Guest post.
Acquiring new customers is vital for every business. But with the steep rise in customer acquisition costs, and research showing it costs up to five times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one, you can’t ignore the importance of customer retention.
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Effective customer retention methods can enhance loyalty and generate better word-of-mouth advocacy, ultimately boosting profits. Retaining your existing consumer base is also, as noted above, much more cost-effective than concentrating entirely on expensive marketing campaigns in hopes of acquiring new customers.
What do you need for better customer retention? Customer-centric strategies. Show your customers that you listen to them and do your best to prioritize their satisfaction. In software development, for example, that means prioritizing new features requested by existing users over new functionality that may (or may not) help win more new deals.
But when customer preferences change daily, how do you ensure your retention strategies drive desired results? Through social listening. In fact, almost 61% of businesses currently have a social listening system.
Social listening, and more broadly online brand monitoring, is essential. This post outlines 10 key steps in using social listening to satisfy and retain more customers.
How to Use Social Listening to Retain More Customers
Social media monitoring is no longer just an add-on element in social media marketing, but a must-have process to monitor the pulse of customer preferences. Reports show social listening is considered a “key planning element” by 82% of professionals.
Here are 10 steps to use social listening to increase customer retention:
1. Monitor brand mentions.
Not all customers will reach out to you with their issues. Some may not even tag your brand while talking about their problems online.
That’s why it’s crucial to stay on top of every instance where someone posts anything related to your brand or products. It enables you to identify the issues your customers are facing, address them promptly, and avoid customer churn.
First, identify the keywords and phrases associated with your brand, including your brand name, product, features unique to your product, brand slogans, hashtags, and common misspellings. This list should also include industry-specific keywords. You may want to use online spreadsheet tools to easily track and organize your keywords.
Manually tracking individual mentions is a time-consuming process. Besides, you may lose customer retention opportunities if you are not fast enough. Some key conversations may even slip through the cracks.
We recommend using a reliable social media monitoring tool with real-time brand mention tracking to avoid this. Some good options here are BrandMentions, Brand24, Hootsuite, and Mention. These tools let you set up alerts for every time someone mentions your brand keywords and respond to them quickly.
2. Track customer sentiment.
Understanding your customer’s feelings requires a deep dive into the intent behind their social media conversations. It gives you an accurate gauge of their preferences and challenges regarding your product.
That’s where sentiment analysis can help you. It’s a natural language processing system that identifies and analyzes the sentiment and intent of texts.
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Sentiment analysis gives an in-depth insight into what the customer expects from your brand, product, or industry. Armed with this knowledge, you can adjust your offerings, resolve customer challenges promptly, increase customer satisfaction, and boost retention.
3. Identify customer pain points.
Customers will only stay with your brand if you improve their experiences consistently. For that, you must remove the obstacles on their journey through enhanced offerings, minimizing friction, and prompt issue resolution. But, to fix any problem, you must first identify what it is.
Examine social media discussions, comments, and reviews to identify common pain points of your target audience. Determine the recurring topics, complaints, or frustrations.
Measure your sentiment analysis data through the NPS scale and identify the promoters, passives, and detractors. The detractors are at the most risk of churning, so these are the customers you need to prioritize to boost retention. Find patterns in their sentiments and detect the root causes of negative emotions.
4. Respond to customer feedback.
To retain your customers, you need to show you value their opinions. One way to do that is to respond to their experiences and complaints on social media. It helps you identify their exact challenges and expectations from your brand, enabling you to elevate user experience.
For example, Nike responded to this tweet and encouraged the customer to reach out directly.
Such direct engagement can provide valuable qualitative data and implement solutions effectively. A study by Bain & Co. found customers who engage with brands on social media spend up to 40% more on their products than those who don’t. You can encourage such engagement by responding to their feedback on social media platforms.
Once you resolve their problem, update the customer personally and through social media. Ask if they are satisfied with the resolution. Such proactive effort can turn even the unhappiest customers into your loyal fans.
5. Monitor competitor activity.
Every brand is trying its best to attract more customers. It’s vital to understand and exceed your industry standard to ensure you don’t lose your customers to the competitors. This requires accurate benchmarking through competitor analysis.
Use social listening to assess how other brands in your industry are accommodating customer demands. It will uncover what your target market likes about your competitors and gauge their preferences.
Analyze the positive feedback your competing brands get to see what customers might want from your brand. This can guide your product development and marketing strategy and strengthen your offerings accordingly.
Holger Sindbaek, the founder of Online Solitaire, said:
We began to monitor conversations in gaming forums and social communities, where players often discussed what they loved and lacked in other games. This was our opportunity to understand unmet needs. We noticed a recurring mention of certain game features absent from our platform but popular among players.
Recognizing this gap, we swiftly developed and integrated these features into our games. The outcome was remarkable – we retained a higher percentage of our existing user base and attracted players from competitors seeking these specific features. This approach underscored the power of social listening in identifying opportunities for improvement and directly contributing to customer retention.”
6. Identify trending topics.
Use social listening to identify trends in your industry and implement them in your marketing and customer service strategy. This will keep your brand relevant to the target market and maintain customer retention.
As trends can expand and fade quickly, it’s important to hop on them early on. Regular social listening assesses conversations around your brand and industry and offers insights on the most relevant trends for your brand.
Besides relying on social media monitoring tools, you can track Instagram’s “For you” and “Explore” pages. Since these are customized according to your activity, you can get an idea of the trending topics in your industry.
Narrow down the most used hashtags for your brand and industry. This will help you filter trending topics.
It’s also important to know which trends aren’t for you. Assess a trending topic’s scope and see how well you can customize it to your brand image before joining the bandwagon.
7. Personalize customer interactions.
A McKinsey report notes that 71% of customers expect brand personalization, and 76% get frustrated by the lack of it. This can lead to customer churn.
To prevent that, use social listening data to tailor customer interactions and personalize brand experiences. Segment customers based on their preferences, demands, and challenges. It simplifies personalized communication and resolution and lets you cater to each segment’s needs.
This helps to make every customer feel heard, and makes them more likely to keep paying for your services.
8. Measure customer satisfaction.
Use social listening to track KPIs, including the number of mentions, reach, engagement, and share of voice. It quantifies customer sentiment around your brand on social media.
Run customer surveys and benchmark them against your social listening data. You should also benchmark your social listening results for a specific period and compare them to industry standards. This will provide you with a comprehensive view of where you stand in customer satisfaction.
9. Anticipate customer needs.
While prompt issue resolution is a critical customer retention tactic, it’s better to anticipate and accommodate customer needs before issues arise. This gives your customers fewer reasons to consider other brands over yours.
Look for patterns in social media conversations around your industry. Identify the common problems your target market faces, even if they aren’t addressed directly. Examine whether your offerings can accommodate these needs and adjust accordingly. You can also conduct surveys and polls to validate your assumptions and collect more insights.
10. Adjust marketing strategies.
Personalize your digital and traditional marketing strategies to suit changing customer needs. Adapt your content and messaging according to your social listening data. Integrate trending topics in your marketing campaigns.
Run exclusive offers based on customer preferences. Create marketing materials about how you listened to your customer’s demands and updated your offerings.
Most importantly, measure your marketing impact, compare them to changing customer demands, and adjust strategies continuously.
Wrap Up—How to Use Social Listening for Customer Retention
Social listening is crucial for understanding customer needs and preferences in a constantly evolving online world. The insights lead to more effective product development and marketing strategies, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and improved customer retention. You can also elevate your customer service through social listening.
You can use social listening to retain more customers by:
- Monitoring brand mentions and track sentiments regularly;
- Identifying customers at risk of churning;
- Detecting the most common customer pain points;
- Spotting and acting on relevant trends;
- Personalizing customer interactions to improve your buyer’s journey;
- Anticipating what your customers need before they complain; and
- Assessing and adapting your marketing strategies based on social listening insights.
To stay attuned to customer sentiments and turn them into loyal fans, implement a robust social listening program across your marketing, sales, support, and product development teams.