Providing a Superior Experience – Staying Ahead of the Curve

Over the past few months, we’ve rolled out a number of reports examining the many opportunities and obstacles specific industries face in social media.

While each industry is unique in many ways, one trend we’ve noticed across industries is that customers strongly prefer a superior experience.

Indeed, a better experience with a product or brand has been cited as the single greatest factor influencing a shopper’s impression of a brand, and even lets brands charge premium prices.

Really, this is completely expected.

Yet what exactly defines a superior experience and how brands can create that for a consumer is far more complex and specialized between industries.

These in-depth sector analyses have exposed just how specialized each industry’s social media needs are. The way financial institutions engage customers is different from that of airlines. How household brands use social media to perform market analyses is unique to how hotels are doing it.

For example, airlines’ Twitter accounts are often among the best managed and most responsive to customer complaints. Today airlines without a vigilant social media presence run the serious risk of having public complaints unanswered – leaving the customer disgruntled and outside viewers discouraged.

Yet have these brands been reactive rather than proactive about their social media strategies?

In other words, did they develop these well-managed accounts because they foresaw an opportunity to provide quicker, more personal customer service or did their consumers force them into action?

This field is still quite nascent and the business applications of social media are not fully understood. Yet proactive brands that are recognizing and even developing innovative ways to apply social media strategies are reaping the significant early benefits.

In the recent Household & Personal Care Goods report, we identified how social media can be used for in-depth market research to compare how one brand’s reputation differs against that of competitors.

Brands with a strong digital intelligence are way beyond analyzing the volume of total mentions against that of their competitors. They are breaking down conversations in unique ways that uncover real ideas and create insights that inform definitive action.

While traditional brands hold onto an outward model, with engagement and advertising at the forefront, many brands recognize that the inward potential from the vast amount of social media data available.

via Business 2 Community http://ift.tt/Tkfsau