4 ways to maximize social listening and propel your brand with trend analysis

What kinds of messages drive your customers to take action? Who do they trust when it comes time to make a purchasing decision, and where and how do they connect with those sources? What feelings or experiences spark loyalty and affection for your company — and which ones lead someone (and their entire extended network) to turn their back on you?

And what could you do for your brand if you had the answers?

Social listening tools help you hear the voice of your customer across an increasingly complex digital ecosystem. But while tracking specific mentions of your brand is important, it’s also critical to understand the broader context that informs consumer sentiment. That’s where trend analysis equipped with Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes into play.

Trend analysis allows you to fully leverage social listening capability by illuminating the underlying factors that create a trend. That deeper view enriches your understanding of consumer needs and behaviors, so you can answer all the questions I raised before. Most importantly, this kind of insight allows you to be proactive about the messages, product features, and support that connect your brand with your customer.

Get the most out of your toolset with better trend analysis

Making sense of unstructured data for a clearer view of trends is a challenge for every brand, even with the right tools. Here are some tips and best-practices for getting the most out of social listening with trend analysis for your brand:

1. Narrow your focus

As with any tool, trend analysis gives you the best results when you have a clear understanding of what problems you are trying to solve. The voice of your customer comes from numerous sources and in various forms, so start with a clear set of factors you’re listening for so you can:

• Identify innovative content formats you may not have tried before, helping to keep your messages fresh and compelling. When you speak in the unique voice of your customer, you build a more meaningful, trusting connection to your brand.
• Target messages to the specific geographies and demographics where related trends are having the greatest impact. You’ll also be able to transmit these messages through the right social channels to join the conversation when and how it’s taking place. This gives you influence at the moment purchasing decisions are being made.
• Proactively manage potential brand crises. Many public relations disasters begin at the trend level, before they ever reach your brand. A deeper understanding of customer sentiment allows you to recognize potential threats to your reputation before they happen and support key customer groups before they become brand detractors.
• Boost your customer care. AI-driven analysis can isolate common issues customers are experiencing with your competitors or in related industries, so you can avoid similar issues with your own brand and give your customer care team the right tools for better support.

2. See the bigger picture

Millions of conversations across dozens of social media channels prove that every customer has a unique voice, and social listening with trend analysis helps identify these specific personalities. But trend analysis also helps you cluster these insights into larger themes. This helps you make connections among unstructured, disparate data points that you can feed into your comprehensive brand strategy immediately.

This is possible when you select a social listening solution with a unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform. Point solutions may help one part of your business understand a narrow slice of your consumer base, but very often this results in fragmented, inconsistent data. Not only does this siloed data make it impossible to see a broader, more detailed picture of your customer, it also prevents teams across your organization from collaborating or acting on insights.

Leverage a Unified-CXM platform that gives you a single source of truth for a holistic view of the customer, shared dashboards for consistent visualization across internal teams, and a clear roadmap for the next actions your teams can take immediately to improve customer experience.

3. Consider the source

One thing that makes the social media landscape so complex is that not every source is created equally. Once you’ve identified the trends to focus on based on your objectives, you need to drill down to discover the origins of the information so you can make a more informed judgment about its authenticity. The right social listening tool with AI-powered trend analysis gives you the clearest view of where your data comes from, so you don’t waste time or resources on bogus intelligence from questionable sources.

4. Get creative

Actionable insights derived from social listening are just the start when it comes to truly differentiating your brand. Once your teams have a clear, unified view of the trends shaping customer sentiment, they can start to harness new patterns and make new connections. How do pop culture conversations in Florida tie into your marketing strategy? How might regional news stories in the Pacific Northwest change the way customers receive certain messages? What are Dads in the Midwest talking about as Father’s Day approaches?

A Unified-CXM platform can give you answers to questions you never thought to ask about your brand and help you speak directly to a specific customer in a critical moment. That creates a powerful connection and a positive emotional association. Those can be huge motivators when it comes time to make a purchase or a recommendation. Let AI-powered insights unlock the creativity of your teams in ways your competitors can’t match and your customers can’t miss.

Create unique customer experiences with Sprinklr Insights

Sprinklr’s Sprinklr Insights amplifies the voice of your customers through social listening and AI-driven trend analysis, all in a Unified-CXM platform that provides actionable insights and a clear, consistent view of the conversations impacting your brand.

Sprinklr Insights helps you get the most out of social listening through customizable, scalable trend analysis, with features that include:

• Proactive alerts that utilize AI to detect potential threats to your brand reputation. Because proactive alerts reach beyond the narrow scope of keywords and topics to capture the full spectrum of customer sentiment, you have the intelligence you need to act before crisis strikes.
• Smart trends that put insights at your fingertips in a clean, unified dashboard. Smart trends help you recognize an ecosystem of industry and brand-related themes that might have remained hidden with point solutions.
• Eight layers of Artificial Intelligence, including sentiment analysis, to help you understand the attitudes and feelings of customers on a deeper level than mere mentions.

To learn more about the ways Sprinklr Insights can help your brand excel, connect with us today.

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