7 reasons why an e-commerce website needs social listening tools

You are starting an e-commerce business and want to figure out what people are saying about your brand and products. You also want to find out information about your competitors and know if relevant conversations are happening around your brand in your market. This is when you will find social listening tools to be extremely helpful. Three different types of tools will get you all the insights you need to make your e-commerce website gain more traffic and ultimately attain more conversions for your business growth. In this article, you will learn the seven reasons are why e-commerce websites need social listening tools. Before diving into the seven reasons, first, you need to understand what social listening is, what social listening tools are, and what the three different types of social listening tools are.

What is Social Listening?

To get a brand recognized and become famous, these days, you need to use social media marketing and have social influencers represent your brand so that people will buy into your brand. In fact, you probably already have either a personal account or a business account on one of these platforms. You might use Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or TikTok as a social media platform. When you use a social account to gain traffic to your e-commerce website, you need to gather data and insights about your followers and users. Using and analyzing data about your followers and customers is considered to be social listening. To collect this data, you will need to use social listening tools. Therefore, social listening tools are necessary for gaining traffic to your e-commerce business websites and increasing your conversion rates.

What Are Social Listening Tools?

According to Synthesio.com, a social media monitoring (or listening) tool is software that monitors and analyzes online conversations about your brand, a specific topic, your competitors, or anything else that’s relevant to your company. It pulls in mentions of specified keywords and helps marketers analyze these mentions. It doesn’t just measure social media; it’s able to pull in posts and comments on blogs, forums, and websites where the information is made public. With many mentions and insights, social listening will help you track how well your company is doing and what your consumers think of your brand.

Types of Social Listening Tools:

There are three main types of social listening tools. Each of the tools is used for a different purpose and insight. According to Unmetirc.com, the three types of social listening tools include the following types of platforms:

1. Listening Platforms

These platforms monitor many different social listening platforms to find out what’s being said about your brand. Listening platforms allow you to gather information on the latest industry news and trends. One example of a social listening platform is Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The data you gather will help you when you need to plan and create content. If you know what’s relevant to your audience and what they care about, it will be easier for you to create content relevant to them. To get a fuller understanding of the industry, you’ll need a complete competitive analysis, so you will also need to use the following two types of social listening platforms.

2. Competitive Analysis Platforms

This type of platform contains social analysis tools. These tools help you gather information on brands and industries. You will be able to track metrics that are relevant to your business. This includes analysis on first-touch, multi-channel, content, and timing. Most importantly, you’ll be able to analyze your competition’s content.

3. Native Tools within Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms also have built-in analytics tools all ready for you to use that are free. For example, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and TikTok have tools to see who your audience is, how many followers and likes you have, clicks to your website, and more.

Seven reasons for using social listening tools

Now that you understand the two types of social listening platforms, we can dive into the seven reasons why an e-commerce website needs social listening tools. Social listening tools are helpful in many ways. According to Synthesio.com, they can help you track brand intelligence, find influencers, measure campaign impact, develop your product, competitive benchmarking, improve customer relationships, and keep track of trends for you.

1. They can help you track brand intelligence.

Learning about what your customers and followers think about your brand will allow you to focus on your efforts more efficiently. When you know your customers, you will know what they want and need from your brand. This will help you shape the image of your brand.

2. They can help you identify influencers.

By identifying influencers in your niche market, you will be able to work with them to help influence potential customers and increase your brand’s image. Influencers can help you convince potential customers that your brand and product are worth looking into and buying. By using social listening tools, you will be able to find out which influencers will be the perfect fit. And also be able to help to elevate your brand’s image.

3. They can help you measure campaign impact.

By evaluating your marketing campaigns, you will be able to measure your return on investment. You can use social listening platforms to measure how your brand awareness has improved, and the number of mentions following a campaign has increased. This information will tell you what your customers thought about the campaign contents and in which ways it impacted them. Knowing this will help you create more effective campaigns in the future.

4. They can help you develop your product.

Social listening tools help you understand your customers better. These tools allow you to track positive and negative feedback from them. In turn, you can figure out what your Research and Development team should focus more on. This will lead to a better product and increase your overall business.

5. They can help you benchmark your competitors

According to the co-founder of Reddit, Alexis Ohanian, “The way you treat your users or customers, and how you personally present yourself through social media, is a way to differentiate yourself from your competitors.” Knowing your competitors is essential in having a competitive advantage. To understand your competitors better, you need to also know how consumers view them. You can get these insights by using social listening tools. These tools will allow you to set your prices and control your release dates. This will, in turn, create a more competitive landscape for your company and brand.

6. They can help your customer relationships improve.

Bryan Eineer, CEO of Comscore, said, “Social marketing eliminates the middlemen, providing brands the unique opportunity to have a direct relationship with their customers.” You can improve your customer relationships once you understand their pain points. Social listening tools can give you insights into them. For example, maybe you will find customers complaining about shipping issues, or they cannot contact you quickly. Once you have this information, you will be able to transform your customer service so that your customers will continue to return, and you will also gain more traffic to your eCommerce website. Understanding your customers and empathizing with them will improve your customer relationships.

7. They can help you keep track of trends for your business.

Market trends can make or break your business. Social listening tools can help you keep on top of the trends so your business does not fall behind. The insights you gain from social listening tools will help you analyze how and what actions to take next. For instance, imagine that you own a shoe store and find out that running marathons have just become extremely popular, then you can focus your business on selling more running shoes and make ads focused on running. When you analyze the conversations around a specific product or brand, you will then have the ability to control your marketing strategy and increase sales.

Final Thoughts

The above seven reasons why an e-commerce website needs social listening tools prove how important it is to start using them. In fact, an e-commerce business must know how to use social listening tools and apply the insights you gather from them to drive customers to your website. According to Ryan Holmes, Founder, and CEO of Hootsuite, “By monitoring the activity taking place on social networks, retailers can amplify successful marketing and sales strategies and avoid weak tactics which can later be tied back to organizational objectives.” Therefore, the insights you gain from using social listening tools can be invaluable depending on how you use them. Use the insights you gain from social listening tools to have conversations with your customers, understand the market trends, know your competitors, and ultimately drive traffic to your e-commerce website and increase your overall revenue.