Social listening or the practice of doing research on social media – is squarely positioned under our STORY MAKING phase of our Visual Storytelling Framework:

According to US Bureau of Labor Statistics, half of all new businesses with employees don’t make it to the fifth year. When you dig deeper and look at the high-tech sector we see that 70% of all venture-backed startups are failing. And less than 1% have a chance of becoming a unicorn.

CBInsights, who ran this report also analyzed the reasons for this staggering failure rate and found the top reasons are: the No Market Need (42%), Get Outcompeted (19%), Lack of Business Model (17%), and Poor Marketing (14%).

Translation: businesses don’t know how to vet a compelling business story that resonates with their market [highlight to tweet].

Founders are in love with their product, but their product is connected to a nice-to-have problem [highlight to tweet]. Customers don’t really consider the problem their product solves as a major pain.

And this is where the rubber meets the road for the viability of social listening in crafting a meaningful business story. In our visual storytelling workshops, I can’t stress enough the importance of developing a clear picture of your top buyer persona – the hero of your business story.

The process of developing an authentic buyer persona profile requires you to do a comprehensive research. You can run a direct interview with your customer, probe your sales team, and run social listening.

Regardless if you’re in the Business-to-Business or Business-to-Consumer, at the other end there is a human being you’re trying to improve her life with your product. So think about this as a Human-to-Human (H2H) relationship building. 

The communication reality is that in today’s sharing economy, your audience is freely talking about their pains, interests on social media channels. So, if you’re working on a new product launch, listening to your audience, your competitors, top influencers – will give you an authentic picture about the market state your product is about to enter.

From this perspective, social listening goes beyond marketing. Think of it as a real-time focus group [highlight to tweet]. It always available for you to learn from and optimize your business story, product development, reputation management, customer service, public relations, influencer recruitment, and tips for enhancing your investor pitch.

All these use cases represent different types of business stories with a wide range of emotional triggers. In order for these stories to be effective, they need to function like “mirrors” and authentically reflect the must-have problem your customer is facing.

Why? Because once your customers see themselves in your story, your story becomes THEIR STORY. They empathize with your message, trust your intentions and are more inclined to act on your call-to-action [highlight to tweet].

I always recommend testing your business story with a few customers, tweak and then you can move into what we call Story Visualizing phase where you convert your business story (your big Why) into mini visual stories. This could be video explainer, infographics all the way up to AR and VR.

Once you have your visual stories created, you move to our Story Telling phase, where you develop your content marketing strategy that adapts your visual narratives to the buyer persona, the platform culture (e.g., LinkedIn vs. Instagram vs. offline event) and their stage in the buyer’s journey (i.e., Discover, Consider, Purchase, Adopt, and Advocate).

But the listening never stops.

Because once your visual storytelling strategy is in full motion, you want to continue to monitor the impact of your stories on your audience and optimize on two levels: a) your tactical approach and b) your overall business narrative viability, as market conditions, trends, audience tastes are in constant change.

On October 31^st, I’ll continue discussing this important topic with David Berkowitz, Chief Strategy at Sysomos, the leading social media monitoring platform.

What you will learn:

• Why is social listening vital for crafting a business story?
• What are the core challenges marketers are facing today when researching their customer segments?
• How visual storytelling plays out into social listening?
• 2 examples of successful social listening done right
• 3 basic social listening tips you can apply to your business today

Want to know more?

Awesome! We know you’re busy, so if you simply complete this brief form below, we’ll personally send you FREE the video recording, including the audio podcast of my conversation with David Berkowitz, Chief Strategy Officer at Sysomos on our upcoming Visual Storytelling Today show.

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