Listen Up: How B2B Marketers Are Expanding Social Listening Offline & Beyond

Expanding B2B social listening strategies businesswoman with hand to ear image

How can B2B marketers amp up their social media listening strategy and put it to use in other areas to become better all-around listeners?

Social listening is a vital aspect of modern B2B marketing, providing valuable insight into current and potential future customers, yet many marketers treat it almost as an afterthought.

Fundamental listening skills outside of the social realm are also often given only lip service, leaving B2B marketers plenty of room to purposely hone a winning listening strategy.

Whether online or in person, taking the time to build better listening habits can provide a sizable return on investment, so let’s take a look at five ways to expand your B2B listening ROI.

1 — Amp Up Your B2B Digital Listening First

Before tackling in-person listening improvements, it’s important to make sure that your social media listening efforts are in order, and that you’re doing all you can within each social environment relevant to your organization or brand.

A few areas where social listening may be a good fit include the following:

Established social channels including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram
Emerging online channels including BeReal, TikTok, Twitch, Reddit, and Discord
Research tools and databases including the Internet Archive / Wayback Machine and JSTOR
Search engines and third-party search tools such as Semrush, Meltwater, and BuzzSumo
Question research tools including KeywordTool.io, Answer the Public, and others

When you’re looking to learn exactly what your audience thinks about a particular topic, taking a direct approach with polls either through social media platforms or on a brand website can also help efficiently get the job done. Learn more about the ins and outs of social media polls in our, “Survey Says: 2022 B2B Marketing Insight From Social Media Polls,” and “Social Media Polls For Marketers: 6 B2B Brands Winning With LinkedIn Polls.”

Getting to the heart of the questions most important to your potential audience provides a powerful path to finding best-answer solutions.

To learn more about why question research is such an important facet in marketing, and some of the primary ways to uncover precisely what people are using search engines and other search technology to ask and learn more about, check out our “10 Smart Question Research Tools for B2B Marketers.”

[bctt tweet=”“’Listen’ means much more than hearing with ears. It means to pay attention. Synonyms include observe, be attentive, give attention to, hang on words, and take notice.” — Meryl Evans @MerylkEvans” username=”toprank”]

Not that you’ve put your social media listening house in order, or at least established a framework for making improvements, it’s time to take our listening skills in other areas to the next level.

2 — Put Your B2B Listening Skills To Use Beyond Social

Once you’ve ensured that your digital listening strategies are running smoothly and gathering B2B marketing insight, it’s time to focus on doing the same for all of those non-social interactions we conduct every day, including: