One benefit by participating in social media is building relationships with your target audience. To build effective relationships, listening is extremely important.

Just like effective relationships in our personal lives, listening is essential.

I too want to build relationships with my target audience, which includes you. So I encourage you to leave a comment at the end of this blog post about building relationships or digital marketing topics you want to learn more about.

Additional Benefits to Listening to Your Target Audience

1. Customer Opinion – Via social media, you can get unbiased opinions and learn about your target audience’s likes, wants, needs, hates, and desires. This information will help you form marketing messages and deliver your target audience’s wants.
2. Potential Leads – Identify members of your target audience and develop methods to establish a relationship and start a two-way conversation with them.
3. Understand your Market – You can stay up to date with your industry and learn about the factors that influence your market. Eventually, you will be able to discover emerging trends.
4. Identify Your Influencers – On average, approximately 1% of a site’s audience generates 20% of all its traffic. By listening, you can learn about the 1%, and you can start building relationships with these influencers.
5. Where does your Target Audience Hangout Online? – What social media networks do your target audience participate in? If you find out where they hangout online, you can start creating content for those specific social media networks.
6. Possible Content Ideas and Formats – What kind of content does your target audience respond to?  By knowing what type of content sparks action with your target audience, you know what kind of content to produce.
7. Keywords Used by Target Audience – What are the words and phrases that your target audience uses when talking about your brand? You can also learn what keywords or phrase are use in their search queries, and this can help you form your keyword strategy saving you lots of time and analysis normally involved in keyword strategy.
8. Target Audience Needs – How can you fulfill your target audience needs with your marketing messages and products.
9. Brand and Products They Use – What brands do they use? what are the similarities and difference to your brand? What experiences do these brands deliver? How can you improve these experiences better?
10. Competitors – Are your Competitors a part of your target audiences conversations?

These are really good reasons to listen to your target audience. Listening can make our digital marketing jobs a little bit easier, so let’s take a look at some tips to make us superior listeners.

How to become and Effective Listener?

1. Don’t Pretend to Listen – If you want your target audience to know that you a really listening, discover what are the best methods to find your target audience and hear what they are saying.
2. Reduce Distractions and Background Noise – Identify the barriers that prevent you from truly listening to your target audience, and remove them.
3. Take the Time to Comprehend What Your Target Audience is Saying – Take advantage of this intel to improve your relationships with your target audience and deliver superior experiences.
4. Respond with Superior Content – Make your target audience indicate that you understand them by delivering superior content and experiences.

Over time, you will refine your listening skills, and you will learn how to take advantage of the information you gain when you listen to your target audience.

In conclusion, it is worth your time to develop methods to listen to your target audience via social media.

In the next social media marketing discussion, I will explore methods on how to listen to your target audience via multiple social media networks.

Until then, I welcome your comments about listening or anything else about digital marketing.

Sources

• Social Media Relationship Skills – Listening (Part 1) from Convert with Content
• 4 Steps to Create a Social Listening Strategy from Social Media Examiner
• Social Selling Action Plan, Part 2: Listen to What Your Industry is Saying from The HootSuite Blog

In Other Social Media Marketing News

• This Week in Social Media : Unlimited Pinterest Secret Board from Social Media Examiner
• How SMBs Use Social Media from Marketing Profs
• 5 Hashtag Tracking Tools for Twitter, Facebook and Beyond from Social Media Examiner
• The World of Social Media Monitoring and Analytics Infographic from Demand Metric
• The Dos and Donts of Creating an Effective Social Media Strategy from CIO Whitepapers
• 10 Social Media Marketing Guidelines from Site Pro News
• How Converse uses social media: Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, Vine, Instagram and Twitter Case Study from eConsultancy