How Can You Grow Your Digital Marketing Agency Using Social Listening?

Building a successful digital agency is easier said than done in the current business ecosystem. Digital marketing agencies have grown the fastest since 2000 in the US. In this article, we will discuss how to grow a digital marketing agency using social listening.

It has become increasingly difficult for agencies to continue to provide long-term value to their existing clients.

As the world is almost past the pandemic and brands are looking at innovative ways to stay relevant in front of their audience, a digital marketing agency needs to continuously innovate and constantly upgrade its social media monitoring.

With brands like Coca-Cola deciding to take their entire marketing efforts in-house, many more renowned brands will likely follow suit. Close to 44% of CMOs are planning to take the function in-house. It will create another layer of competition in the digital marketing industry, where agencies compete with each other and brands to stay relevant.

It has become more critical for brands to have advanced social media monitoring tools that can be considered a competitive advantage in the crowd. Brands have already seen the benefits of technology with the emergence of social media and other digital platforms over the past decades. It is now time to harness the capabilities of technology to develop a unique advantage among other digital marketing agencies.

Several tools and solutions can be added to this mix for expert social media monitoring and analytics, but it also can get overwhelming.

Therefore, get started with the addition of social listening to your list of offerings and use it to drive your client's business and boost the growth of your digital marketing agency.

With increasing social media users, social listening can emerge as the knight in this shining armor to help grow and take your digital marketing agency to the next level.

Here is how you can use social listening to grow your digital marketing agency:

Use social listening for better understanding and targeting.

The use of the latest tools and solutions and the ability to continuously acquire new clients is a parallel rope. As a result, using social listening in your list of services can help you better understand what consumers are saying about the client's business.

The addition of social listening to your list of services will also give you that extra leverage to put your business development on steroids and boost customer loyalty at the same time.

Here is how you can use social listening for better understanding and targeting:

Preview

Social listening can prove to be an effective solution - both for existing and new clients. Once the clients have seen what a social listening tool can do and how it can drive business, it is just a matter of time before they come back wanting more.

Social Listening is useful to acquire new clients and offer an add-on service to existing clients. Once you can build the preview strategy in your agency's working operations, you will likely succeed sooner than later.

For instance, Scout grew their business by triple digits in a year with 15 minutes of preview of social listening capabilities.

Staying competitive

The last few years have been a learning curve for businesses and consumers. It is apparent to all segments that staying agile is the only option to stay competitive.

As a result, it has become important for businesses to understand the changing consumer requirements and respond in real-time.

Social listening helps you get an ear to the ground and focus on changing consumer needs. For instance, when the pandemic struck, a surprising instant boom was felt in segments like baking, indoor sports, home office furniture, and other related home appliances.

The optimal use of social listening during that phase helped several brands understand the changing requirements quickly and respond in real-time to cash in on the boom. As a result, social listening helped these brands to find an opportunity even in such challenging times

Being a digital marketing agency, you need to realize that lack of capability can't be a reason to allow your clients to go to your competition. The addition of social listening skills in your services can be an effective competitive edge. Still, the omission of social listening in your services list can work against the brand.

Nurturing existing clients

Businesses and digital agencies need to use social listening to understand what the existing customers are saying about the brand. As they say, you can only improve what you can measure. The use of social listening in the marketing mix enables the agencies to get data-driven insights with which you can find the missing pieces of the puzzle.

The use of social listening in day-to-day operations helps highlight the right things a business is doing and the areas where it is falling short of customer expectations. This information is critical to improving the customer relationship and continuously innovating to stay relevant.

For example, Ingredient, a food marketing agency, uses a data-driven social listening strategy to nurture its relationship with existing clients. At the same time, it also relies on consistent social listening support to ensure it is on the right track to achieve client objectives.

Use social listening to increase your capabilities and diversify your offerings.

For a digital agency to be successful, it is a good idea to focus on incremental additions to grow business. You can use social listening to increase your capabilities and diversify your offerings. According to a study, 86% of agencies have added a new service in the last 12 months.

Here are some examples of how social listening can help you diversify your offering and increase your capabilities:

Uncovering social trends

The rise of the Kardashian sisters and other key influencers on social media platforms is too big to ignore for a business. Be it the #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt trend or similar hashtags that have real-world business implications. Businesses are better off uncovering social trends using social listening tools.

Helps create relevant content

Creating relevant content is critical, even for digital agencies that operate in a particular niche. Each client's unique audience expects relevant content to be served regularly. According to research, nearly 51% of consumers unfollow a brand if they notice irrelevant content.

As a result, it has become important for digital agencies to use social listening to understand what their audiences are saying on social media in general and not just about their brand. This is helpful information for brands trying to create relevant content. It also helps understand the language and tone consumers are using to connect.

Better tracking of campaigns

The addition of social listening into your offerings can help you get better at effective tracking of campaigns. With the ability to understand the overall conversations on various social channels, you are in a better position to track the performance of your campaigns.

Social listening makes it easier to track brand mentions and the impact they can create on the internet, be it a branded hashtag, an occasion you are celebrating, or a new launch. It is particularly useful to build those ROI reports your clients are always interested in.

Use social listening to stay ahead of the competition.

With the changing business ecosystem and uncertain environment that we live in, it is important to have a strategy that helps you stay ahead of the rest. A digital agency can use social listening to stay ahead of the competition. Here are some ways in which social listening can help you stay ahead of the competition:

Early identification of market trends

The use of social listening in your marketing mix can help you understand the changing market trends fairly early. Be it the trend of sneakers, wearables, fantasy sports, or even air fryers. The brands that could spot the trends at the earliest were better positioned to capitalize on the market trends and create space for themselves in the industry. While social listening alone may not guarantee success, it is enough to give you the best chance.

Better monitoring of brand sentiment and potential crisis

The use of social listening can help you get better at understanding sentiments for and against your brand. At the same time, it also helps to uncover the potential crisis before it becomes too big to handle.

Several brands create a response matrix that keeps crisis management in mind. It works towards early identification and diffusion of potential crisis points. At the same time, it also allows engaging with the existing customers and putting your viewpoint across effectively.

Competitive analysis

One of the best ways social listening helps you stay ahead of the competition is by using competitive analysis. It is equally important to understand consumer sentiment towards your competitor brand and identify opportunities that help you grow your brand.

Most brands use social listening to do sentimental analysis around their brands and leave out the opportunity to grow by finding opportunities around the competition.

How to grow a digital agency using social listening?

Apart from the several insightful ideas shared above, you can take the following actions to enable the growth of a digital agency using social listening:

Opt for regular listening

For a social listening strategy to work effectively, you must take social listening seriously and be more active in the ecosystem. It will help you identify patterns and a baseline for your business and clients.

As you conduct regular activities under social listening, you will be able to go deep into the evident trends and develop insights that help the brand grow quickly. Some brands can find useful insights even with a few mentions. Therefore, opting for regular listening with an open mind is important.

Prepare your clients

Brands need to take inspiration from different brands, verticals, and industries. Most brands are unwilling to go out of their comfort zone to look at what is lacking. Therefore, it is critical to prepare your clients to come across unconventional feedback. 

There is a high possibility of achieving true innovation only when the brand is willing to move out of its comfort zone and look at the various other possibilities it never thought existed.

Start with simple keywords.

There is immense potential and depth in social listening. However, it can overwhelm clients if too much is thrown away too soon.

You must start this journey with simple keywords and start with the social listening journey. As a brand gets comfortable, you can increase the intensity to include keywords and strategies to go deeper to find useful insights for the business.

Conclusion

Building a digital agency in the current business ecosystem requires consistent effort to upgrade the level of service and offerings to the clients. Opting for social listening as part of this mix will help you scale your digital agency faster.

Social listening can sometimes surprise you; what you thought may work may not, and what you neglected can do wonders.

Luckily, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You can start this journey by opting for the right social listening service and providing immense value to your clients to help you grow your agency business.

Our social listening service will help you with prescriptive, predictive, diagnostics, and descriptive analytics. With modern technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and social intelligence, you can build useful insights in no time.  Know more.