The Benefits of B2B Social Listening - 6 Best Practices

Shefali Mathur

When we are having a conversation, our intention is usually not to merely hear what the other person is saying but to absorb the information coming from the other end. While the art of listening has dwindled in society, for businesses, it continues to be one of the paragons of customer experience.
Social listening is the practice that monitors online conversations and digital chatter surrounding your brand, industry, and related trends. It helps you gain an understanding of your customer’s psyche and craft experiences that work for them.
If you are a B2B business, you need to branch out a little and invest time, effort, and resources into the practice of B2B social listening.

What is B2B Social Listening?

B2B social listening is a slight uptake on B2C social listening where your team dives into keywords, and mentions regarding specific information around factors like the business’s sales cycle, customer experience, on-demand service, tech support and much more. We’re being specific here because these are the usual challenges surrounding a business to business model and having the insights from B2B social listening can help teams and the leadership make informed decisions.

Benefits of B2B Social Listening

Social listening for your B2B brand is no longer a nice-to-have but a necessity. By knowing what your customers are talking about, you have the upper hand over your competitors and can enhance the overall brand reputation. Here are the top 5 benefits of social listening for your B2B brand:

1. Monitoring Brand Reputation

Your reputation precedes you, and managing it is very important. With B2B social listening, you can tune into media mentions and monitor what platforms like online review sites, news channels, and others are saying about your brand.
With B2B social listening, you also get a scoop into the following:

Sentiment Analysis: This feature allows you to assess the customer perception of your brand. It helps analyze the net sentiment score, showing whether your customers are saying positive or negative things about you and enabling you to tweak your strategies accordingly.
Share of Voice: This is the majority position of a brand in a particular industry. This measure helps understand the brand’s standing when it comes to market share and can be tracked using B2B social listening tools. To have a better market presence, your share of voice should be greater than others.

2. Improve Engagement

With B2B social listening, you know what your customers are talking about. During this activity of monitoring conversations and chatter, you are likely to hear suggestions and recommendations to make your product or service better. Use this direct feedback from your customers to improve engagement and overall perception.

Moreover, it also helps stay in vogue with the latest emerging trends and important topics, helping your brand craft its new features and services in line with demand. This is especially important in the B2B sector due to constant innovation and the need to stay ahead of the curve.

3. Execute Accurate Industry Research

Your customers are smart and know what they want, undertaking major research to put their money into the right products and services. Interestingly, they are pretty vocal about their demands and desires online, and with B2B social listening, you can tap into this goldmine to undertake your own research to understand your customers and industries.

This is especially helpful because the data can help your sales team highlight the exact pain points and your marketing team create campaigns around those ideas to grab attention. This is the most accurate and direct research you can undertake to generate new leads and improve your bottom line.

4. Stay Different

B2B social listening gives you the power to know what your competitors are doing and the flexibility to NOT sound like them in the market space. Your market is saturated with the same tone and messaging, trying to attract customers with common messaging. While staying in line with the trend is crucial, sounding like your competitors can instantly make you boring. With social listening, you can be the same but different, minus their mistakes.

5. Better PR for Your Brand

Since you have your ears to the ground with B2B social listening, you can accurately create, measure, and analyse your data-backed PR plan for your business. This ability allows you to go beyond investing in focus groups or chasing industry forums to see your brand perception and get accurate results quickly.

How Can Brands Use B2B Social Listening for Growth - Best Practices

Earlier, reviews were reserved for B2C brands, and industry members often relied on customer recommendations and peer suggestions. However, this is now valid for B2B businesses, making social listening a necessary part of business growth.

With social listening, B2B brands can explore different platforms, such as social media (for customer chatter), review platforms, and third-party websites, often buzzing with communities and conversations around various topics. One of these topics can be relevant to your business, and you must keep it close with social listening.
Let’s dive a little deeper into how brands can deploy B2B social listening for growth:

1. Crisis Management

Where there is fire, there is smoke, and it doesn’t take long for the fire to spread.
With social listening, you can detect the smoke by monitoring online conversations and checking for sentiment analysis. This will give you insight into your customers’ feelings about your product/service.

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In case of negative emotions, you can avoid it snowballing into a major crisis by immediately responding to negative comments or resolving the concern your customer may be harboring. This not only avoids a crisis waiting to happen but also improves customer satisfaction, loyalty, and experience.

When Instagram had shut down for a couple of hours, there was widespread panic because of business dependencies and user concerns. Some turned into memes, making a tense situation slightly humorous.

2. Leverage Marketing Intelligence

If you thought social listening was only about listening to conversations, then you have only seen one side of the coin. For B2B brands (and also B2C), the devil is in the data, and with social listening, teams have the power to gather consumer insights, which can be converted into visual reports and dashboards that create a heatmap of brand perception.
Based on this empirical value, businesses can craft campaigns and close the gap between customer demand and company supply.

3. Competitor Analysis

It is said, “Keep your friends close, keep your competitors closer.” If you are not using social listening to gain an edge over your competitors, you already leave money on the table.
As a B2B brand, you are in a race of constant upgrades, primarily because your competitors are always innovating (or maybe they’re not). You need to tap into their activities and gather as much information as possible.
Social listening can help you estimate what your competitor is offering, how it is helping your target audience, and even see if they have copied any of your ideas. With this information, you can always create something new and unique to help your customers get the best experience.

4. Improve Your Leads Pipeline

For B2B organisations, there are a limited number of platforms that they can monitor for their product or service-related conversations, a few of them being G2, Capterra, etc., which are often goldmines for information regarding B2B SaaS products. Social listening arms teams with the capability to track conversations on these and other relevant platforms, bringing the brands one step closer to their target audience. This is because only relevant personas are likely to comment or engage in conversations about the specific product or service, making them the brand’s ideal audience. Teams can zero in on their prospects and reach out to them to build a quality leads pipeline.

5. Product Development

B2B social listening is your gateway to a better product and development journey. Your customers are likely to complain about a certain product feature that might not be up to their expectations and voice it on review and social media platforms. If luck has it, they might also suggest feature improvements from their end, making your product more customer-centric than ever. In Locobuzz, you can add the keyword that you want to track and monitor to receive regular updates. In this case, you can add a keyword related to your product and track it regularly to hit upon some product innovation gold.

6. Enhance Your Customer Support

B2B social listening can significantly improve your customer support services. By monitoring conversations about your brand and products, you can identify recurring issues and pain points that customers face. This allows your support team to proactively address these concerns and provide timely solutions. Additionally, social listening helps you identify potential support tickets before they are officially raised, enabling you to respond swiftly and prevent issues from escalating. This proactive approach not only enhances customer satisfaction but also builds trust and loyalty, which are crucial for long-term business relationships.

Conclusion

In the ever-evolving B2B landscape, social listening is a powerful tool that can help brands stay ahead of the curve. By understanding your customers’ needs and monitoring your brand’s perception, you can create strategies that resonate with your audience and drive growth.

With Locobuzz’s robust social listening feature, you can monitor relevant keywords, gain insights from customer conversations, and make data-driven decisions to enhance your product and service offerings. Start leveraging the power of B2B social listening today and take your brand to new heights.