How to Commercialize Visual Listening for Social Media Monitoring

First of all, what is Visual Listening? In order to understand it, we first need to know what Social Listening is. Social Listening involves monitoring online conversations about brands so that they can gain certain insights about their audience. For example, brands can find out what their customers are saying about one of their products using a Social Listening tool which supplies them with interpretable data. This can all be gathered from monitoring the conversations their customers are having about those products online.

So what is Visual Listening? It is essentially the same thing, but instead of monitoring text-based online conversations, it focuses on monitoring visual-based conversations, i.e. within images and videos. Logo detection for Visual Listening allows Social Media Monitoring and Social Listening companies to provide to their customers a more accurate representation of online data analysis as it also includes visual mentions.

Commercializing, marketing, and selling Visual Listening for Social Media Monitoring can be a challenge for many Social Intelligence companies. Simon Sinek once said: “people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.” With this assertion in mind, before promoting any product or feature, it’s important to ask yourself: why am I promoting this product or feature? Why do my customers need it? And why should they care about it? Here are five steps you can take to help you successfully sell Visual Listening to your customers:

1. Emphasize the value of Visual Listening with visual content:

What better way to showcase the value of visuals on social media than to use visual content that emphasizes their importance? If you want your customers to really know just how valuable Visual Listening is, then you as a vendor need to practice what you preach. And the best way to do that is to create visual content that explains the product you want to commercialize. The infographic is a great format to achieve this as it allows the content to be informative but also visually appealing. Video is another medium that receives a lot of engagement online.

How you format the information you release is just as important as the information itself. This is particularly true when promoting a visual-based product or feature. Think about it: if you want to emphasize the value and importance of monitoring visual mentions, then you should present that content in a visual format to really make an impact on your target audience.

2. Carry out a study on Visual Listening:

Evidence is important when it comes to proving and communicating your belief in something. Creating an in-depth study in whatever format you choose, such as an e-book or case study (including plenty of visual aids, of course), will allow your customers to fully understand exactly why they need to be monitoring their visual mentions.

Social Media Monitoring and analytics companies that have integrated a Visual Listening tool have the ability to conduct studies to see for themselves how effective that tool is, so why not display your findings to your customers? Show them exactly what they can get out of investing in this new feature with concrete examples so that they have no reason not to invest in it. And present the results in an easily accessible format so that they can give a convincing pitch to their C-levels

3. Show them what they are missing out on:

Publish your findings an individual basis. This means that you should let your customers know how many insights they missed simply because they weren’t using Visual Listening. You can do this publicly, for example, by tweeting how many insights a brand missed and tagging them in said tweet, or you can send them a private message detailing exactly why they need this offering with concrete evidence.

Being passive in your approach to commercializing something that is relatively new in terms of technological advancement just won’t cut it. People are more likely to act and respond when they are told they are missing out on something as opposed to being told how great a new feature is. And if the above doesn’t work, show them how your customers’ competitors are doing so much better because they are gaining far more insights than them thanks to Visual Listening. They will feel as though they are behind everyone else and losing out on the future of innovation in the marketing space. FOMO always wins!

4. Interview experts on Visual Listening:

If you and your team aren’t as well-versed when it comes to the ins and outs of Visual Listening, why not pick an expert’s brain? Interview as many people as possible who are willing to contribute their expertise and collate those thoughts into a blog post or film a video compiling those interviews in a creatively edited and concise audio-visual guide. This allows your customers to digest those first-hand accounts of exactly why they need Visual Listening.

People trust experts. So let the experts speak for themselves rather than regurgitate and paraphrase the information they supplied to you when they first pitched you the product. It’s also great for potential partnership opportunities as both you and the experts can benefit from the experience which will form an alliance for future ventures.

5. Host webinars all about Visual Listening and invite the experts you interviewed:

As a follow up to the blog-post or video you create surrounding the experts’ views on the importance of Visual Listening, it’s a good idea to host a webinar to create even more publicity and content marketing material surrounding this exciting new feature. It could be a series, or it could be a one off special- whatever works best for your type of audience.

It’s important to let the experts answer any questions your existing and potential customers have about this new feature during the webinar so that they can fully understand the value of monitoring visuals. It also gives them the opportunity to address any concerns they might have about Visual Listening.