Creating a digital brand strategy through qualified social listening

The use of monitoring techniques is a key mechanism for knowing and understanding – from the analysis of data extracted from social networks – the state of a brand’s health. The knowledge and information obtained can be useful to design product-marketing activities; to define the strategic lines of communication; or to provide guidelines for the digital transformation (Article in Spanish) of a company.

Pepa Romero, in a recent post, identified five steps that enable the development of a digital strategy through social listening, and which, at Territorio creativo, we consider essential to successfully tackle any project.

What are the concrete benefits of monitoring?

• Identify points of contact between the consumer and the brand, in order to build a Customer Journey.
• Detect new trends in consumption habits or consumer behavior.
• Develop new creative lines that enrich content.
• Innovation in the development of products and services.
• Glimpse the topics that are becoming culturally relevant.
• Verify whether the brand’s users perceive its values.
• Analyze the sentiment in conversations.
• Locate people and communities representative of, and of interest for the brand.
• Characterize the key attributes of each community, in order to undertake effective campaign segmentation (demographic, social, geographic, psychographic, etc.).
• Determine the platforms where the most significant interactions are produced.
• Measure the reach and impact of actions and campaigns implemented.
• Determine the share of voice and the positioning against other competing brands or companies.
• Program alerts and agile response protocols before events of situations that are detected on social media.

An example of the application of this methodology: IKEA

The IKEA case, which Territorio creativo participated in, shows us how, through monitoring, it is possible to convert the data obtained from mentions into information, and information into knowledge, and knowledge into actions to implement.

The challenge

The challenge faced by the Iberian branch of IKEA lay in defining the strategic lines along which to develop the identity and relationship model of the brand in the digital environment. To face this challenge, it was necessary to undertake prior research and analysis of all social media mentions (compiled over several months).

The key aspects of the monitoring involved determining:

• The perception that people have of the brand;
• Their digital presence on social media;
• Their communication style;
• The values associated with the brand;
• The communities that emerge around generated content;
• The “viralization” of their campaigns and the degree of reach in the target communities;
• The authors that lead the conversation;
• The sentiment of conversations;
• Customer experience and the mentions that emerge along the customer journey and the services provided by IKEA;
• The presence of employees in the digital realm and their roles.

The methodology

The tool that we rely on to carry out the analysis and obtain the insights that helped us define the strategic lines of action was Brandwatch. The functionalities provided by this platform – including the establishment of different levels of categorization of the mentions; cross-segmentation abilities, and the analysis of indicators from various viewpoints – were crucial to tackling a study of more than 90,000 mentions.

Additionally, the interactions and the content generated on existing digital channels were analyzed; interviews with people from different departments were conducted, in order to identify the sorts of challenges that were likely to arise before a new digital strategy; and reports on perceived future trends in the retail sector were studied.

The conclusions

The result of the analysis allowed us to define the human dimension of IKEA, content to improve it, the level of knowledge of users who interact with the brand, and the tools necessary to enhance it. Additionally, we detected the main authors that talk about IKEA, as well as the most relevant communities – valued by potential customers – that trigger and activate these discussions. Finally, we defined where and how to improve the customer experience and what new platforms of interaction would be explored.

The details of the project and the main findings can be seen in the case study published by Brandwatch: “Creating a digital brand strategy through qualified social listening.“