Finding the symptoms – the unaware audience

A few weeks ago I was thinking about the unaware audience. How to help people realize that there was a problem and that you had a solution that would help. At that time, I was thinking about educational content that would support your solutions. It’s a good tactic, but it’s not the whole story. How do you know what content to publish?

Since then I’ve been digging deeper. How do you help the unaware audience connect the dots to become aware of a problem? You lay out the symptoms.

Ok, taking a step back, how do you, the marketer, find the different symptoms and connect them to the audience, so you can connect them to the solution?

Natural Language Processing for product development

You might be collecting customer feedback, such as support calls or tickets. All this data, when processed, can give you cues about what you might be missing. Using natural language processing can help you understand the frequency of specific terms that will mean something to you. For example, we worked with a client that had millions of records of customer support data. So much so, that they were struggling to get ahead of product development requests. We applied natural language processing to their data and helped them learn the different symptoms their customers had. The customers wanted a new kind of non-dairy milk that accounted for nut allergies. Without processing all that data and finding the trends within it, the company would have fallen behind and not delivered a solution. They needed to find the symptoms of emerging problems to create solutions.

You can read the full case study here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/expertise/case-studies/natural-language-processing/

Natural Language Processing for hiring

Are you finding the right candidates? Like your customers, your potential employees have needs that you may not be meeting. When you’re trying to hire, you may have a mismatch between what you think your employees want and what you’re actually offering. If you’re not processing the candidate feedback, you may have job postings that fall into the void. We had a client that ran into this exact issue. They were not attracting the right kind of candidate and couldn’t figure out why. We used natural language processing on their data to learn that there was a mismatch between the benefits they were listing and the questions candidates had. They needed to find the symptoms of the job applicants so that they could meet their needs with the benefits offered.

You can read the full case study here:
https://www.trustinsights.ai/expertise/case-studies/exploratory-data-analysis-and-natural-language-processing/

Social listening as part of the customer journey

You may not have mountains of unstructured data waiting for analysis. What your audience wants is still something you find out using social media. This is where social listening can help you. Tools such as Talkwalker or Sprout Social have natural language processing built-in that can summarize conversations and be on the lookout for specific keywords. Using these tools will allow you to learn what problems they are experiencing. You need to understand the symptoms at every stage of the customer journey so that you’re meeting your audience where they are.

If you want to explore this topic more you can join me and my good friend Brooke Sellas gave a webinar recently. You can watch the replay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqXiHCOCYb4

Once you know the symptoms, and what your audience wants, you can deliver on your content and solutions.

How do you listen to your audience? Tell me in our Free Slack Group, Analytics for Marketers