Before you create a plan to increase website traffic, listen to the needs and wants of social influencers in your market, your existing customers and your potential customers.
Attracting Social Influencers
Social influencers have followings and garner respect for their knowledge, opinions and advocacy. They include journalists, authors and bloggers who write about specific topics of interest in the market. The information they require about your product, service and company allows them to share information through a range of media, like articles, podcasts, videos, blog posts, interviews and comments that valued audiences follow.
Creating Customer Advocates
A company’s customers and potential customers also have information needs that may differ from those of social influencers. Potential customers may require information concerning product care, serviceability, maintenance, availability, pricing and operation. Existing customers may want to voice suggestions for new products and product features. Generally, a company’s customers are more committed to your product than non-customers.
By listening to customers and then delivering more value than customers expect, you stand an excellent chance of building customer advocates. Customer advocates increase business by generating value testimonials, ratings, comments and references that create new customers.
Success in business today requires that companies follow successful social media strategies. A successful social strategy requires companies to listen to their customers, customer advocates and industry influencers. This listening requires social listening, or staying alert to customer and influencer communications made in person, during phone calls, in e-mail messages, and through online media.
Listening to Global Audiences
Since today’s global business environment is multilingual, listeners must also be skilled at listening to non-native English speakers. The attached infographic provides some simple suggestions. When language barriers exist, it’s best to consult with a profession translator or interpreter.
Strengthening Your Brand
By listening to your customers and influencers, you can gain a good understanding of the types of information to share and solicit. With comprehensive information, you can improve your value proposition, increase your traffic, collect more likes, and gain more followers and advocates.
This article was very helpful to me, not only do I struggle with not interrupting in my everyday conversations, but I also hope to launch my own blog later this year. The tips for listening to non-native customers were useful since I hope to be able to communicate with customers through my blog. Now I have some knowledge to put to use and better communicate through my blog and social media platforms. ( This also serves as a reminder to be more patient and not interrupt in my everyday conversations)
As an office manager this was very helpful and this article gave me key points I would love to use in upcoming meetings. We sometimes provide services to customers that are ESL and I really need to work on being patient and ensuring that I understand their needs correctly. Thanks for the tips!
Sincerely, every business that desires increase should read this. It’s really a helpful one. Thanks for making it so simple and straight forward. I think the part I really need to work on myself now is listening to non-English speaker.
Thanks once again for the help.
Better products and services are developed from attentive listening to what clients, customers, and audience of such product or service says. From there, it’s becomes easy to figure out what they really want and how to satisfy them better. So good to read through this piece. Thanks a lot!