How to Understand Your Customer Needs Through Social Media?
Social media is generally known to be a tool of online communication that is used to easily share information and bring together people with similar ideas on the internet. But brands use them as a marketing tool. And their customers use social media to either appreciate the brand or most commonly, criticize it. Do you know this social media criticism is your way to reach customer needs?
Most chief marketing officers forget to acknowledge social media’s objectives on the part of customer retention because of which customer cooperation are always known to be left behind. On some social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, brands are being dissected and discussed on, stories of some companies are being inverted and subverted.
Why?
Because they don’t know their customers.
Every business owner wants to convert, attract and hang onto customers. But that cannot be done if you do not truly know who your customers are. Knowing your customers include understanding their wants and their needs.
But the problem is most brands don’t know how to know understand what customers actually want?
Are you the one?
Not to worry….
This guide will tell you about the 100% proven ways of understanding your customers’ needs, wants and problems through social media without failing.
1. Organize Focus Groups on Social Media: One of the best ways of understanding your customers’ wants and needs is by talking to your targeted audience directly so you can ask questions and get answers from them. These groups are used as a social media marketing technique to target and interview people of a particular audience collectively.
You can learn to implement Social Media Focus Group strategy through Domino’s Pizza.
The brand runs an Ad Campaign named “Pizza Turnaround” where they display TV commercials from Focus groups revealing tasteless, boring pizzas.
By showing the worst Pizzas, Domino’s takes feedbacks from customers, embrace them, and starts improving from there onwards.
This campaign is fully integrated with Domino’s Facebook page and Twitter account which makes users’ believe that the brand listens well to its customers. All of this drives a good amount of traffic, real engagement and increasing brand trust.
Things you should take care of while organizing a Social Media Focus Group:
- Group members must be comfortable enough to interact openly; focus group members must have the ability to interpret situation or discussion at hand. They need to be comfortable and be able to ask and answer questions in the process, this will make them know more concerning your product.
- The marketer need to be prepared for an honest and open dialogue in order to give your customers additional understanding on your product or service.
- Focus groups can be accessible by marketers in all domains and fields, even industries can also administer these groups.
2. Social Media Listening: This is a process where brands self-update on the current event happening on the social media – tracking and analyzing what the customers are saying about business or product on social channels.
One example that’s worth sharing here is of Jack in the Box – A Fast Food Restaurant.
Source
See how they are listening to the complaints of users and responding genuinely
Updating yourself on how or what your customers post on social media about your service or product will lead you to find the best solutions for them and provide them with great service.
The use of social listening does not only brings your customers’ expectations but also how up to date you are with those expectations.
3. Select the Best Social Media Channels: Making the right decision when selecting a social media channel for your business is one of the greatest achievements for a business owner. It’s not a good idea to take suggestion from someone regarding what the best social channel is, the person might just be wrong because the platform doing well for others business might not result the same with yours.
The most important thing is where your audience is. Nobody would like to setup its business where there is no one in need of the services they provide. If you do not know the platform where your audience is, it will be a great idea to ask and make some surveys.
You can at times send surveys online to bring feedback. There are infinite online survey tools available to seek feedback from customers. Some great tools for your online surveys are SurveyMonkey and SurveyGizmo. These are the most popular survey tools being used with ease.
Some steps to selecting an ideal social media channel for your business
- Think of the platform your audience is using: knowing the platform your customers are using will lead to ease of communication between the two parties.
- Think of the channel your competitors are using: knowing the social media accounts your competitors are using will help you in growing. You have to take into consideration how often they post, which social media channels they use and number of likes & shares they gain on a single post. There are some social listening tools like Buzzsumo can help you know which product from an industry has more likes and shares.
- Think of the of the service you offer: knowing the service you offer will also help you in the selection of a perfect platform, for some businesses are suitable for some platforms than others.
4. Get Personal with your customers: The use of social media channels is to help the company interact in a humanly way and build good relationships with customers. Sadly enough, 58% of consumers who would tweet concerning a poor customer experience won’t get a reply from the company in place. Some small issues like these can sometimes reduce the company’s revenue in a short-term and cause damages to the brands in a long run. Social media has made customers more informed and given them the ability to have more buying choice than ever.
5. Create Advocates: You have the advantage of being the default buying choice of customers when they get engaged. They become loyal customers and promoters of your business in turn.
Already engaged customers can defend your company on Social Media in the presence of a thousand people. Keeping a good history of service will assure a company with over 70% of their buyers. An example of customer advocacy is by identifying and rewarding high profile buyers.
6. Your social support responds time: The responds speed may not be seen as an important factor in the use of phones and emails but in the world of social media, the speed of your responds time is one of the most important points to put in place when setting up a social support team.
The nature of social media all depends on live events and speed which gives expectations much different from the email like platform. 24 hours response rate is usually acceptable for an email platform but when it comes to a social media channel, you have to be much quicker than that.
7. Social Media Analytics: With social media analytics, you can always determine the searches your customers make online relevant to your products or services. Social media competitor analysis would also be a great help if you know how to play the cards well.
8. Use the right tone when communicating with customers:
The tone of your voice is highly important in social customer support. The tone part plays a very big role in social support. Some social channels like twitter restrict the users to short messages which make it difficult for you to the tone. The tone you use at times will all depend on the customer you are talking to, and to get the ideal tone for a customer is to adjust your tone accordingly.
Here’s the example of JetBlue that is good at reassuring customers.
They’re highly focused on empathy and apology when they notice the frustration of a customer:
An apologetic tone to the customer issues on various social channels can develop stronger business relationships and make your customers more loyal to your company.
There are some ideas you should take into consideration before involving in social media conversation:
- Check how the customers sound; are they fluent in your language? If not you have to be much careful with the words you use.
- Is the customer disappointed with your service? you need to use understanding tone in cases like this, try being apologetic and reassure the customer of your service or product.
Wrap-up
All thanks to social media, customers now have the ability to be involved in a two-way conversation with brands and be more informed with their buying decision. Now, its upto brands how they leverage maximum advantage of it. The trick is: what makes customers feel engaged is when they are known by the company that can only be achieved with proper response on social media.
Am I done? If you think that I have missed something or mistaken somewhere, you are most welcome to rectify me on given below comment section.