How to understand billions of consumers
Phill Agnew (@p_agnew)
Director, Product Marketing
Publication date: 1/20/20
Social listening has been the key driver for utilizing consumer opinions to test ideas, make decisions, and ultimately create products and services that adeptly solve customer needs. Doing this at scale to implement change for a company or organization, however, is not always easy.
Companies are committed to developing tools that businesses need to grow larger and faster with customer insights. They zero in on the right kinds and combinations of data, the right features to handle and interrogate data, and the ability to embed consumer insights at the heart of an organization.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is where it’s at
AI is vital for the modern-day analyst. With more conversations comes more metadata, including reposts, replies, follower counts, and so on. With the number of data points rising exponentially, an analyst's job gets exponentially harder.
To be effective, every analyst will need an intelligent AI assistant to scan through huge volumes of data and identify significant trends. They'll need AI to analyze specific conversations to understand what's unique and different. And they'll need an always-on AI-based alert system for notifications around unusual events 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This will allow users to get back to what they’re best at: discovering and sharing insights from data.
Social listening is evolving
Gone are the days that social listening insights stay within the marketing department. Insights aren't just confined to marketing metrics, such as likes or shares, they can instead reveal the true, live thoughts and opinions of the consumers who buy products or services. Therefore, they should be spread across the entire organization.
Most of Brandwatch’s customers analyze conversations from hundreds of thousands of sources, both online and offline, moving beyond simply listening. By implementing technology like Qriously, they're surveying the digital consumer to discover brand preferences, recall, and customer loyalty.
This is why Brandwatch has stopped referring to itself as simply a social listening tool, repositioning it as a digital consumer intelligence platform.
Other predictions for the next decade
Not only will brands need to collect and analyze ever-growing unprompted conversations from consumers, but also prompted views and opinions from billions of consumers across the globe.
It's never been easier to reach your actual customers and survey them on your products, services, and experiences. It feels inevitable that marketers and analysts will soon need to analyze this data alongside social listening conversations to get a holistic understanding of what their consumers really think as well as powerful sentiment analysis.
So, what do we think? A true understanding of your consumer only comes when you both listen to and question your consumers. And AI is going to be your best solution for that.
To learn more about Brandwatch, head to their partner page on partners.twitter.com.
