Using social listening for your content marketing strategy

Content marketing has always been around, but did not take hold until the digital transformation of marketing. The COVID-19 Pandemic has also forced a lot of brands to place a lot more resources on their digital marketing. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 94% of marketers surveyed said their content marketing strategy changed because of the pandemic.

Here are some of the findings from the top content marketing performers surveyed:

• 73% conduct lead nurturing from content marketing
• 64% generate sales through content marketing
• 60% are actively building an audience

But how does social listening help with your content marketing strategy?

Understanding your audience

This ad by JWT India from 2013 never made it to print, but was widely circulated by employees who probably thought it was funny. The theme is that the Ford Figo is a compact car with a spacious trunk. The outrage quickly showed that no one else thought it was funny, but rather distasteful.

There are other instances where brands launch the right campaign at the wrong time, like Airbnb's Floating World campaign. The campaign's copy read “Stay above water. Live the life aquatic with these floating home.” which feels tone-def considering that it was launched during Hurricane Harvey.

These examples go to show you that you must read the room. You should know your audience and their changing moods.The easiest way to do this is by monitoring keywords and the tracking sentiments through time.

Social listening word cloud

Social listening is an active feedback loop that allows you to identify trends as they emerge. Hashtags and other trending topics may fluctuate from day to day, but some other topics can prove to be more sticky. Whenever there is a trending sticky topic, it can feed into your content engine.

One of the simplest and most effective ways to identify emerging trends and themes is through the use of word clouds.

Learning from influencers

Social media monitoring can't be without influencer discovery. Influencers are increasingly becoming central to marketing strategies for brands of all sizes. Engaging with influencers in your space generate goodwill that will organically pay off.

You can always determine when you want to boost your organic engagement with influencers and commercialize it by paying for their advocacy of your products and/or services.

But most interestingly is that we can learn about the issues they care about and their views on them. Those views and insights can be great fuel to your content engine.

Analyzing competitors

Business advice on competition can be contradictory. Some will tell you to ignore your competition and focus on your customers. Others will tell you to focus on the big corporations, while some will say it's the smaller startups. There is no right or wrong answers here.

Obsessing over your competitors is counter-productive, but ignoring them completely can result in you missing out on opportunities. Social listening and competitor benchmarking lets you know what their content strategy is.

It's always helpful to know where your competitors are heading.

Using user-generated content

MINT Dentistry's recent influencer marketing campaign is a great example of collecting User Generated Content that can be used and repurposed across multiple platforms. In it, they ask their audience to show off the work done on them before they leave.

Using social data analytics

Social data analytics from social listening is arguably one of the most cost effective sources of insights a marketer can ever dream of. You can produce relevant and interesting content backed with analytics and sentiment analysis.

It only takes a few minutes to build a search query and run analytics with sentiment analysis on it!

Link building

Finding potential partners on social media platforms to link build may not come naturally if you don't already have an engaged audience. Reaching out to bloggers and content creators on social media can uncover valuable link building relationships.

Social listening to your content marketing strategy

SEO and social listening often go hand-in-hand with content marketing. Leveraging your social listening program to inform and enrich your content marketing strategy is a no-brainer. It is cost effective and readily accessible.