How Active Listening Will Help You Grow Your Startup

Active listening in the digital world means monitoring and analyzing conversations around your startup brand, products, services, and even those aspects closely related to your sector. To grow a startup and fill it with success, nothing better than knowing customers’ opinions and what they like and dislike. According to statistics, people tend to hear 25–50% of everything they hear.

In this way, startups have the opportunity to adapt to their needs, improve certain aspects, and reap new triumphs day after day. What is active listening? Active listening is a critical skill for effective communications, and developing this soft skill is crucial for solving problems and growing your startup.

Startups need to uncover customer feedback and use them to improve. According to a study, 80% of your startup’s future profits will come from only 20% of your existing customers. This means that you need to be highly effective in active listening to keep them, and marketing experts have always understood the value of active customer listening.

Customers don’t want you to sell them just one product or service. In fact, according to a study by Wunderman, 79% of consumers said they would only buy from brands that show they understand and care about them. So for startups to truly connect with customers and drive higher sales, they must acquire active listening skills.

Active listening involving your startup’s sales requires your senses and requires paying full attention to what the customer is saying. In short, active listening occurs when your startup establishes a dialogue with your customers, thus generating trust and mutual understanding between your brand and customers. Customers are critical to any business, and what they say can positively or negatively affect your business. According to Hubspot, 76% of customers expect companies to understand their needs.

Increasing customer retention rates by 5% allows increasing profits from 25% to 95%, where active listening is a fundamental element that guarantees a customer’s retention and loyalty since this way communication provides customers with a positive experience with the brand.

Active Listening vs. Monitoring

Active listening can use Monitoring interchangeably; however, the truth is that they are different things. Monitoring refers to the action of using tools to obtain data about a brand. While active listening aims to analyze that data, look for patterns and trends, and above all, conclude. Monitoring is key to an effective engagement strategy. However, analyzing the context and broader trends around those conversations through active listening can provide you with valuable information to speak up and deliver better content to your audience.

Active Listening Tools On Social Networks

When it comes to applying active social listening in your startup, there are specific tools to manage them, which can help you monitor and follow these conversations. Social networks are virtual channels for active listening since, unlike others, communication is constant, generating a large volume of information every minute; this makes them the ideal medium where conversations take place. In addition, the monitoring of certain key elements will allow your startup to follow topics of interest, such as the brand name or its derivatives, names of your products or services, brand names and competitive products, and names of key people.

For this, it is convenient to know your role within the sector, know first-hand who the interlocutors are, and be attentive to the hottest topics. Allows your startup to design messages and strategies that align with your customer conversations that are taking place on social networks.

Active listening is the key to obtaining information and understanding what users think about your startup product, brand, and industry. Active listening tools will give you key insights that can guide and influence your marketing decisions. Ideas you may never have contemplated.

Agora Pulse

From the moment you log in with Agora Pulse, you will be able to monitor what your users say about your brand on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Agora Pulse offers you unlimited users and reports that you can download in PPT format. The best thing about this tool for active listening is that it will help you know which topics best fit your users and the best publication hours.

This tool allows you to carry out content management on different social networks, and you can collaborate with various team members and track the main workflows in real-time. Filter interactions with your brand and actively listen to what they say about it on the Internet.

Audience

Manage the content and actively listen to the conversations generated on Twitter. The audience allows you to know in-depth the followers of your brand, establishing lasting relationships with them.

Perform effective hashtag monitoring and set up rules for automatic responses; use this tool in your web traffic redirection strategy, keeping up to date with all the trends in the sector and offering your audience the content they are actively searching for.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a complete tool for managing social profiles and for active listening within them. Thanks to its distribution of the main panel, it allows your startup to have organized columns and, at a glance, everything taking place in the main social networks of your brand.

From it, you can carry out content programming on social networks and analyze the performance of your startup’s accounts. In addition, it is an excellent option for monitoring and responding to all kinds of comments made by your users, thus improving your startup’s customer service on social networks.

Social Sprout

Social Sprout is a handy tool for active listening that will facilitate your daily work and help you guide your actions to improve your startup’s engagement on social networks. Plan and schedule your content, in addition to responding to your users efficiently.

It has the option to classify the messages received by your audience, being able to manage them more effectively. In addition, this tool will help you to understand better which users may have a particular affinity for your brand, guiding you in the process of turning them into authentic brand ambassadors.

Google Alert

Google Alerts is the most widely used free active listening tool on the web. It will allow you to create alerts every time a user mentions your brand in its search engine. You can also create alerts for keywords or your competition. Any word or combination of words that you want to have control. As simple as entering the comment in the search engine. The best thing about this tool is that it is free. Fill in the fields that it asks for, and it will be ready to analyze.

Mention

The best thing about Mention is it can monitor in different languages. It also has a perfect app to monitor through your smartphone. It is a relatively simple tool with which you can create alerts without a problem. Of course, it has a free and paid trial version.

How Sociable

How Sociable will become your favorite tool to monitor your presence on social networks. It is free and simple; you will not have problems using it. You can track up to 12 profile accounts on social media and include your competition’s profiles to take a look at what they are up to and get ideas.

It is one of the tools for active listening that works best on social networks. Unlike the other active listening tools, How Sociable will present you with all the data and statistics through scores. In this way, you will determine which ones you should continue to keep active or which ones you do not necessarily have to be continually updating.

Advantages Of Applying Active Listening In Your Startup Business

Applying active listening actions will undoubtedly be a differential point when it comes to achieving the success of your online strategy. In addition, discover aspects about the general health of your startup company or product. This is one of the advantages of applying active listening in your startup business.

Why is active listening important? Actively listening to the conversations around your startup, product or service, will allow you to know the feeling that your brand can develop, thus identifying problems and new opportunities in online conversations.

Another advantage of active listening in your startup business is that active listening helps you create the exact content your audience wants by analyzing the problems they complain about and their needs and find weaknesses or errors of your service and helps collect positive feedback that will improve your startup.

One of the advantages of active listening is that your startup can start by identifying the type of content that interests your audience and know how to act quickly in a reputational crisis. Your startup can also find new ideas to improve its marketing campaigns by discovering the feeling that its services generate in the consumers.

Another advantage is that your startup can monitor the competition’s performance by knowing more about its consumers and potential clients to offer them better services. Active listening helps you know what medium your startup’s presence is and how people talk about it.

An advantage of active listening is learning more about your audience and potential customers; active listening can give your startup relevant information about your customers’ expectations. In addition, it allows you to discover the point of the conversation where it is convenient to intervene or establish direct contact.

Another advantage is finding ideas for developing new marketing campaigns. Knowing the needs, tastes, and trends can give your startup precious information that helps generate new successful marketing campaigns. Improve your startup customer satisfaction and increase your fan base by actively listening to your audience’s needs, complaints, and requirements that can help improve your startup’s customer service by achieving a more extensive base of satisfied followers with your product or service. Also, identify potential influencers or brand ambassadors through active listening. Your startup will identify the most relevant influencers in its sector, thus establishing communications with them. In the same way with brand ambassadors, people who already know your startup and like it.

Find out where they talk about your startup, what they say about it by knowing what your target audience says about your startup, how they say it, and in what channels.

Another advantage of active listening is that it facilitates collecting information concerning your product or service, obtaining feedback in real-time, and detecting weaknesses or mistakes. It can also be a great source of information for the development of new lines of business.

One of the most efficient advantages of active listening is monitoring your startup to efficiently and rapidly detect misunderstandings that could cause reputational trouble. Your startup will be able to identify the sources, manage them and even stop them in time. Active listening lets your startup know what is being said about its competition, thus knowing its strengths and weaknesses and establishing specific differentiation strategies. As you have seen, active listening is an essential factor when designing effective communication strategies. Therefore, active listening is essential for improving communication with potential customers, building trust, and designing communication strategies and effective marketing.

Another advantage of active listening is that your startup will evolve hand in hand with users, offering them precisely what they need at all times. This information internally about the rest of the competitors and trends in the sector will become a high-value resource for your brand.

Finally, one of the most important advantages of active listening is that your startup will evolve as a brand according to your potential clients’ needs, offering them more adapted products or services or establishing client/customer relationships more in line with their expectations. Active listening can become a valuable resource for your startup, allowing it to make a difference over the rest of the competitors in its sector. With active listening, it is possible to detect customers’ problems and satisfy their needs to improve the quality of products and services of your startup.

Originally published at https://modernprofessional.co.