use to truly experience what the travel program offers. You can learn more about the NFTs created by Marriott and their meanings here.
3. Establishing a digital consumer base (Nike)
Nike, an American multinational company that designs, develops, and manufactures footwear, apparel, equipment, and accessories for sports, has partnered with RTFKT, a virtual shoe company. The idea is to launch sneaker NFTs for the metaverse.
The goal of their partnership and marketing is to establish a digital consumer base and retain brand loyalty as the world moves to digital. Call it the first mover’s advantage, but all the sneaker nerds are going to love building out their collection online! Read more about Nike’s sneaker NFTs here.
4. Promoting in-person events and functions (AMC/ Spider Man)
In times when everyone is all too used to Netflix and chill at home, getting people to actually attend events is tough. AMC got people to not just join their rewards program and reserve a ticket for Spiderman, but also actually attend the event by bringing NFTs into the mix.
When the tickets for the new movie went on sale, AMC offered the first 86,000 investors who bought a ticket the opportunity to receive a free NFT. But they also put a clause to the same, saying if the person did not attend the movie, they would no longer stand a chance to receive the NFT.
5. Supporting a good cause/ cause marketing (Kinetic Sand and Taco Bell)
According to a new survey, about 70% of consumers prefer to interact and buy from brands that address a cause proactively. When the world is moving to digital and the metaverse, why shouldn’t your cause marketing?
Kinetic Sand, a popular brand known for its moldable sand, is using NFTs to raise money for the BGCA (Boys & Girls Clubs of America). The goal is to help them expand their arts and creative experiences programs. They created their NFT collection in collaboration with the artist Dan Lam. You can read more about it here.
Another good example of combining NFT in marketing with cause marketing is that of Taco Bell. They promoted a campaign called NFTacoBell on Twitter; the proceeds of which were donated to the brand’s Live Mas scholarship, with the owner of each NFT getting a $500 gift card to the chain. Now also think about the number of tacos they’d be rolling out and how they also jostled their customer lifetime value!
6. Securing pre-orders on new releases (Gary Vaynerchuk)
Gary Vaynerchuk has been extremely vocal about his projections about NFTs. To put things into perspective, he put NFTs to use in the marketing for his book, Twelve and a Half: Leveraging the Emotional Ingredients Necessary for Business Success.
For every twelve copies that buyers purchased in a 24-hour period, they got one NFT. Seeing the roaring success of the book in the market, the result of using NFT in marketing is pretty evident; the book got more than a million pre-orders on the very first day.
7. Protecting and promoting brand image (Robert Mondavi Winery)
Most legacy or popular brands tend to face product and brand copy knockoffs. Think about the last time you saw a Gucci bag that didn’t exactly look like it was from the luxury brand, but somehow was a replica of their print. Yes, knockoffs are that common; but they do more damage than it may seem to a brand’s reputation.
We’re seeing legacy brands like Robert Mondavi Winery use NFT in marketing to protect brand imagery. Instead of trying to reach out to a new audience, they’re focusing on securing their brand’s collateral instead. They partnered with an artist called Clay Heaton to create a collection of wines featuring their patent porcelain bottles, and are using NFTs to authenticate the wine – remember how we said no one can manipulate that data?
8. Growing your audience faster (Bicycle Cards)
Acquiring new customers is all about being in the right place at the right time, with the right message. That makes it important to pick up on trends that your target audience is genuinely interested in. With most millennials and the younger lot looking into NFTs right now, it’s the one place you can get ‘noticed’.
Bicycle Cards is using NFTs in marketing for exactly that. It’s one of the oldest card-making companies in the market, but with the growing competition, they needed to upgrade their interests to match their target audiences (younger customer segment interests. So to do this, they launched a first-ever NFT collection, designed by artist Adrian Valenzuela.
Is it time to use NFTs in marketing?
If you ask us and what we see in the conversations online, NFTs sure have the attention of most netizens. That only goes to say that if your target audience is looking into the new technology, it’s time for you to be on the platform too!
The good thing is that you have nothing to lose and a lot of scopes to experiment with different branding and marketing strategies.
So tune into what your target audience and customers are talking about NFTs, gauge their sentiments on it and if you see a positive response, it’s time to tap into NFTs in marketing!
Get ready to listen to conversations around NFTs using Radarr for social listening.
Consider this, whenever you make a purchase from an online store, you probably proceed to checkout and actually place the order only after going through the product reviews, ratings, and testimonials. That is, you need some concrete social proof before you make a purchase decision.
A recent study by Invespro showed that 90% of consumers read online reviews before visiting a business. And 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
These numbers are so high because nobody would want to invest their money in brands that don’t seem trustworthy. Your social proof helps you stand out as reliable. These ‘proofs’ could be product reviews, ratings, testimonials, social media posts, to name a few.
And the importance of each isn’t just applicable to eCommerce businesses. From mobile apps to online tools, enterprise softwares and even services, a good review can make your business – and a bad one can destroy all the hard work you put in.
But as simple as it may seem, getting a customer to review your business in a way that it looks like they actually vouch for it, isn’t that easy.
Worse still, it becomes really tough to monitor negative reviews that you may be garnering as there are so many channels that a consumer can post reviews on – based on what type of business you run – eg. Apple App Store review, Google Play reviews, Google My Business reviews, e-commerce reviews (Flipkart, Amazon, Shopee, Lazada, Tmall, jd.com) and more.
So how should you be asking for these reviews from your consumers?
What can you do to monitor all the incoming reviews – good or bad – then? How do you ensure you get more positive customer reviews?
We’ll explain that in detail in this blog but before that, let’s start from the beginning.
Why are customer reviews important?
1. Social proof drives purchases
Other customers’ reviews on purchased products/ services can affect a consumers’ evaluation of the same and persuade them to make purchase decisions better and faster. It is a crucial aspect in customers’ decision-making process.
Take a look at these numbers if you don’t believe us:
About 85% of consumers state that online reviews influence their purchase behaviors drastically
63% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from an online store which has customer reviews
Consumer reviews are trusted 12 times more than product descriptions from manufacturers
2. They increase your visibility
Most shoppers choose to do a quick search on search engines like Google when choosing where to make a particular purchase from.
This means that your SEO needs to be top-notch.
Customer reviews on any website will always be original and fresh content – something that the algorithm favors. So, customer reviews are in fact going to increase your website’s indexing rate too.
And when you’re ranked higher, the algorithm and consumers begin noticing you. This is going to help you gather more brand exposure and sales.
3. They make you look more trustworthy
If you cannot win the confidence of your consumers, you will obviously not make it.
Customer reviews can help your brand stand out amidst your competitors.
Your brand can build trust, reliability and credibility through product reviews, testimonials and ratings. They can help you significantly in building and shaping your brand’s online identity.
4. They help increase the conversation about you
Encouraging consumers to review your company and/or products/services is an easy yet assured way to improve your brand’s online presence and reach.
Yes, reviews on your website are going to be super useful, but if your customers are happy with their experience of shopping from you, they are more likely to share their thoughts on other platforms as well, like Quora for instance.
This will ultimately increase your online footprint and make you visible in the right circles.
5. They have a clear impact on sales
Did you know that 50 or more reviews on a product can increase its conversion rates by 4.6%? Also, customer reviews produce an 18% uplift in sales on an average.
This is because social proof enhances your customer’s shopping journey.
With the increased brand exposure and trustworthiness, customer reviews do help you increase your overall revenue.
6. They give you an open line to consumers
Consumers expect brands to reply to their comments and reviews. These reviews are a medium for you to have an honest conversation with them.
When you respond to these reviews, it also shows that you, as a brand, care about your customers a lot and that they matter to you.
But like we said before, getting a customer to review your business is easier said than done – let alone nudge them to drop a positive one. So let’s tackle that bit next.
Now, how do you ask customers for a review?
1. Identify the right moments to ask according to their shopping journey
To get the best results, you need to know when exactly in the customer’s shopping journey should you ask for a review.
If you ask a customer for a review at the wrong time, it could lead to the customer leaving a negative review in a fit and fury, which will obviously be read by your other customers. This is going to ultimately affect your brand image and sales.
You want to obviously avoid that at all costs.
To maintain healthy relationships with your customers and also bag their positive reviews, you need to carefully and strategically plan when to politely ask for one.
Here are some instances of when you can ask for a customer review –
When they re-order from your store/ business
When they tag you in a social media post
If they are browsing through other products/services on your website a lot
If they ever refer a potential client/customer to you
However, remember that when you ask for reviews, it is also very subjective to the market and field you belong to. For instance, if you were a food delivery app, you will have to ask your customers for a review immediately after the delivery. On the other hand, if you were a skincare brand, you cannot ask for one immediately after the delivery. You’d have to wait longer so the customer can notice and feel the visible changes.
2. Choose a method that works for you at scale
Collecting testimonials, reviews and ratings should be an integral part of your sales process. You should:
Make it a point to ask for customer reviews after every successful delivery of product/ service
Add review requests in your automated email, SMS, Messenger and other communication channel marketing campaigns
Follow up with customers to nudge feedback and share the importance of it for you
The idea is to figure out what works best for you and then work on bettering that approach while also trying and experimenting other modes for better results.
3. Leverage moments of customer happiness
Consider this, you are an online gifting store, and you just helped one of your customers pick out a beautiful present for their significant other for their upcoming anniversary. They then reach out to you a week later to let you know that the gift you suggested was a total hit!
Leverage this exact moment. Do not let it go.
If you ever make remarkable progress in achieving customer satisfaction, that customer will very happily leave you a review – and a good one for that matter. While this can help you collect plenty of social proof, this also helps you avoid asking a customer for a review before knowing they had a bad experience shopping from you.
1. Begin with an open-ended question
You do not want to abruptly ask your customers for a review. Instead, what you should consider doing is starting a conversation.
You can use an open-ended question as your conversation starter. By asking your customers “Did you like the product XYZ” or “Was your recent interaction with our customer support satisfactory?” you can start a conversation and then ask for a review after analyzing their experience.
2. Reduce the hassle and let them know
In a fast-paced world like ours, your customers don’t have all the time in the world to leave a positive review for your store. If it’s a hassle for them, they’d choose to rather not go about it at all.
You could include multiple options that a customer could choose from to leave a comment according to their comfort or add a direct link to the review page when sending out a review request email, SMS or WhatsApp message.
So the basic idea is,
Keep your review-writing process as simple as possible and
Let your customers know it is hardly going to take a minute or two
This is going to help you gauge the customer’s intent to leave you a review or a rating better.
How to ensure that all the reviews you get are positive?
Now, collecting reviews is one thing but ensuring that these collected reviews are in fact, positive and can actually benefit you is a whole other ballgame altogether!
Close to 86% of people hesitate to do business with a company if it has negative online reviews. You don’t want to miss out on any sales opportunity obviously. So, here are some tips to bear in mind to help you get more positive customer reviews.
1. Create different spaces to leave reviews
Before customers make an online purchase from your store or subscribe to your paid newsletter, or install that mobile app of yours, they prefer to learn more about your brand. This means that your online presence matters on other third-party review sites as well when the customer does their online research about your company and the value you offer.
While you obviously should collect reviews on your own website, you should also cover the following platforms (subjective to your niche and market):
Google
Amazon
Facebook
JustDial
Apple App Store
Google Play Store
Angie’s List
Choice
Trustpilot
Glassdoor
TestFreaks
Which?
ConsumerReports
Compare Camp
HundredX
Consumer Affairs
TripAdvisor
Yelp
Citysearch
Yahoo! Local Listings
Influenster
FinancesOnline
G2 Crowd
TrustRadius
GoodFirms
Salesforce AppExchange
Better Business Bureau
Manta
Capterra
Foursquare
Superpages
Top Ten Reviews
2. Optimize your content
Optimize your website, blog, social media profiles, app store listings and other digital profiles to provide easy accessible portals through which customers can write reviews and even view reviews dropped by others. You can achieve this by:
Add website badges to easily direct to your review forms, pages and profiles
Have a responsive website that is mobile-friendly for viewing/ submitting reviews
While asking for reviews via email, SMS and other channels, keep your message crisp and start slow
3. Add incentives
Your customer’s time is valuable, so while you do ask them to drop a review, make sure you persuade them by giving them a good reason for the same.
You can create and offer incentives to them if they leave you a review. These could be discount codes for their next purchase, reward points, gift cards – anything that suits your business model!
For example, a number of mobile apps share a custom discount code on their paid plans to those who review their apps.
Pro tip: Ensure you have the ability to monitor and manage the reviews closely.
4. Respond to every review – even the negative ones
It is okay to make mistakes. But as a brand, it is only okay as long as you own up to it and make an effort to rectify it.
When you receive a bad review, take time to respond to it thoughtfully, without being too defensive. Try to understand the customer’s experience, the sentiment behind the review and resolve the issue.
The best way to do this is to have a powerful social media monitoring tool like Radarr by your side. The tool lets you keep track of all the reviews that are being posted online across all platforms and between conversations. It comes with a sentiment analysis module that further helps you understand the reviewer better, helping you resolve their concerns in a more contextual manner.
5. Share positive customer reviews you’ve already received
When you receive a very good customer rating, review or testimonial, make it a point to share it with your customers. This will act as a persuader for others to add their personal happy experiences of shopping from you as well.
For that matter, reviews and testimonials make for really good social media posts as well that can double up as ad campaigns.
6. Leverage social listening
If you closely ‘listen’ to all the conversations happening on the internet about you, across social media platforms, online review websites and publications, etc, you get a chance to actually reach out to customers, engage them in conversations that lead to positive reviews.
For instance, when someone has bought something from you and needs help in how to assemble it, if you’re social listening, you can reach out to them in time with a how-to guide before they get frustrated; similarly, if someone is not happy with your service and mentions it on their Instagram story for instance, or submits a review to a review site, you can reach out to them and ask for feedback, what happened and use that information to turn their negative experience into a positive review.
But the trick to nailing this part of the process is having a social media listening tool that brings all the conversations onto one dashboard. Radarr pulls in conversations from 100+ data points per day, helping you listen in closely and engage your audience.
Bonus tip: Start understanding your consumer sentiments
Customer reviews are a long term game and will never stop being of importance when it comes to growth. If you want to ace them, you need to understand your audience and your customers better.
It basically enables one to not just tune into the ongoing conversations on your socials and other channels, but also understand the sentiment that they stem from and help you identify where you can improve or how you can reach out to that particular customer.
With Radarr Sentiment API, you can now make sense of your own data sets and uncover the unsaid to understand your audience’s sentiments better. When you understand your audience better, you are able to deliver a better experience to them and in the long run, get more positive reviews for your business.
Conclusion
With 2022 just a few days away, it’s time you focus on growing your business sustainably and through your customers.
And make social proof an independent growth strategy for your business in a competitive ecosystem!
Whether you’re a mobile app developer, a service provider, agency, software company, or a publishing website, don’t wait another day on social proof.
If a customer doesn’t like your product or service, there’s a high chance that they might take their frustrations to social media or discussion forums. On the contrary, the customers also share their positive experiences from the brand on the internet. The mix of customers’ emotions (positive, negative, or neutral) towards your brand is called sentiment.
Sentiment analysis is an important metric that analyzes the online brand mentions and gives you insights into how your potential customers perceive your brand. However, to apply it correctly, you have to understand what sentiment analysis is, its benefits, and how it works.
In this blog post, we’ll talk about all that. Plus, we’ll focus on how some brands are using this metric for success.
What is sentiment analysis?
Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, is the process that uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques to analyze the online written pieces and determine the emotional intent behind them.
In simpler words, it involves understanding customers’ attitudes towards a particular topic, brand, product, or service—positive, negative, or neutral.
For example:
“I really like your new website design.”—Positive
“I’m not sure if I like the new design of your website.”—Neutral
“I don’t like the design of your new website.”—Negative
Since customers give their feedback more openly than ever before, sentiment analysis is becoming a powerful tool for monitoring and understanding their opinions and social media conversations. This way, brands learn what makes customers happy or angry so that they can tailor their products and services according to customers’ needs.
There are four types of sentiment analysis:
Fine-grained: Analyzing reviews and ratings and classifying them into positive, negative, and neutral.
Aspect-based: Identifying the opinions on a specific aspect of a product or service. For example, TripAdvisor uses this approach to identify the sentiment behind the customer feedback and the service itself.
Intent-based: Identifies the intention of the customer—whether they want to purchase something or just browse.
Emotion-based: Identifies the emotion of a customer behind the mention. This can include sadness, anger, happiness, satisfaction, frustration, etc.
How is sentiment analysis used by brands?
Let’s have a look at some of the popular applications of sentiment analysis.
Brand monitoring
Customers talk about your brands, products, and services on the internet and share their recommendations. Blog posts, social media platforms, product reviews, news articles, and discussion forums are excellent sources of business information. These are filled with customers’ opinions and comments that can help assess your brand health if analyzed.
In your social media monitoring dashboard, check the ratio of positive and negative brand mentions within the conversations. Also, learn what your customers find useful and complain about the most.
Preventing reputation crisis
Reputation disasters happen to every brand at some point. And, it’s nearly impossible to predict when your business might fall prey to a reputation crisis. But, when the brand gets the crisis response wrong, it can go viral for all the wrong reasons. Hence, analyzing online sentiments can be your best bet to avoid these crises.
Sentiment analysis is your secret weapon when it comes to managing brand reputation crises. It helps you identify the spikes in negative mentions so you can spot a reputation crisis early and act quickly, leaving lesser chances of spreading it online.
Measuring campaign effectiveness
Like with brand monitoring, you can track the mentions of your marketing campaigns and identify how users perceive your message by measuring the overall sentiment of their comments, shares, likes, and posts.
This is especially useful if you’re launching a new product or service. For example, if you’ve launched a new product and noticed a sudden spike in your customers’ sentiments, it can be something related to your new product or how you marketed it.
So, track your marketing campaigns as they launch to find out your customers’ sentiments. This way, you can learn what’s resonating and what’s not with their needs and preferences and tailor your future campaigns accordingly.
Performing competitor analysis
Don’t only analyze your own sentiments. To take your brand’s online presence to the next level, keep an eye on your competitors too.
Analyzing your competitors will help you know what aspects of their products receive a large number of positive or negative reactions. Plus, you’ll be able to see what’s working for them and what’s not, so you can repeat their successes and avoid their failures.
Competitor sentiment analysis can also serve as a benchmark when you analyze your customers’ sentiments behind your brand. For example, if 40% of your mentions are positive, 35% are negative, and the rest are neutral, competitor analysis can help determine whether it’s a good thing or something that needs improvement.
For example, Apple uses sentiment analysis to analyze the competitors and their actions based on specific aspects, such as brand value proposition, the introduction of new features, addressing different issues, and so on.
This information allows Apple to determine how to differentiate and strengthen its brand in the market. Hence, no doubt why Apple is a trillion-dollar company today.
Improving customer experience
Finding out what your customers feel about your brand, products, and services is essential for your business. This is where sentiment analysis comes in. It helps you monitor and understand customers’ opinions and feedback about your products and campaigns the moment they’re launched.
Further, it helps you identify positive mentions conveying what they liked about your product and negative mentions showing bad reviews and problems customers are facing. If you catch these negative comments early, chances are you can act on relevant suggestions quickly for this specific customer and improve the experience for others too.
How does sentiment analysis work?
Now that you’re aware of what sentiment analysis is and how it is used by brands, let’s get into the mechanics of how it works.
Sentiment analysis is a form of data science. Or, more specifically, it uses natural processing language (NLP) to identify and classify the pieces of text as positive, negative, or neutral. There are three main approaches to sentiment analysis: supervised machine learning, rule-based system, or a combination of both.
Let’s check these out.
Supervised machine learning (SML)
As the name suggests, this model doesn’t rely on manually created rules but on machine learning techniques. In this case, you have to build labeled datasets (similar to the data you’d like to analyze) to help the machine learn how to classify text based on different emotional tones.
Since the sentiments of the given dataset are already determined by the human evaluators, the system uses sentiment analysis from the training set to label the new test set. After providing enough relevant data, feed the machine new, unlabeled data to see if it marks it correctly. If not, keep adding more data to increase the analysis’s accuracy further.
Supervised machine learning model consists of the following classification algorithms:
Naive Bayes
Linear regression
Support vector machines
Deep learning
The advantage of this approach is that it creates models trained for many different contexts and purposes. For example, the word “apple” refers to fruit and also to one of the leading mobile companies in the world. A machine learning algorithm can be trained to identify what Apple means when the word is used in the sentence. It can then apply this experience to analyze similar cases.
Rule-based techniques
Unlike supervised machine learning, the rule-based system uses a set of manually crafted rules to identify the text sentiments. These rules may include various NLP techniques, such as stemming, tokenization, parsing, part of speech tagging, and lexicons (i.e., dictionaries of pre-labeled words and expressions).
Check out the following example:
WORD
SENTIMENT
Great
0.8
Good
0.5
Bad
-0.5
Terrible
-1
Here’s how the rule-based system works:
Determine the polarity of a text by using sentiment analysis tools to break it down into individual components, i.e., words and phrases. Then, assign each component a score using lexicons.
Generally, positive words such as good, great, helpful, and useful are assigned a positive score (above 0), whereas words and phrases like terrible, bad, and disappointing would get scored negatively (below 0). Plus, neutral words and phrases are assigned a score of zero.
Next, add up the score for every word and divide the result by the number of words in the text. For example:
The ambiance was good, but the food was bad.
In this case, the score would be: (0.5 + (-0.5)) / 2 = -0 / 2 = 0
Hence, this text will be labeled as neutral by the system.
You can also count the number of positive and negative words mentioned in the given text. If the number of positive words is more than the number of negative words, it indicates a positive sentiment and vice versa. Also, if both the numbers are equal, it means a neutral sentiment.
In a nutshell, the rule-based technique is much easier to deploy than machine learning. However, it can take a lot of time and effort to maintain. You have to keep adding new rules, which might also affect the previous results.
Hybrid approach
Hybrid systems combine the elements of machine learning and rule-based approach into one system to improve the accuracy of sentiment analysis.
Data scientists often use these techniques alongside each other. A rule-based model will try to classify the sentiment of the text. If the sentiment is not easily identified (when no or very few words from the sentence are available in the lexicon), a machine learning system will be used to gain better insights.
Is sentiment analysis really accurate?
As sentiments are often subjective, it’s hard to expect a sentiment analysis tool to be 100% accurate. In fact, research shows that the sentiment analysis accuracy of a human brain is between 60% and 65% only.
So, what are the major challenges that affect the accuracy of a sentiment analysis model? Let’s discuss.
Irony and sarcasm
In many cases, people often use negative words to express positive sentiments. This can be difficult for the machines to detect without knowing the context of the situation.
Consider these two situations:
The order is only 30 minutes late again. What a great start to the day!
The order is only 5 minutes late again today. What a great start to the day!
Obviously, a 30-minute late order won’t make someone’s day better. But, this can be tricky for machines to understand.
Negations
Negations are a means of reversing the meaning of a word, phrase, or sentence. For example, “I wouldn’t say the hotel stay was particularly good.” For accurate sentiment analysis, it is crucial to identify the negation and detect which word or phrase is affected by it.
Multipolarity
Often, a sentence will express different emotions at once—it might speak positively to one topic or object but negatively to another. For example, “Dominos is much better than Pizza Hut.” This sentence says positively about Dominos and negatively about Pizza hut.
A sentiment analysis system will consider the sentiment to be positive, considering the “much better” phrase. However, if you’re analyzing Pizza Hut’s mentions, you might disagree.
Hence, you’ll need more sophisticated programming to score this sentence accurately.
Sentiments to pay attention
Sentiments can be classified into three main categories:
Negative sentiments brands need to watch out for
Negative sentiments include brand mentions that have negative words/sentences attached to them. Many people believe that the presence of negative sentiments means that the campaign, product, or service is a failure.
However, that’s not always the case. Such sentiments can also indicate opportunities for business. For example, they could mean that something is off and you need to find a solution to fix it.
Examples include:
Sadness: This happens when a customer is not satisfied with the purchase or if you haven’t replied to their request. For example, “Your response time is really slow. I’ve been waiting over two weeks.”
Anger: When a customer talks about how bad your product or service is. For example, “Your support team is useless.”
Comparison: When a customer compares your product or service with that of the competitor’s. For example, Dell’s laptop is better than HP’s laptop.
Positive sentiments brands need to monitor
Positive sentiments include brand mentions that have positive words/sentences attached to them. Customers have positive feelings about your brand and want to recommend your products or services to their loved ones. The more positive brand mentions, the better your brand is perceived in the customers’ eyes.
Examples include:
Happy: When a customer loves your product or service and shares their experience with their friends, saying how amazing it was. For example, “Great service at an affordable price. We’ll definitely try this again.”
Extremely satisfied: When a customer recommends your product or service to their friends and family. Such customers are more likely to become your brand advocates. For example, “I really like how easy this product is to use and how it successfully helps manage my team—clearly, one of the best team management tools I’ve used.”
Neutral sentiments brands can work on to turn these people into positives
Neutral sentiment is neither positive nor negative. This means that such brand mentions don’t contain any words/phrases that can be classified as positive or negative. Instead, they just state some facts.
Such sentiments offer an excellent opportunity for brands to reach out to customers and ask them for detailed feedback and how their experience was.
Examples include:
No comments: When a customer seems satisfied with your product or service but doesn’t express their feelings clearly. In simpler words, it happens when the customer writes neither good nor bad about your brand. For example, “Good job, but I expect a lot more in the future.” Or, “The movie was incredibly unpredictable.”
How KFC used sentiment analysis?
For a while, Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) started losing out to its competitors. The brand decided to leverage the power of sentiment analysis by including memes and pop culture iconography to increase engagement and instill the brand’s value proposition.
After trying out a few things, it began analyzing its campaigns and social media posts by:
Monitoring performance using aspect-based sentiment analysis, which helped in highlighting the specific aspects of the campaign, product, or service.
Topic mining to generate new ideas.
As a result, KFC boosted its presence in the online media landscape, leading to increased growth, reach, and market share.
Do you really need sentiment analysis?
Today’s generation has a cancel culture—when they like a product, service, or campaign, they spread positive word of mouth on different platforms. But, when they don’t like something, they go all the way to take it down. For example, Tanishq has withdrawn its “Ekatvam campaign” from all media platforms as it generated a lot of negative sentiment around it. And that’s not the only brand to face audience sentiments – from McDonald’s to Pepsi and many others, brands have seen the power sentiments have on their campaign performance over the years.
In times when customers come first, and they give their feedback more openly than ever before, creating products and campaigns that appeal to your audience and make you stand out among others is crucial.
This is where sentiment analysis comes into play.
Sentiment analysis is an incredibly valuable metric for businesses as it provides real-time feedback from your customers. Plus, it enables you to uncover your audience’s emotions about your brand, which can make your product, service, or campaigns more effective.
Hence, no matter what stage your business is at, sentiment analysis should be an essential strategy to take your brand’s online presence to another level.
Ready to leverage the opportunities that sentiment analysis brings to your business?
