Tools for Social listening are here to help you. Have you ever wondered what your brand needs in terms of insights of your target customer? What are they talking about? What are they speaking of?

Or in more detail: Are you a relevant topic in their conversations? Does your brand resonate in their minds as relatable and important? These questions may sound hectic and a burden but with social listening tools your work will be much easier. 

Here in DiHunch, we will tell you how you can benefit from actively searching for information about your brand, your customers, and your competition. All of these can be achieved with a content strategy based on tools for social listening. 

What is Social Listening?

Social listening is an activity on how to be alert to what your customers are asking and what your competition is doing. In other words, a process of collecting data on social platforms. Especially, since your target customer is wired to social media, through Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and so on. 

Those social media platforms are the fuel of social listening tools because it is where you will discover potential clients, future trends and topics, along with such an amount of information for your marketing strategy to rise and shine. 

Why do you need Social Listening tools? 

As we have said before, if you want your services or products to be in the spotlight, social media listening will help you optimize your resources by knowing the right audience and how to address them directly. 

Social listening tools can be a helping hand, when it comes to structuring your content strategy. That’s why we want to give you three reasons why is a good ally to create a powerful content strategy:

• Helps you find and understand your audience and what type of content they would like.

• You can research the tone and voice of your community, and how to appeal to them.

• Last but not least, delineate your business goals, whether is brand awareness, engagement or more traffic to your website.

5 Social Listening tools for Free 

• Buffer  

Buffer has been in business for more than 10 years with over 75,000 customers and the number keeps increasing. They also praise themselves on being salary transparent and being supporters of diversity. 

Buffer is one of the most known tools for social listening and social media with 3 tools that are interconnected. First, you have Publishing, which is about how to “Plan, collaborate, and publish thumb-stopping content that drives meaningful engagement and growth for your brand.” (Buffer, 2021). They work on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, having access to all of them from one dashboard. 

The second tool for social listening is Analytics, the goal is to measure your social media performance by having reports and recommendations that will help you grow your reach, engagements and sales. Therefore, you can track your performance in any of the social medias mentioned before, while also having one dashboard featuring all of them. 

• BuzzSumo

Buzzsumo, as a social listening tool, has four core elements in their platforms. Those key elements are Discovery, Research, Influencers, and Monitoring. 

The first one is content discovery, here you can have content ideas by browsing topics, trends and forums. The platform can show you what’s going down and what’s rising up, according to the Buzzsumo page. They have a Keyword Tool that can generate thousands of keywords. You can access monthly search volume, cost-per-click, search trends and full insights. 

Moving on to the second feature, we have content research with both data-powered content so you don’t have to guess what is popular at the moment, and backlinks, where you can see your competitors’ sites and key domains in your niche. 

What is a content strategy without influencers, right? Or you probably have a hard time searching for the right influencer for a campaign? With this third tool for social listening, in Buzzsumo, you can identify creators and influencers with an engaged audience and an authority on their subject. Whether it is Instagram, Twitter or the web, you can look at metrics of engagement, competitors analysis, and more. 

Here is how it looks like: 

The last tool on social listening is monitoring. Monitoring is the pre-step of social listening because you are looking and gathering the data from mentions, trends and updates as Buzzsumo does. Thus, you monitor your competitors, brand mentions, and industry updates. They even have Alerts as a way to ensure you are getting all the information about your business and other important actors. 

• Mention

As they say in their website, they can help brands and agencies to monitor the web, listen to their audience and manage social media, quite the statement, isn’t it? 

Let’s start with their pricing, they have five different plans, including a free plan which is what this article is about. The free plan comes with monitored networks, ranging from news, forums and blogs websites to social media including only Instagram and Twitter. Moreover, you can have 1 alert and 1 user in this plan with 1,000 mentions and 3 social accounts. If you want to know more, here are all their prices and plans for you to consider as a tool for social listening. 

Their features are Alerts, Monitor, Listen and Publish. In the first one you have access to advanced keyword search in a simplified way. This easy way is based on the capacity of selecting filters to narrow down, whether by source, country, or language. 

Here is a sneak peek:

Monitor comes with knowing what is being said online about a brand or a product, so you will never miss a conversation on reviews or comments from your audience. Listen is their third tool for social listening with the idea of listening and learning from social media data, therefore it is based on an insights-driven strategy. 

The last tool for social listening is Publish, as simple as its name, you can maximize your social media strategy by sharing relevant content for your community, while also building a digital presence on those social media. You can plan and manage posting on social media from one tool, having the perks of scheduling in advance and choosing when you want to publish them. 

• Agorapulse

Agorapulse has a free trial that lasts 30 days that doesn’t require a credit card. Their achievements range from being the #1 social media management solution ranking, above the well-known Hootsuite and Sprout Social web platforms, in terms of social listening tools. 

Agorapulse features are Unified Social Inbox, Intuitive Publishing, Social Listening, and Insightful Analytics.  The first one is managing the chaos that your inbox can become. So, you can organize, manage, and assign the way you like it. 

The second feature is about planning, collaborating, and scheduling content for all your social channels. Here you can optimize, organize, and collaborate with your team. 

In a nutshell, this is what they offer as part of their tools:

As you can see, there is a lot you can do with this tool for your content management. 

Moving on, for more specific tools for social listening we have their Social Listening. No brainy here for sure. As usual the goal here is to discover trends, having insights of your brand, and also of your competitors. The main objective is actively listening to social conversations to stay on top of your brand, your competition and the channels you are using. Then, you can quickly take action and respond via DMs, retweets, replies and more. 

This social listening tool helps you focus on what’s important in Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and Instagram according to your parameters. You can use Boolean operators which are related to the words you are searching by using conjunctions such as AND, OR, and NOT. Thus, narrowing down the terms you are interested in. Other actions of this feature includes labelling important content, whether they are related to posts, competitors, and customer feedback. 

The fourth and last one is Insightful Analytics. Agorapulse focuses on how you can create reports that are beautiful and actionable so you know what is really working or not. Their goal is that you can detect, track, and get recommendations about your next social content move with user behavior data.   

Apart from pinpointing your content on the best platforms for its optimal performance, you can also detect major trends in your social media activity, as you can see in the image, while also measuring your team’s performance. How so? You can easily monitor who, when, how many replies have been made and comments to handle incoming brand conversations. 

If you are hungry for more tools for social listening, visit their comparison of Hootsuite and Sprout in terms of what differentiates Agorapulse from the competition. 

• Talkwalker  

As you can see in the picture, they have a free demo for you to taste what they are up to regarding their services. Talkwalker highlights how they have already helped more than 2,000 companies with their listening and analytics tools, in order to protect their brands, measure their impact and obtain key consumer insights. All of this effort with the goal of driving purchase decisions.

They have 5 different products, which are Analytics, Quick search, Free tools, Paid social, and Social content rating®. We will focus on the free tools you can have access to. 

Talkwalker’s main objective with these free tools for social listening is using monitoring tools to convert real-time customer conversations into what will be your next marketing campaign. How do they achieve that? 

They have two main features for free. The first one is Talkwalker Alerts, and the second is Talkwalker’s free social search. 

Talkwalker Alerts allows you to create an alert about any word that you write on their website, they even tell you they are free and an easy alternative to Google trends, quite the statement, isn’t it? You can even track the mentions of your brand and keywords across the internet. Their search tool’s main focus is Twitter, but they also incorporate blogs, forums, and websites. 

Their second tool for social listening is their free social search. How does it work? You can enter your brand, a company or a hashtag, with the goal of monitoring your campaigns, brand mentions of you or your competition and hashtags for free. 

When they say that an image worth a thousands words, here you have in a nutshell what you can do with their searching tool: 

Little Gift for you

This is a list of the 10 top information you can access when you are doing, actively, social listening and using tools for social listening: 

Final Thoughts

Tools for social listening are everywhere, some are free or are partially free and others are quite expensive. If you are just starting, getting advantages from anywhere you can is a must. But as you scalate in your business and traffic you might find it difficult to monitor and then practice social listening with just simple tools. Our advice is that you should always analyze how your business is growing, what are your objectives and your goals. 

To be constantly upgrading and stepping your game is part of the business world and we know. That is why here in DiHunch we want to give you valuable content and convert that hunch into action.

Don’t hesitate to follow up and start a conversation.

What is a digital marketing funnel?

A digital marketing funnel consists of a top and bottom part, narrowing down as you go deeper into the funnel. The top part of the funnel is wide and open, here is where people are coming in as masses. But as they move forward in the funnel of your digital marketing the number of people shrinks. 

The goal of a digital marketing funnel is to generate traffic that will convert into a purchase, while not letting your customer down, the funnel also works as a way of looking at clients from a loyal perspective. You want them to become advocates of your services, products, and ultimately, of your brand. 
That is why digital marketing funnels are important for your brand strategy and marketing campaign. If you don’t have a way in which your prospects become customers, you will be losing hundreds of leads.

What are the uses of a digital marketing funnel? 

A digital marketing funnel is not just a path for your audience to become solely customers. Although that is what it is for, don’t get muddled into the idea of a simple sales strategy. 

The uses of a digital marketing funnel are directed to what you can obtain from planning and delimiting a sales funnels:

• First, you get to know your target audience in a deeper way. Researching your target customers is a basic step on knowing how to appeal to them. Knowing their pain points, where they struggle and thinking of personalized solutions will get their attention. 

• Second, with that research you can create content that brings value while remaining true to your unique audience. By tailoring your content, you can increase and improve the overall experience of your future customer. Getting to their core and shaking them a little bit without overwhelming them. 

• Third, pointing more with the necessities of a business, a digital marketing funnel will help with your revenues because you are guiding your ideal customer into becoming a paying one, helping your return on investment (ROI). 

How to structure a digital marketing funnel?

In order to have a successful digital marketing funnel you need to establish the model you are going to use, the objectives or structure of your funnel and what type of funnel you will use or even mix them up. 

You may have seen it before, the AIDAA model for digital marketing funnels. It is widely known and emulated across business because it concentrates the core steps of your sales. Therefore the structure of it.

The AIDAA model refers to these five stages:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Desire
• Action
• Advocacy

We will talk more in depth later. The importance of this model is how you will structure your funnel into these seven goals (while focusing on each of the five stages mentioned above). 

• Getting exposure.
• Being discovered.
• Make them consider you.
• Strike a transformation /conversion.
• Build up your customer relationship.
• Keeping your new customers.
• Having loyal customers.

Two types of digital marketing funnels

This is the traditional digital marketing funnel, it is as explained before, quite open in the top and more narrow in the bottom, because of the amount of people starting as possible sales end up with less people converting into purchases. 

The traditional digital marketing funnel is not so different from the AIDAA model because they follow the same logic as explained in the previous paragraph. It is like a journey that just has started, a journey with your whole university class, they are all excited and looking forward to discovering what the journey will bring. 

But as the time passes, the one remaining at your side are your long-lasting friends, the one you have accompanied through hardships and lovely times. The same is for your clients, if you managed to create a relationship with them. 

In the traditional digital marketing funnel people come in and people go out as sales, while retaining is there, as a stage, you need to change the perspective on how to make them come back.

The next type of digital marketing funnel changes that last stage:

In this second marketing funnel, you are looking at a cycle where stages are connected as if they were those infinite Hot Wheels tracks that you played as a child, you were the force who tapped on the button to go faster and faster.

The speed of your car is like the customer’s journey with your product or service. The harder you push the faster it goes but sometimes if you go too fast, a crash can happen. We are not saying that you will jeopardize your customers’ smooth and safe road trip into your products or services. We want to focus on ensuring that each stage is managed in a way that the customer can go as fast as they can into the purchase stage without breaking a leg in the middle of it.

Knowing that, we can know more of the AIDAA model so you adapt it to your business.

Knowing your AIDAA for your digital marketing funnel

• Awareness

In order to attract customers’ awareness you need to prepare beforehand what your content will be and the structure those will be given. How? You ask yourself what will be the problems and solutions your ideal customer will be looking for in Google. Most of the time, questions start with:

1. What is…? 
2. How can I…? 
3. Where can I find…? 

Moreover, in terms of traffic you may want to differentiate between organic and paid. When it comes to a digital marketing funnel most brands combine both in order to gain more reach and, therefore, more traffic. Search engine optimization or SEO comes in handy when you are looking for topics for your content in order to rank higher whenever people are asking a question in Google or another search platform. On the other hand, paid ads such as Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google ads can help you with segmentation of customers depending on demographic characteristics (location, gender, age, etc.). 

In this stage, your market is all the people who don’t know you but are looking to solve a problem they have. So you probably can appear as the solution. 

DiHunch marketing actions: pay-per-click ads (PPC), email marketing, and social media posts.

• Interest

In the interest stage of the digital marketing funnel you have people who already know who you are, and are more willing to click on your link in Instagram so they go to your website, or click on an ad you prepared specifically for them. 

• Desire

The crucial part of this stage is showing information about your product or services, the advantages, how you are better than the competition, how good they can feel with your brand. Most of the time, testimonials or videos showing how to use your product can help your lead to become a purchase because they are creating a sense of trust with your brand. 

Blogs are a must if you want to educate and bring value to your audience, they will feel that your brand is giving them all the solutions they were looking for. 

• Action

In this stage of the digital marketing funnel your objective is to finally have a direct interaction with your lead to convert them into a purchase. Whether you are a service business that wants them to fill out a form, so you later send them emails with more services, or you are a product-based business that wants to sell. In the purchase area, it is advisable to show other products so your customer adds more products, even showing a “hot” product can inspire them to buy before you run out of that product and they will regret it later. 

• Advocacy

So now that they have made a purchase and the money has changed hands, what’s next? Leaving them to their own luck? NO! The process of brand loyalty has started since they have become aware of your business, so now you need to nurture even more your relationship with your customer if you want them to come back. The goal here is to create brand advocates, people who will recommend your product/service to their friends, family, posting a story on Instagram, etc. 

The 3 main components of a digital marketing funnel 

1. Foundation 

As we said before, knowing what you want with your digital marketing strategy is key to knowing how your funnel will work. Are you trying to get more leads? More traffic? Are you holding a webinar so you want to spread the word? Is a new launch of a product coming in a few weeks? A new store is open so you want to high-up that date and prepare momentum so people are eager to go? 

It will all depend on the goal, so you define where your traffic will come from. 

2. Floodgates 

After knowing your objectives, you will need to decide how to attract people. You can use social media marketing, SEO, paid advertising, marketing events as webinars, email marketing, newsletters, a free consultation, talking with a sales person, etc.

3. Sales Funnel

The final component of your digital marketing funnel is the actual sales funnel. As you know, AIDAA model is the most widely used. 

Now that you have your strategy, your goals and your content planned, the next step is ensuring that the lead has a smooth and well-rested journey with your brand. In this case, the movement of the traffic from the top to the bottom is essential. 

Customer’s Journey in a digital marketing funnel

Let’s name our ideal customer Susan. Susan is a middle-aged woman with two children, both boys. She is looking for a jumping bed for their son’s birthday because, guess what, they are twins. 

But you are not selling jumping beds, you are a business dedicated to making huge birthday parties for children. How on earth will Susan know about you? She is in the stage of awareness, she has a problem and she is going to look at Google: “where do I find a jumping bed in…? 

Now, if you have been using SEO for organic research you may have a blog on jumping beds with safety measures and how to find a good provider for that product. Or you have paid Google to appear at the front of that keyword, “jumping beds”. Whatever your strategy, you are now there in the eye of the hurricane.

Luckily, she found your blog because as a mother, safety comes first, she is reading through your blog and then a banner shows up with your service of making children parties with all the safety measures a parent wants. 

She might not go and pay for it, but you are there, in her mind. She continues to look for vendors of jumping beds.

A few days passed, Susan is still busy with the kids, school, being a great mother, etc. But anyone can forget a thing or two, so you pop up in her mind. 

She comes to your website and you have another banner on “last minute services” for a birthday party. You offer a pack with the essentials and because it is her first time she can personalize it to a maximum number of items.

She has already passed the interest and desire stage, now she is in the action stage because you are solving a problem for her. You may not sell your whole package for huge birthday parties but you have already made a connection with her.

You ask for personal information so they know the date, where and the name of the kids. The service goes smooth, all with safety, etc.

After a few days you send via email a questionnaire on “How was your service?”, you can even offer a discount if she pays for the whole package. Even more, now that she is in your database and you know the birthdays of Susan and her children you can plan ahead a personalized birthday package just for her. This is how you prepare the terrain for a new advocate of your brand. 

Ultimate advise on digital marketing funnels 

You may have looked at all these blogs with how to make digital marketing funnels successful and yet, you still struggle because you don’t know at which stage your customers are not landing into your page, or into sales.

At DiHunch, we know the struggle of our clients with knowing how to have a good-structured funnel. So, if you want to have experts on the subject of creating a digital marketing funnel and the strategy for your brand to flourish.

Don’t hesitate to contact us. We are one hunch away!