Jun 16

5 Ways Food Marketers Should Use Social Listening to Inform Strategy

BLOG June 16 2021

Social listening allows you to track, analyze, and respond to online conversations about your brand and your industry. Most importantly, it is the analysis of this information that makes social listening so powerful. This is because the analysis portion allows your brand to gain valuable insights into your market. The question is, how do you leverage these insights? Check out 5 key ways that food marketers should use social listening insights to inform their strategy.

Product Development

Knowing what consumers are saying online about your products is essential to outside-in product development. While social monitoring focuses on collecting information such as mentions and posts, social listening layers on top of this analysis and reflections. Food marketers can launch a new product in the evening, monitor the social response, and iterate accordingly.

Take the case of Coca-Cola who after 99 years, revealed for the first time an updated version of the Coca-Cola beverage, which they called “New Coke.” The result? Backlash from their loyal customers. While this was in the 80s, if Coca-Cola had social listening at the time, they likely would have been able to test this idea with their audience.

Messaging

Following the previous point, consumers are increasingly willing to share their opinions and reviews about the products they use. They use reviews to voice what they love (and what they don’t love). Using social listening effectively can allow you to take inspiration for your marketing, crafting messaging that tactfully takes into consideration feedback from your audience. You can speak your consumers’ language to them!

Generate New Content Ideas

Not only can social listening allow you to perfect your brand’s messaging, it can also help you create content that your audience craves. There is no trial and error when it comes to social listening, you can immediately identify topics that your audience is interested in without having to guess. It’s like you have a giant focus group right at your fingertips!

Once you’ve nailed your topics, make sure not to make these common content marketing mistakes!

Identify Influencers

Have you identified influencers you’d like to partner with? It’s possible to make influencers really notice you when you leverage social listening. Set up a social listening feed for these influencers and then share it on social media while giving them a shout-out. Not only can these tools help you build relationships, they can also help you understand what influencers are driving positive word-of-mouth and extending your reach.

Measure Results

Not only does social listening help food marketers gather valuable information on influencers, social listening can allow you to understand the effects of a strategy in the form of a number. When you combine variables like: size of your following, number of interactions with content, and the social media reach of this content, you can learn how many people have potentially encountered mentions regarding a specific topic and calculate the value of conversations like this.

Not sure what you should be measuring? Click here to check out top social media metrics and benchmarks by platform!

Conclusion

In a nutshell, social listening can help you take your strategy from good to great. Your marketing team can understand necessary tweaks to your products, you can inform your messaging, identify influencers, help you develop content, and ultimately allow you to measure the results of your strategy.

The best part? Social listening yields increasing returns as your consumers see that your brand listens and actively engages. As a result, they become more comfortable sharing honest feedback and recommendations. These suggestions will help your brand in both the short and long term.

What are you waiting for? Get started today!

Get your free quote now!

CONTACT US TO LEARN MORE

 
 

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE…