If you’re new to Social Listening Marketing you may be wondering “How do I get started!?“
We spent the past 3 years using Notifier to market Notifier
The funny thing is that we didn’t even really try that hard. Notifier was just one of the side projects I was working on and for a lot of that 3 years it wasn’t my primary focus. But through consistent commenting on Reddit posts/comments that Notifier found we were able to build a small but loyal (and paying) following.
More importantly, during that 3 years we have learned 4 primary strategies for marketing your own brand, tool, startup or company using Social Listening.
Well, we did manage to grow Notifier from 0 – Thousands of users in 3 years without really trying!
And that was by just using Reddit. Imagine if we had been using multiple platforms! In case you do not know Notifier’s history we use to be called “Notifier for Reddit” and we were a Reddit-only tool.
But don’t just take our word for it you you can actually check out our page on Customer Testimonials to see what other users think!
Social Listening is just one the channels you need to use to market your product…
We are not going to lie to you. Social Listening is just ONE of the channels you need to effectively market your product.
You can actually read our article on How to Market Your Startup if your interested in learning what the single most effective marketing channel is. You may be surprised to know it’s not social listening. Well, not long term.
Okay so now let’s get to those strategies…
The 4 Social Listening Strategies
1. Search for mentions of your own product.
Chime in and connect with customers and get feedback.
2. Search for mentions of your competitors
Mentions of your competitors. Respond and gently market yourself as an alternative to try.
3. Search for keywords your potential customers might mention
You can see an example of how I did this here.
I had a Searcher setup to monitor Reddit for mentions of marketing and saas in the same comment or post. This comment matched and I read the comment and found a good opportunity to mention social listening as a possible marketing channel:
Be casual and helpful, not spammy
So once again, if you look at my comment above, I do not just spam the user with a comment like try “Try Notifier.so MOFO!“
Instead, I simply gently ask him if he has thought about using Social Listening as a marketing channel. Then when he asks me to expand I provide more helpful information but I do not hard-sell.
Never hard sell
And check the yellow box. A very effective technique (though you have to mean it like we do) is to let the customer know what you want to help them regardless of whether or not they use your product. NEVER hard sell!
Present your product, tell them what it does and how it can help. Let them know you are standing by for any questions. And mean it.
Meaning it is the key. We are Notifier.so are here to help you and us effectively market our products in an industry dominated by huge players that have the dollars for huge advertising budgets.
If you ever need help, want to chat about strategies, or even just want to share some dog pics then feel free to reach out to us on our chatbox or email us at [email protected]!
4. Try monitoring all posts in potential high value communities of your niche
So this is an advanced technique that can really take some work but can be amazingly effective.
It can also be a great way to find the keywords you need for technique #3 above when you are new to the community and do not know what someone may be searching for that could be of value to you.
An Example of ours
We are obviously a product that is targeted towards start ups and other SaaS products. Because of that I set up a searcher that notifies me of all new posts in the subreddit by using the * operator in the search string field.
And then I setup a specific subreddit to include results from:
What this means is that I will now get notified of all new posts in the subreddit r/startups.
Now, I can watch this subreddit and I will be notified when new posts occur.
Keep in mind you only want to do this probably in two cases:
- When you are new to a community and want to look at every post to find keywords your customers might mention
- When the subreddit is so specific to your niche that every post that occurs is a potential opportunity to market yourself.