The world is navigating uncharted territories due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past few months, businesses have had to deal with a shift from the traditional office lifestyle to remote working. In addition to making adjustments regarding work, businesses currently face a challenge with changes in consumer behaviour.
At this point, it has become imperative for businesses to modify their process of listening and understanding their customers by doing the following:
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Set up a Growth Strategy
The pandemic has caused deep-seated changes in consumer values, habits, consumption patterns and spending behaviours. To stay relevant and on top of their game, companies need to be in tune with their customer’s expectations. This can be achieved by setting up a growth strategy focused on what they should do now and beyond the pandemic. A functional growth strategy should be a careful fusion of both short-term plans and long-term projections.
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Maximise Analytical Tools
Analytical tools such as Keyhole, SproutSocial, and Social Bakers are helpful for monitoring your audience, learning how to engage them, monitoring the trends on social media and understanding consumer behaviour. Tools such as Social Mention enables you to measure the strength, sentiment, and reach of your business. With these tools, you can gain insights and use findings as applicable to your business.
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Adopt the Use of Feedback Forms
With social distancing measures becoming a growing approach globally, the use of focus groups for feedback and sentiment research is no longer optimal. Adopt individualised feedback using tools such as Google Forms and Survey Monkey. This helps the business to understand the needs and interests of the customers and refine products to solve a problem.
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Audit Brand Communication
Another thing companies can consider in order to understand their customers is to rapidly audit their brand communication across paid, owned and earned channels to review their engagements. Since everything is done online, it would be essential to learn new ways of serving consumers through virtualized services.
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Use Self-Service and Automated Sales Channels
We are on the path to a new normal, so digital marketers are concentrating efforts on converting online audiences. With this, more focus has been placed on accelerating the use of self-service and automated sales channels to increase margins while maintaining high-quality customer experience.
Incorporating the above points into the activities of companies will enable companies to build lasting and meaningful relationships with consumers and bounce back from the fallouts of the pandemic.