The value of listening in B2B branding

We talk a lot about the value of listening in branding. Listening to your internal team to unearth the brand behaviours and internal perception; and listening to your customers to grasp what’s actually resonating in your brand with its buyers. But I’d like to propose that there’s a third dimension of listening that is often neglected in B2B branding: social listening.

What is social listening?

Simply put, social listening is a process for aggregating commentary around a brand on various social media channels and then analyse those comments by a variety of factors; sentiment, demographic, location, etc. The purpose for which being that you can better understand how people think, feel and speak about your brand and therefore anticipate issues and assess opportunities.

As a little joyful active example, I’ve (with help from Martin Hawksey) created little social listening archive on one of my most-encountered brands: Southern Rail. If you’d like to go check out what people are saying about the brand, feel free to take a gander at my Google Sheet here. It doesn’t take look when you’re looking at the archive that there is an overall negative brand sentiment being expressed publicly on Twitter. For Southern Rail themselves, taking all this data and extrapolating the keywords could enable them to prioritise improvements to their customer experience and thus tackle their current brand positioning.

Social listening has been a prime digital marketing, customer service and business development tool within B2C sphere for a while now. In fact, fellow Brighton-born business Brandwatch opened their social media monitoring doors way back in 2007 and are now heralded is one of the most successful local digital exports having raised over $60m in equity funding. Yet, as Brandwatch so aptly puts it;

While business-to-consumer (B2C) companies quickly developed comprehensive social media strategies, business-to-business (B2B) companies, skeptical of the value it can provide to their less public facing endeavours, have been far more reluctant to adopt social.*

What is the value of social listening in a B2B context?

To some extent this ‘social listening’ is an extension of an impulse behaviour that a lot of ‘digital natives’ do without thinking about it. What’s the first thing you do when you encounter a new lead or brand you haven’t heard of before? You Google it. Or perhaps, like me, you look them up on Twitter. And herein lies the magic.

In a world of peer influence and social networks, finding out what the crowd says about a person or organisation is often perceived more authentic than what that company says about itself. That authenticity of brand is transforming our relationships with, and expectations of, businesses across the spectrum. Crucially, that experience doesn’t draw distinction between B2C and B2B — some would even say that we’re entering a H2H (human to human) marketing era. Recognising that at the end of the day, we’re all just finding better ways to communicate to each other, and the businesses we work for are just the tribes we’re operating within.

We work with a lot of clients in the built environment sector — from construction to landowners, interior fit-out and real estate — clients who are firmly operating in a traditionally ‘business to business’ context, yet whose work is often engaged with by thousands of real life human beings on a day to day basis. In our early stages of assessing their existing brands, we use social listening to gain an insight into the wider conversation happening around their brand. If you’re an interior fit-out company, it’s often very rare that you get to engage with the feedback or day-to-day realities and experience of your finished product. Instead, you’re often measured by your direct client on your efficiency and quality of work at the point of delivery. Through using social listening, you can tap into that legacy of your work and feed it back into the organisation, revealing whether or not there is a disconnect between the immediate and long term experience of a finished piece of work. Does the building fall apart after a year? Or do people continue celebrating their new space for years to come? Does the project suddenly have a spike in social mentions? What are people really saying about the product or service you’re delivering?

These questions present an opportunity to address the positioning of your brand; to make improvements to your product, reputation or culture: the triforce (Zelda reference, meaning ultimate power) of a strong brand.

Is it really useful?

Social listening is really about using the wisdom of crowds to gain data-driven insights into the opportunities and challenges around your brand. If you’re considering a marketing campaign around one of your recent project launches, but your social media monitoring is telling you that everyone is talking about a completely different project you’re going to be wasting time (read:money) and energy fighting against the crowd rather than building on an organic conversation to amplify your brand message.

Going back to the Southern Rail example, you can also use social listening as a tool for gaining insight into the public conversation your team are having about your business. In the case of Southern Rail, they can assess how best to improve the relationship they have with their most vocal staff… Now that’s a fairly negative example but, for balance, another business I monitored had thousands of on-site employees tweeting selfies with buildings they’d constructed — a grassroots social media campaign that actively showed proud people voluntarily celebrating their work. Management, meanwhile, had no idea this was going on.

If there’s anything I’ve learnt from the Buzzfeed revolution, it’s that we all like lists. So here’s a list of what I think you can broadly gain from social listening:

• Understanding how your audience interact with your business, what the legacy of your product/service is with that audience and their expectations of your business
• Employee engagement
• Competitor analysis
• Lead generation — are there particular users or influencers that are engaging with your brand on a regular basis? Are there opportunities to expand your brand conversation within specific locations or target markets?
• Identifying brand advocates, inside & outside your business

How does this fit all into branding?

As I mentioned before, brand is what is created when you align culture, reputation and your product / service. As brand-guru Robert Bean puts it, it’s the single organising principle. Misalign one of these factors, and you dilute the strength of your brand.

For us at Pixeldot, social listening is part of our temperature check at the beginning of a rebrand project, but it’s also a key element of brand guardianship; enabling us to ensure we’re working closely with our clients to build a holistic picture of their brand.

About Pixeldot

At Pixeldot, we’re working with our clients to create brands that align culture, reputation and their product / service; empowering them to unleash their potential and access new opportunities. If you want to talk to us about creating, or discovering your brand thread, or our brand guardianship services then come and book an office hours session with us for a chat.

*Citation: https://www.brandwatch.com/reports/b2b-social-media-report/