How to Shorten Customer Acquisition Process with Media Monitoring?

Due to the development of digital marketing and immensity of marketing channels and techniques, traditional sales techniques are not enough. Now, people want to feel valued, be a part of a specific community, and get served fast and professional. So, if you want your customer acquisition strategy to succeed, your job is to get the right message to the right person at the right time.

In this text, I’ll tell you how media monitoring tools like Brand24 can help you to shorten this process by extracting your potential customers who may be interested in your products or services.

But, does social customer acquisition work?

According to research provided by LinkedIn, 78% of social sellers outsell peers who don’t use social media.
What’s more, social sellers make 45% more sales opportunities, and they are 51% more likely to hit quota.

Stages of Customer Acquisition

Customer acquisition is a long and complex process, but thanks to media monitoring you can make it way shorter.

Now, let’s go through the stages of the traditional customer acquisition process, and then I’ll show you how can you shorten the process with media monitoring tools.

Awareness

This is the first stage, where people become aware of your business. Usually, at this stage, people discover your business through a blog post or other content.

At this point, the potential customer doesn’t always look for any specific solutions and may not even be aware of the problem your business is solving.

Engagement

At this stage of the customer acquisition process, when potential customers start regularly consuming your content. They also may subscribe to your newsletter, download some of your content, and visit your social media profiles more often.

In this phase, they are more aware of what you do, what problem does your business solves, and may begin questioning themselves whether this problem also affects them.

Exploration

At this point, potential customers know that they have a problem, and they begin to look for solutions. However, before the purchase, they do the research.

At this stage, they will visit your pricing page, may ask you for more details about your product or service, read some other customers’ opinions about your brand, etc.

If they make sure they can trust you, they’ll sign up for a trial account (for example, if you run SaaS business), or order your products to try.

Conversion and retention

Now, your potential customers have fully explored your offer, and they became paying customers. Now, your job is to make them sure that your products or services meet their expectations, and the customers will stay with you.

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As you see, the process is long and requires a lot of time and effort to succeed.

But, thanks to media monitoring tools, you can directly approach people who are looking for the products or services that you provide.

And do it exactly when they need you.

So, we are coming back to what I told you at the beginning of this text:

get the right message to the right person at the right time.

How to Acquire Customers with the Help of Media Monitoring

Now, when you know four stages of the traditional customer acquisition process. Now let’s find out how media monitoring tools can help you speed up this process.

Thirst thing you need to do, to speed up your customer acquisition process through media monitoring tools is to set up a media monitoring project for your brand on one of these tools.

I’ll show you how it works in Brand24.

First, create your trial account on the platform.

It’s free for 14 days. And no credit card required!

Then, choose the keywords you want to monitor. In this case, I’d recommend you to type keywords like:

• Your brand name
• Your industry name
• Your product name
• Your branded hashtag

The last step is to choose a language of mentions, you want to collect. Of course, the tool will collect only mentions containing your selected keywords.

Voila!
Your project is ready.

Now, let’s take a closer look at how can you use media monitoring to speed up the customer acquisition process.

Find out where your customers are

Even the best strategy, content, or any marketing initiative won’t work out if you don’t approach people who may be interested in your products or services.

So, the first thing you should do to acquire new customers is to define where they are.

I think we can all agree that promoting your business on every social media platform, forum, or any other marketing channel that exists (regardless of whether your target group is there or not) is pointless and wastes your time, money, and effort.

Remember the golden rule – less is more.

If you are planning a new customer acquisition campaign, find out on which social media platforms people are talking about your business.

And here comes the media monitoring.

Thanks to media monitoring tools such as Brand24, you can see, on which platform your products or services are most popular.

Take a look at “Mentions by category” in the Analysis tab.

Here you have a graph and stats showing the total number and percentages of mentions containing your keywords on each social media platform.

Tip: Find out which media platforms are best for your business and choose the three most active channels.
Thanks to that, you’ll be able to focus more on the quality of the content and your audience.

Keep your ear to the market – respond to queries related to your business

One of my favorite features and media monitoring tools like Brand24, and their great advantage at the same time, is the ability to react to the mentions about your brand quickly.

If you find mention when somebody asks for help and it’s related to what your business does, react!

In the Mentions tab, you have a list of latest mentions (or most popular, it depends on how you’ll sort them) containing your keywords.

If you find some query and you see that your business can fulfill the need of the asking person, react to this mention.

Just like here:

Use the search engine

Ok, but how to find these queries I’ve described above?

I know that reading every single mention to find those with a question about your product or service can be a time-consuming task, but, in fact, there is no need to do it.

Thanks to the search engine in the Mentions tab, you can browse your mentions more thoroughly.

To look deeper into your project, you can use the following operators:

{AND} – for example, if we write “Brand24 {AND} price” the tool will find mentions containing words “Brand24” and “price.”

{OR} – for example, if we write “Brand24 {OR} media monitoring,” the tool will find mentions containing the phrase “Brand24” or “media monitoring.”

{NOT} – for example, if we write “{NOT} <keyword you want to exclude>” the tool will show you mentions without the excluded word

{IS} – it narrows down the results to mentions containing a precisely specified word, for example with “{IS} red” the tool will find all mentions containing “red” but not “Redbull.”

Also, you can combine these operators. For example:

“Tablet {AND} {NOT} laptop – in this case, Brand24 finds mentions containing the word “tablet” but no “laptop.”

What’s more, media monitoring tools like Brand24, give you the ability to react to the mentions by redirecting you to the source of the mention from the tool.

If you find a mention you want to respond to, click on the “Engage” button.

The tool will automatically redirect you to the source of the mention, and you can start the conversation with the author.

Take care of your brand reputation

Nowadays, the customer’s trust is one of the most important factors that influence your business’ success. That’s why you should pay special attention to your brand reputation management.

A positive brand reputation is essential for your business because it evokes customers’ trust in your brand.

When people trust you, they are more likely to choose your brand instead of competition; it’s as simple as that.

Tip: You need to remember, that a positive brand reputation requires some effort. Check out the video prepared by Chia, where she presents 10 ways to protect your brand reputation:

In the era of social media, when people can say whatever they want about you, you have to monitor what’s being said about your business on the Internet.

Sentiment analysis will be helpful in this case. Thanks to that feature, you can filter the mentions for their emotional charge.

With the use of natural language processing (NLP), a sentiment analysis filter can determine whether the mention is positive, negative, or neutral.

Here is an example of positive mention:

And here is an example of a negative mention:

It allows you to pick up negative opinions about your brand and react to them, clearing-up the misunderstandings.

It also positively affects your brand reputation. If you can admit that you’ve made a mistake, apologize for that, and maybe give something for a reward, people will value that.

Remember, everybody makes mistakes. The most important is how will you behave in the crisis.

Learn more: If you want to expand your knowledge about brand reputation read this post.

Also, find out how to deal with negative reviews by reading this post.

Build an Online Community – Good Practices

As content marketers, we use to say that content marketing is 20% creation and 80% promotion and distribution. There’s a similar rule refers to social customer acquisition:

80% community and 20% sales

The most important thing is to stay patient. Building a community around your brand isn’t an overnight process. I hope it’s obvious for you.

Imagine the situation: Would you be able to make a new best friend in a week? Especially if you were constantly trying to sell him something?

I guess not.

Building an online community around your brand is all about building real relationships.

If you’d like to improve your knowledge about community management and find out how to get 650 leads in one month from just Quora alone, watch the video below:

Learn more: Find out how to build an online community by reading a blog post prepared by our Community Manager – Kuba.

Conclusions

To sum up, media monitoring tools can be a powerful weapon in the customer acquisition process thanks to its features and pieces of data they collect.

Having a knowledge on which social media (and not only social media) platforms the buzz around our business is the biggest will help you to choose which platforms you should focus on while promoting your business.

By responding to queries related to your business, you not only show people that you deliver a product or service they look for, but also that your goal isn’t only to get paid, but also to solve their problems.

And you know how to find them what makes you more close to your potential customers.

Thanks to media monitoring tools like Brand24, you can easily find those queries by using the search engine and browsing the mentions more thoroughly.

Also, media monitoring tools allow you to monitor your brand reputation and quickly react to what’s being said about your brand. Especially in the case of negative reviews.

Thanks to sentiment analysis, the tool will show you whether the mention is positive, negative, or neutral. Also, it will show you the percentage of positive and negative mentions.

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