Defining personalisation
Personalisation in digital marketing has become an increasingly powerful way of boosting engagement and connecting with audiences. In a digital world filled to the brim with automated ads, creating content that is personalised to your audience can help remind users that there is indeed a real person behind the face of their business. SmarterHQ, now Wunderkind, discovered that 72% of consumers said they would only engage with marketing messages tailored to their interests. When done correctly, personalisation can further increase lead generation and conversion rates.
Defining social listening
Social listening is a concept that has also grown in popularity within digital marketing due to the host of benefits it can present. The digital landscape is complex and reaching the desired audience can be difficult. Social listening helps us to not only find our audiences, but also improve the way we engage with them. The knowledge is power cliché is certainly applicable to digital marketing, which relies heavily on consumer data and analytics to determine behaviour and bolster campaign performance.
Social listening 🤝 personalisation
Social listening essentially consists of actively searching social platforms for mentions of your brand, competitors and keywords surrounding your business. Listening to users can be highly valuable for identifying demand, fatigue and opportunities. It’s all about getting an understanding for your audience in a more personal and humanised way; reading individual posts, comments and tweets that can help tell a story about the landscape of your products or services.
Personalisation in digital marketing involves creating content designed specifically for individuals or groups (as well as businesses in B2B) by addressing them directly, such as using their first name in email campaigns or using direct messaging. The content should be tailored to them and show a level of understanding for their interests, avoiding the templates and duplicated content that consumers are much more able to identify.
The crossover between personalised content and social listening therefore immediately becomes apparent. Personalisation, similarly to social listening, helps to humanise the brand by focusing more on the personable, qualitative information surrounding your business. Creating content that is personalised to specific audiences therefore becomes much more effective when social listening has been carried out. Building relationships and trust on the back of truly understanding your audience can not only generate leads but also improve customer retention and repeat business.
While the nature of social listening is to understand audiences from a more human perspective, this is digital marketing, so analysis naturally plays a big role. Tracking the number of mentions, keywords and behaviour is important for generating data-driven insights for your audience. Furthermore, content personalisation relies on extensive customer data that consists of personal information, key interests and past behaviour on the website, or in relation to previous purchases. The data recorded from social listening can therefore be directly used in personalisation analytics.
So… How exactly is social listening carried out?
There are countless tools available to digital marketers designed to cover every aspect of our strategies and campaigns. Social listening is no different, with a variety of tools and services available with the purpose of effectively generating key audience data. This will essentially provide you with a complete overview of all online posts, conversations and discussions related to your brand, industry, and competitors.
Social listening is often carried out using artificial intelligence that automatically searches and scans through various platforms and channels. As with most digital marketing tools, there are paid subscriptions for these services, however the majority have free trials for those looking to try before you buy. Here is a selection of some of the various social listening tools we’ve found online:
About Inflowing
Inflowing is a B2B marketing agency. We help B2B organisations do meaningful things with marketing. Whether that’s getting more leads, more visibility, or supporting their sales teams.
We’re an experienced team of marketers with an incredibly strong background in B2B. To learn more about B2B and improving your marketing, check out our other blogs or get in touch.
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