Tasked with providing products and services that are ‘better than yesterday’s best’ is where most CPG brands find themselves living these days. And we see many of these brands consistently clearing that hurdle thanks to customer experience (CX) analytics informed by Next Generation Artificial Intelligence (AI). Here’s how you can join their ranks!
Using AI to Connect the Dots
AI offers CPG brands the ability to understand precisely what consumers are talking about and which information requires action. More specifically, it uncovers key competitive intel, including:
- Share of voice – where brands stand and how to capture a larger chunk of it in your category
- Differentiation indicators – helping you speak to relevant segment concerns, at scale, and maximize brand awareness
- Audience segmenting to a granular level and discovering new, lookalike audiences to speak to
- Monitoring competitors’ successes and mistakes, to learn from their efforts as well as your own, and create the perfect – and perfectly timed – content
- Tracking trends, new ideas, market drivers and threats to help you keep a comfortable distance ahead of the competition – or create that distance if you don’t have it already!
And there are (at least) five things about your CPG consumers that you need to have in mind when considering that next product or service campaign:
Responding in Real-time is Required
Responding in real-time is not only impressive, it’s game changing. 82% of consumers expect an immediate response. Are you meeting that standard? If not, you’re in good company as many brands aren’t. So, if you can adopt a “challenge accepted” mindset, you’ll have an edge when it comes to increasing customer acquisition.
In NetBase, you can set alerts to receive notifications around any metric or any mention, as well as trigger alerts:
Any Metric alerts are notifications about events that you cannot predict or anticipate. These alerts zoom your way when your mention count, sentiment score or some other metric changes by whatever degree you’ve specified. For example, if Starbucks wanted to know when their sentiment score drops below 40, they’d set up this alert:
Triggered Alerts are great for more granular alerts, like if Starbucks wanted an alert whenever an unusual volume fluctuation occurred. They could set the alert for a particular strength (severity of the volume change) and stamina (how long the change has continued):
Any Mention is an alert around an event you can anticipate. Like wanting to know if/when an influential user mentions the word “boycott” in relation to your brand:
Each of those alerts are important additions to a brand’s daily listening activity.
Lurkers Are Always Listening
Consumers are always listening, even when they’re not engaging. They’re watching for deals and drama and any number of things – and many have their own alerts set to let them know when sales are happening to help them be smarter comparison shoppers.
Help them stay on top of the great content you provide by creating consistent posting schedules informed by your analytics. You can see which days and even hours you’re seeing the most engagement from different segments and create a content schedule that sings:
These folks may be silent, but are included in impression counts – and you won’t see these stats if you’re distracted by counting likes and comments in isolation. The big picture matters, particularly as lurkers make up 99.989% of social media.
Green is Good
Consumers are increasingly environmentally conscious, so when your brand has an opportunity to “go green” so let it be done! It’s a concept that’s pretty equally supported across demographics:
Amazon has taken note and is changing its packaging and marketing of CPG goods. “Tide says its Eco-Box has 60 percent less plastic and uses 30 percent less water in its soap than its 150 ounce bottles.”
So, sustainability is always a good move – and so is doing good. With nearly 4 million impressions in the past month alone across social, and a Net Sentiment score of 90%, the focus on “doing good” is not only beneficial to the world, but beneficial to your brand:
Capture Conversational Context – Or Else
Understanding the context of a conversation is something that comes so naturally to us as we speak, that we don’t really consider how (or even, if) that plays out when run through a social analytics tool. And it’s important to note that this is where accuracy is crucial and not all tools are created equal.
You can have weighted word clouds anywhere, but if the tool is not powered by Next Generation AI, it just can’t keep up with every element it needs to. Context requires an in-depth understanding of sarcasm, slang, emojis and imagery – it’s not just about tallying word choice. It can’t be. Yet, it often is.
Best-in-class tools bring together expert systems, machine learning, and deep learning to create an overall offering that creates word clouds (and other graphical representations) that you can confidently share with your CEO. It showcases the ability to track sentiment back to its root drivers and allow you to take swift, relevant action (which we know from #1 is critical!).
Geofencing is Underrated
It just is. But don’t take our word for it, ask Billy Grenham, Global Director Marketing and Communications, at Taco Bell. In the video below, he shares why he runs NetBase dashboards 24/7 to gain invaluable insights about customers across the globe before they launch into a new market!
His team uncovers local trends and create customer experiences like underground hip hop performances in Tokyo or punk rock concerts in the UK.
Are people camping out for his restaurants before they open? The answer is consistently yes, because they’ve identified what they care about and brought it to life by honing in on specific areas. Once in the map, brands can navigate by panning, zooming in and out, or entering a value in the Search box:
Tracking events and hashtags you’ve created in a specific area can help you manage customer care, crisis communications and analyze how well a campaign has done to attract targeted consumers to a location. It’s pretty amazing.
And we can help you uncover the same insight, specific to your brand – in each of the areas listed above, and more! Reach out for a demo and gain that competitive edge!
