Search Listening for the Social Listener

When a consumer posts a Tweet, publishes a blog, or comments on a Reddit thread, they’re confident enough to put their opinion into words. So, when a consumer types words into a search engine like Google, they’re not just stating an opinion; they’re engaged and want to know more. They’re researching, comparing, and asking questions.

In this article, we will discuss what your consumer insights and social listening strategy could gain by understanding how those customers explore your brand.

Social listening and search listening are two tools you can use side-by-side to understand your customer journey for marketing, product and commercial.

Firstly, how your consumers search for your brand in Google tells you what they know, what they don’t know, and what they want. But how can your brand strategy and marketing teams use this data?

Are you familiar with Google Trends? It used to be the main resource for Google search insight. In the early days of Search Listening, Trend’s free dashboards and country-specific search rankings showed the main stories, search volumes, and top search queries on Google. However, while it’s a good resource for quick insights, as consumer intelligence experts we all know value comes from more nuanced data.

Nowadays, search-derived insights tools like Answerthepublic meet this need for deeper data insights. Tools such as these merge various Google insight sources and present the data in a format that’s better (in our opinion) for the consumer researcher.

In addition, using more intelligent sources of consumer search data, such as autocomplete data from Google search functions, allows users to find out what people search for alongside their brand. Interestingly, this also includes the questions they ask.

So, once you’ve got this data, Search Listening can be an invaluable way to see your brand through the eyes of your customers. Therefore, it can be the key to understanding your customers’ wants and needs, especially in their research phases.

When in doubt, it feels like the whole world just “Googles it”, and your customers probably do, too.

So how can you shape the answers your consumers see?

It can help to think of social listening as your consumers’ words and search listening as your consumers’ thoughts or feelings.

Throughout your consumer lifecycle, you’ll use different data to research your Leads’ and Customers’ opinions. In short, adding Social or Search listening to your data sources at different points can give you the information you need to make decisions based on your consumers’ thoughts. As a result, this level of understanding can give you serious engagement potential.

For example, your Marketing team will be aware that your early-stage potential customers are Googling your brand to find answers to their doubts. Search listening therefore has key insight for erasing those doubts and powering your digital marketing strategy.

One of the most direct and quick ROIs of using search data is to optimise your SEO and content strategy by copywriting exactly what your consumers search for on Google. Beyond that, we’re often asked about using search listening research data for product development, brand awareness monitoring, and campaign planning.

In conclusion, the possibilities are endless – it’s an exciting new consumer data space. If you’d like to chat about using search listening data for your team, please contact rebecca@tenbeargroup.com