How to Grow a Digital Marketing Agency Using Social Listening

The digital marketing industry is rapidly growing, but agencies are still striving hard to survive, retain their clients and expand. There can be numerous reasons behind that.

Digital agencies in the US registered the highest revenue growth in 2021 since 2000. Among the many challenges, the major ones include a shrinking team size trend and more and more businesses switching to in-house marketing.

To counter this, many agencies are opting for automation. With effective automation processes, you can easily overcome the negative impacts of a shrinking workforce.

The Current Trends in the Digital Marketing Industry

Agencies are also experiencing an increased demand for more specialized services, and to meet these demands, they need the right tools to grow and offer a variety of services to their clients.

As an agency, you can't afford to shoot in the dark, as precision, data-driven marketing, and automation have become the industry watchwords.

Social listening becomes an extremely important strategy in the scenario.

Brands have been using social media to market their products and services for a long time because of a spurt in social media usage around the globe. Many brands use social media listening tools to get insights about market trends.

Social media listening tools are also used to formulate content strategy, conduct a comparative analysis, monitor campaigns, boost brand growth and find influencers.

With social listening, agencies can add value to their deliverables and get powerful insights to attract new clients.

Image Source

In generic terms, social media listening has revolutionized the industry by focusing on customer-generated media across different social platforms. Businesses are doing it to forecast market trends and improve their marketing campaigns based on what customers are saying about their brands and products.

It has emerged as a wonderful strategy to analyze social media sentiment and design a robust strategy.

How to Use Social Listening to Grow a Digital Marketing Agency?

As an agency, you can support your existing clients with social listening. You can minimize their efforts and tell them what to do. An in-depth, comprehensive social listening analysis can open the floodgates of valuable data businesses can use to boost their sales and branding.

A mere half an hour of social listening can provide you with so much marketing data that you can gather a lot of input to formulate a robust marketing strategy for your clients. They would be happy to see the quality and relevance of this data.

The Scout Agency's director of social media, Britanny Fryman, says they have registered triple digits growth year after year just by practicing social media listening.

Here are some useful tips for using social listening to grow your digital marketing agency:-

1. Embrace Changes With Dynamic Strategies

The pandemic has shown us how to survive by being agile and flexible.

The market dynamics are constantly changing, and so are the customers' needs. As an agency, you can ensure your success by proactively uncovering those changing needs for your clients through social listening.

It had become even more pronounced during the pandemic when people changed their priorities, and their social conversations provided deep insights into what they were thinking.

To stay ahead of the competition, you should constantly eavesdrop on social media.

L'Oreal, the famous cosmetics company, uses social listening to fuel its product development cycle, according to its senior VP of global open digital innovation and business development, Esohe Omoruyi.

In 2011, L'Oreal needed clarification on which hair product to develop next. The three obvious options were ombre, splat, and tie-dye. They used social media listening to know the most promising trends. Their modus operandi was simple. They performed comprehensive research on YouTube and gathered user-generated content to understand what customers thought about these products.

Image Source

They also invited influencers to help them decide which product to focus on. Finally, with the help of social media listening, and analysis of Google Trends, they went with the Ombre Hair Oil trend. The result was the development of the product L'Oreal Feria Wild Ombre, which became a massive success and is still popular.

Ingredient, the famous food marketing agency, uses social media listening to know what customers are talking about, to stay ahead of the competition, and for lead nurturing.

2. Expand Your Capabilities

Businesses worldwide are using social media listening to get deep insights about their audience and boost their product marketing strategies.

The trend is quite popular in the food and beverages, cosmetic, electronics, and apparel industries.

Pro Tip: You can use DashClicks' white-label fulfillment services to expand your capabilities without hiring an additional workforce. For example, if you specialize in SEO, you can offer content marketing, paid advertising, and social media account management services and diversify your portfolio.

Please watch this video to know more -

3. Create High-Quality Content That Resonates

Since content marketing is extremely effective and the lifeline of marketing campaigns for various businesses, it is crucial to create content that resonates.

Most companies fail at content marketing because they cannot produce high-quality content that their audience loves. 51% of customers are likely to unfollow a brand if it provides irrelevant content.

It has become even more important post-pandemic because people have very less attention span online. Social listening goes one step ahead in addition to your clients' owned channels. It helps you closely monitor your customers' trends and the hashtags they use.

You also know their pain points and how they relate to your brand. It provides a wholesome understanding of how an audience perceives a brand and what they expect. Brands also track mentions of their clients, so they can get accurate data to build their content strategy.

High-quality content is educational and entertaining, and it makes life easy for your target audience by adding value to help them achieve their objectives.

4. Do Performance Tracking of Marketing Campaigns

The success of a marketing campaign is crucial to the satisfaction and retention of clients and, ultimately, an agency's growth. Shallow metrics like engagements and impressions may not be enough to understand what your audience loves.

Image Source

Many businesses have started investing in social listening to improve their campaigns because it provides rich information about their campaign performance and helps them track conversations online.

Social Listening is a boon, especially for large and massive campaigns where tracking becomes almost impossible.

5. Stay Ahead of the Competition Through Social Listening

You can use social listening for various objectives, including product innovation and avoiding potential crises. With the help of social listening, you can identify market trends early on and prevent a possible disaster. It gives you an edge over your competitors.

You can use social listening to monitor brand sentiment to avoid any potential disaster and negative market trends. You can also reduce the impact of negative rumors that can hurt your brand by proactively crafting marketing messages to your clients.

Tips to Grow Your Digital Marketing Agency Using Social Listening

Here are a few tips for growing your agency with social listening:-

• Use social listening consistently and religiously.
• Identify patterns and be ready to go deeper.
• Choose a mix of small and big sample sizes.
• Educate your clients about the effectiveness of social listening and convince them to embrace it, even if it is against their existing views
• Expand social listening to different categories and brands
• Capture the keywords your audience is using.
• Practice transparency with your clients
• Include the trivial things as well in your reports

Final Words

With increasing competition and the fast pace at which market trends change, agencies face multiple challenges. To stay successful and expand your client base, you must evolve your marketing strategies to grow your business against all odds. Use automation wherever necessary, given the shrinking workforce. You can use DashClicks' white-label automation tools for that. Social listening is a powerful practice that every brand should embrace. It can do wonders for your business if you're using the right tools and processes.