All Marketing Insights Archives | Sprout Social Sprout Social offers a suite of <a href="/features/" class="fw-bold">social media solutions</a> that supports organizations and agencies in extending their reach, amplifying their brands and creating real connections with their audiences. Tue, 02 Apr 2024 13:37:40 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://media.sproutsocial.com/uploads/2020/06/cropped-Sprout-Leaf-32x32.png All Marketing Insights Archives | Sprout Social 32 32 The rise of virtual influencers: are they here to stay? https://sproutsocial.com/insights/virtual-influencers/ Tue, 02 Apr 2024 14:00:00 +0000 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/?p=184368 The steady popularity of influencer marketing, coupled with rapid advancements in AI and metaverse technology, is fueling the growth of a new social media Read more...

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]]> The steady popularity of influencer marketing, coupled with rapid advancements in AI and metaverse technology, is fueling the growth of a new social media superstar: virtual influencers. These computer-generated personalities function a lot like real human influencers. They post selfies and content from their day-to-day lives alongside brand partnerships with major companies. The only difference is they don’t exist in the physical world.

Are virtual influencers a trend with staying power or more of a novelty for brands looking to cut through the noise of an increasingly crowded social media landscape? In this article, we’ll define virtual influencers and how they work, the major considerations brands should have before working with one and some of the most prominent virtual influencers on the scene today.

What are virtual influencers?

Virtual influencers are digital personalities that exist primarily on social media. They’re not real people but computer-generated characters created with advanced CGI, motion capture and AI technology.

There are different types of virtual influencers, ranging from non-human characters to highly realistic human-like personas. They’re often developed and managed by creative agencies specializing in AI, robotics or marketing. However, some brands have even created their own virtual influencers, like Brazilian retailer Magalu’s Lu. These brand-specific characters function more like spokesmodels or mascots, as they rarely have a platform or following outside of the brand.

How do virtual influencers work?

Virtual influencers operate much like regular social media influencers. These online avatars interact with social media users like human influencers, sharing content, endorsing products and engaging with followers. They offer a unique and innovative way for brands to connect with their audience. But there’s a core difference: The interactions they have with real-life products or services and the engagement with followers are completely fabricated.

A virtual influencer marketing example would be Barcelona-based virtual influencer Aitana’s recent partnership with hair salon Llongueras. Aitana shared pictures of her new hairstyle on her Instagram feed and even documented a fake trip to the salon in her Instagram Stories.

An Instagram brand partnership between virtual influencer Aitana and hair salon Llongueras

The benefits of virtual influencers

Influencer marketing and AI are two huge trends that are quickly taking over the marketing industry. In a Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey of 307 US-based social marketers, 81% said influencer marketing is an essential part of their overall social media strategy. And, our Sprout Social Index found that 81% of marketers say AI has had a positive impact on their work. But what happens when you combine the two? Here are a few of the most significant benefits of partnering with virtual influencers.

Control over content

Brands who want to get across a certain message or have a specific point to make with an influencer partnership have a different level of control over content with virtual influencers. Having more control over what an influencer posts can be appealing to some brands with a very specific message to share.

Adaptability

Virtual influencers never age, can speak any language and can ‘travel’ to any place. This level of adaptability and flexibility means brands can potentially use one virtual influencer for campaigns in different regions instead of finding different influencers for various markets.

Consistency

Unlike human influencers whose brands might evolve as they age or enter different life phases, virtual influencers have a consistent appearance, personality and content. This stability means brands don’t have to worry about unexpected shifts and can rely on a virtual influencer to promote their offer in a predictable way.

How virtual influencers impact brands

Are virtual influencers the future of social media marketing? Well, it depends. A 2022 consumer research survey found that nearly half of people who follow social media personalities are interested in following a virtual influencer. However, many brands and agencies are cautiously pursuing virtual influencer partnerships, as the new technology poses some risks.

Here are some key points brands need to think about as virtual influencers become more popular.

Brand safety and reputation

Virtual influencers may seem like a safer bet than real-life influencers, but they’re not completely immune to controversy. For example, influencer Caryn Marjorie made headlines for creating an AI version of herself that some people criticized for being demeaning to women and enabling anti-social behavior.

Additionally, AI has a black box problem. Humans don’t fully understand how these systems work or make decisions, which poses a huge challenge for advertisers and agencies. Without that clarity, it’s hard for brands to trust these virtual influencers completely. So, while AI has a cool factor, marketers must be careful about diving in headfirst to avoid future PR disasters.

Transparency and authenticity

Most people already struggle to tell the difference between authentic and AI-generated images. A recent study found that participants could only do so 61% of the time. As technology advances and virtual influencers resemble humans even more, it’s imperative for brands to be transparent about how they use these tools.

The FTC said virtual influencers should disclose brand sponsorships just like human influencers, and the ad agency Ogilvy is pushing for clearer rules about AI-generated content. Still, virtual influencer regulations and guidelines are a work in progress.

Additionally, most brands work with influencers to tap into their authentic relationships with their audience. While there are still real people behind a virtual influencer, they can’t directly connect with their followers in the same way. They also can’t interact with products or give honest reviews like human influencers can, which can make their endorsements feel less genuine.

Audience sentiment

Virtual influencers can impact how people feel about brands—for better or worse. While AI tools have recently exploded in popularity and have dozens of benefits for marketers, the more human-like applications of the technology can sometimes produce an “uncanny valley” effect where people find them off-putting.

Some of the most popular virtual influencers also have racially ambiguous features, which marketing experts interpret as a way for brands to appeal to a broader audience. However, this approach could also work against a brand, as it can be seen as a shortcut to appearing more inclusive than they actually are—an issue many beauty and fashion brands have been criticized for.

The top virtual influencers making waves on social media

The trend may be gaining momentum now, but virtual influencers have actually been around for quite some time, quietly revolutionizing the world of influencer marketing and building massive social media followings. From fashion icons to animated characters, here are the top virtual influencers to follow.

Lil Miquela

According to her Instagram bio, Miquela (@lilmiquela on Instagram) is a “19-year-old robot living in LA.” A pioneer in the virtual influencer space with 2.6 million Instagram followers and 3.5 million TikTok followers, she was launched in 2016 and is now managed by creative agency Brud. She’s partnered with brands like Prada, Pacsun and Calvin Klein and even earned a spot on TIME magazine’s list of the ‘25 most influential people on the internet.’

An Instagram brand partnership between Lil Miquela and Pacsun

 

Imma

Imma (@imma.gram on Instagram) is a virtual girl in Tokyo with over 390,000 Instagram followers. The brainchild of Aww Inc., she’s known for her iconic bubblegum pink bob and killer sense of style. She is also curious and often questions her identity, using the hashtag #ithinkimcgi. Recently, Coach launched a campaign featuring Imma alongside celebs like Lil Nas X and Camila Mendes, where she visits each ambassador in their virtual worlds.

An Instagram brand partnership between virtual influencer Imma and Coach

Janky

Janky (@Janky on Instagram) is a mischievous cat-like character with 1 million Instagram followers and 11.9 million followers on a shared TikTok account with fellow virtual influencer Guggimon. They were created by Superplastic, a company known for its animated synthetic celebrities and designer toys. As a virtual influencer, Janky has collaborated with brands like 7-Eleven, Fortnite and Gucci.

Janky's Instagram profile and one of his collaborations with the other virtual influencer Guggimon

What’s next for virtual influencer marketing

Virtual influencers bring a fresh and attention-grabbing twist to marketing campaigns. But there’s still a lot we don’t know about this technology.

Our advice? Vet a virtual influencer just like you would any other influencer, and weigh the risks and benefits for your brand. Pressure test the idea against your audience’s expectations and your brand’s core values. Would your audience find value or entertainment in a virtual influencer partnership, or do they prefer real creator collaborations? Make sure the influencer is ultimately the right fit for your brand.

If you do choose to move forward with a campaign, transparency is key. Use hashtags like #PoweredByAI to let people know it’s a virtual influencer campaign, and closely monitor any interactions between the influencer and your audience.

Ready to start planning your next virtual influencer marketing campaign? Check out our influencer marketing budget template to optimize your spending and ensure you allocate your marketing dollars to the right partnerships.

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]]> How AI insights improve decision making https://sproutsocial.com/insights/ai-insights/ Tue, 19 Mar 2024 14:03:35 +0000 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/?p=183733 Artificial intelligence-driven analytics tools sift through massive datasets to identify patterns, trends and insights humans might overlook—allowing brands a distinct competitive edge by making Read more...

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]]> Artificial intelligence-driven analytics tools sift through massive datasets to identify patterns, trends and insights humans might overlook—allowing brands a distinct competitive edge by making strategic decision-making easier and improving customer experiences. Sprout’s 2023 State of Social Media report confirms these advantages, with 9 out of 10 business leaders acknowledging the indispensable role of AI in enhancing market competitiveness, understanding customer preferences and driving innovation. These leaders also expect their companies to increase investment in AI for marketing in the next three years.

Incorporating AI technologies into business operations optimizes performance and pushes organizations toward success and sustainability. For long-term success, companies may face challenges when implementing this technology due to a lack of understanding and organizational experience with AI.

In this article, we’ll explore what AI insights are exactly, how they work and how they’re applied practically to progress different industries.

What are AI insights?

AI insights are the knowledge and understanding gained by analyzing complex datasets using AI. This process involves a combination of machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP) and AI data visualization techniques (charts, graphs, dashboards, heat maps, etc) to make the data more accessible.

The visualization helps strategists find hidden patterns, trends and correlations. Organizations use AI tools to filter big data into actionable intelligence to support better decision-making and strategies.

Advantages of using AI for generating data insights

AI analytics offers many advantages, such as seeing hidden trends in large data sets, forecasting future market behaviors, analyzing customer sentiment, making decisions faster and creating personalized experiences.

Easier decision-making

AI insights arm decision-makers with comprehensive, real-time data analysis, reducing reliance on guesswork and intuition. The AI processes and analyzes data from various sources simultaneously at a speed and scale unattainable by human effort alone. As such, the insights can give you an in-depth view of the market, customers and competitors.

Predicting future trends

AI insights provide the power to predict future trends and customer behaviors through pattern recognition in data. By analyzing historical information, AI tools can forecast outcomes, offering a clear view of customer preferences and potential market shifts. This capability enables you to adjust your strategies proactively and remain competitive. Notably, 45% of business leaders recognize predictive analytics as AI’s most valuable marketing tool, allowing for precise forecasting of future customer behavior.

Creating better customer experiences

The secret to captivating your customers is in understanding their desires, expectations and perceptions of your brand, then turning those feelings into experiences people love. For example, you can anticipate customer needs and gauge opinions through social media listening to monitor chatter around your brand or competition. This empowers you to proactively tailor your offerings and marketing communication. A study by Boston Consulting Group found that companies using AI insights for personalization saw sales gains of 6-10%, which is two to three times greater than those not using AI.

How AI insights help businesses

Let’s explore how AI insights help industries strengthen business strategies, meet market needs and boost brand loyalty.

AI insights for automotive

AI insights improve automotive manufacturers’ understanding of consumer sentiment, market trends and product feedback. Through social listening and text mining, companies can tailor their designs, features and marketing strategies to meet consumer demands, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

For example, a car manufacturer can use review and AI-driven sentiment analysis to gauge global consumer reactions to product recalls. This in-depth investigation can reveal significant regional differences in perception and enable targeted, culturally sensitive crisis management strategies.

AI insights for banking

In the banking sector, AI insights are vital for fraud detection. But they’re also commonly used in customer service and the personalization of banking solutions. By analyzing transactional data and customer feedback, banks can improve their security and offer services that truly help their customers.

As an example, let’s look at a bank that wants to improve its customer service. The bank can use AI-driven sentiment analysis to dive deep into customer feedback, collected through social media listening campaigns. This comprehensive analysis, which can be conducted in multiple languages, helps the bank identify essential improvement areas, such as mobile banking, fees and branch services. The insights can help the bank initiate targeted reforms, such as overhauling the website experience or improving branch operations to boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.

AI insights for call centers

Using AI insights in call center operations can boost efficiency and pinpoint problem areas. For example, a mobile carrier can utilize AI-driven sentiment analysis to tackle customer churn by integrating text analytics with their call center software. This approach converts call voice data into text for real-time sentiment analysis, allowing proactive identification of customers at risk of leaving. By offering timely resolutions and incentives, the carrier can reduce its churn rate, improve agent effectiveness and overall customer satisfaction.

AI insights for finance

AI insights play a role in understanding market dynamics and enhancing strategic planning in the financial industry. For instance, a hedge fund can enhance its trading strategy by employing real-time sentiment analysis and entity extraction to analyze international market sentiment. This involves processing extensive data from varied sources, including news in multiple languages relevant to its global operations. The hedge fund can integrate market sentiment directly into its trading models by developing a sophisticated dashboard to compare market sentiment with share prices, optimizing its decision-making process.

AI insights for government

Governments can use AI insights to improve public services and policies and engage with communities. For example, predictive analytics can help the government anticipate public service bottlenecks, allocate resources efficiently and minimize service downtimes. At the same time, text analytics can monitor public concerns on social media. Helping to monitor, analyze and extract insights from public sentiment. This approach can help officials identify similar complaints or praises, and find areas that require immediate attention.

AI insights for health and pharma

AI provides valuable insights that significantly improve patient care and drug development in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors by efficiently structuring complex medical data. An example could be a hospital network leveraging NLP-based text analytics to transform unstructured EMR progress notes into searchable and organized data. This approach helps the hospital extract actionable insights on medication effectiveness and patient outcomes. By applying named entity recognition, the hospital could analyze detailed information about medications, dosages and patient responses, enhancing patient care precision.

AI insights for hospitality

AI insights have the potential to revolutionize the hospitality industry, empowering businesses to cater to guests’ preferences in a more personalized way. One of the key innovations in this field is the semantic analysis of hotel reviews that offers highly tailored recommendations to travelers. While traditional five-star ratings are widely recognized, they often fail to capture the unique needs of individual guests.

By semantically analyzing text-based reviews, a hotel review aggregator could develop a “smart” search feature that allows hotels to be filtered based on specific attributes such as breakfast quality, internet speed or proximity to nightlife, aligning directly with the traveler’s preferences. This approach goes beyond generic ratings to provide customized hotel recommendations, improving the guest selection process and enabling people to have more personalized travel experiences.

AI insights for quantitative trading

AI insights are transforming quantitative trading by leveraging unique data sources, such as employee feedback, to predict company performance. For instance, a hedge fund might analyze employee sentiments on platforms like Indeed and Glassdoor, theorizing that internal sentiments predict market trends. Sophisticated sentiment analysis allows the fund to categorize employee reviews, unveiling trends in company health and potential. This approach uses unconventional data to give traders an edge, offering a novel angle on investment strategies.

AI insights for market research

AI insights revolutionized market research, enabling marketers to extract valuable competitive insights from a large consumer base quickly. Consider a new healthy snack brand, analyzing thousands of consumer surveys and open-ended responses about snack preferences and brand recognition. Through AI-driven data extraction, the brand can quickly categorize responses, pinpoint key themes and identify mentioned brands. This analysis offers the newcomer precise market positioning insights, including identifying indirect competitors like essential vegetables. With this knowledge, the company can strategically focus its marketing and product positioning efforts to maximize success in its core markets.

Understanding how AI insights are generated

As you can see, many industries use AI for sentiment analysis to provide an in-depth understanding of their customer behavior. As an example, this section will walk you through how AI processes numerical and textual data to give you better customer insights.

Step 1: Data collection

The first step involves collecting the data for analysis. This can be social media posts, customer reviews, surveys, customer care logs, NPS scores and emails. The aim is to gather a comprehensive dataset that reflects the sentiments and opinions of the target audience about your brand or product. The data can be uploaded directly through APIs or manually entered as CSV files.

For example, let’s say we wanted to understand people’s sentiments around Sprout Social across social media and review platforms.

An X (formerly Twitter) post from a fan of Sprout Social's AI Assist

A LinkedIn post from a Sprout Social employee describing the positive work culture.

Step 2: Data processing

Once collected, the AI tool processes the text or numerical data using AI and ML algorithms tailored to interpret and analyze the specific data type. For text, the tool uses subtasks like NLP and text analysis to understand the language, converting sentences into structured formats that machines can work with. It also understands emojis. This enables the AI tool to perform tasks like sentiment mining, language translation or text generation by finding patterns and relationships within the data. Numerical data is processed using statistical and ML models that can identify trends, classify data into categories or predict future values.

The neural networks (NNs) in these tools help them learn from the data they analyze and adjust their parameters to accommodate new information. This continuous learning mode improves the accuracy over time.

In the Sprout Social example, AI would use NLP and text analysis to decipher complex language nuances, emojis and sentiment within social media posts and reviews – transforming the open-ended feedback into structured data.

Step 3: Data analysis

The tool analyzes the processed data by picking out important parts or patterns it is trained to recognize from pre-processed, labeled datasets. For text, this could be things like the tone of a message or the main topics discussed. With numbers, it might look for trends or unusual patterns. The AI uses special algorithms to sift through this data and learn from it, improving its tasks over time by adjusting the internal rules to reduce mistakes.

For the Sprout Social case, the structured data gets analyzed to detect prevalent themes, such as sentiment tones and customer concerns. This step is important for understanding the broader sentiment landscape identifying strengths and potential areas for service enhancement based on the collective feedback.

Step 4: Visualizing the data

Data visualization is the last step that involves the tool transforming the data into intuitive graphs and charts, making it easier to digest and understand. Visualization helps you identify trends and outliers in the data, offering a granular view that can influence decision-making. For Sprout Social, this could mean a graph that tracks sentiment trends or compares service perceptions across different demographics. These visualizations provide a clear, at-a-glance understanding of how the brand is perceived, enabling Sprout Social to make informed decisions on service improvements or marketing strategies.

Sprout Social’s sentiment analysis tools showing negative and positive sentiment scores and identifying sentiment trends across timelines

The future of AI adoption

Despite AI’s capacity to sift through and make sense of big datasets and produce actionable insights, only 20% of strategists harness AI-related tools, such as ML or NLP, within their strategies. This highlights a wealth of untapped potential, where AI’s capabilities can improve business strategies, giving adopters the opportunity to innovate and create great customer experiences.

To incorporate AI insights into your own marketing strategy, social media data is an excellent starting point. As one of the world’s biggest readily available datasets, using tactics like social media listening will provide you with real-time insights into your customers and market.

Next, learn how marketers are leveraging AI in marketing to generate content, automate operations and create powerful campaigns.

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]]> 11 AI marketing tools your team should be using in 2024 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/ai-marketing-tools/ Mon, 11 Mar 2024 15:30:51 +0000 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/?p=176186/ Artificial intelligence (AI) emerged as one of the hottest technology trends in 2023. Not only is it fundamentally shifting how we work but AI Read more...

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]]> Artificial intelligence (AI) emerged as one of the hottest technology trends in 2023. Not only is it fundamentally shifting how we work but AI marketing tools are also reshaping marketing now and in the future.

Companies are investing in these tools to get more out of their efforts. This includes handling customer support inquiries, creating personalized offers and analyzing customer data. Whether you’re looking for marketing automation or to write email copy, there’s an AI marketing tool that meets your AI marketing needs. For businesses, these investments mean faster, better decisions and a competitive advantage.

Read on to find out about the 10 best AI marketing tools you can use to speed up your workflows.

Table of contents:

What is an AI marketing tool?

An AI marketing tool is a software that harnesses artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance the execution of marketing tasks and workflows. With AI being predictive based on provided data, its use within marketing tools is incredibly helpful for repetitive marketing workflows.

The nature of AI marketing tools is quite sophisticated. They intake data that humans feed them–from its built-in database and users’ direct inputs of data into the tool. From there, they form an insight based on what we are asking it to do or it’s programmed to do. Lastly, the tools will provide an action based on our request.

What’s remarkable is that some AI tools for marketing are automated, which can lift a notable workload off of marketers.

Benefits of using AI tools for marketing

AI marketing tools help marketers work faster by executing repetitive tasks based on a pattern of work that they have already accomplished. With continue collaboration with AI tools, marketers will clearly see their skill sets and marketing campaigns continue to advance.

Without making this the longest blog post you’ve ever read, here are just some of the key ways marketers are reaping the benefits of using AI marketing tools:

AI for Customer Personalization

One of the noteworthy ways that AI marketing tools are benefiting marketers is that AI is assisting marketers in producing personalized content for each customer. The benefits of this are astronomical with customers expecting personalization in every point of their buyer journey.

According to McKinsey & Co’s survey around personalization, customers are expecting brands “to know them no matter where brands interact with them.”

This is where content personalization marketing tools that utilize AI are so impactful for marketers. These tools personalize which content is being served to which buyer persona. Content personalization tools analyze a customer’s profile and leverage intent data. They predictively adjust which content is being served to them based on what best relates to their needs or preferences.

AI for Content Creation

One of the most common ways marketers are using AI is for content creation. Marketers are using it for discovering fresh content ideas, creating content outlines, content editing, and to produce written copy. A few examples of the written copy marketers are using AI writing tools for are social media posts, blog posts, and emails.

This is taking off a massive mental load for countless marketers in the creative writing process, providing them with a rough draft for content in just seconds. From there, it allows them to add their own human flair to it and adjust to their brand’s tone of voice.

AI for Data Analytics

Another incredibly advantageous way that AI is being incorporated into marketing tools is through data analytics. AI can analyze enormous amounts of data, draw insights from said data, and summarize the findings.

The uses for this are broad, but one of which is particularly helpful is for sentiment analysis. AI can read vast reservoirs of data to understand user sentiments across various online platforms. It can help marketers better understand real-time brand sentiments, evolving market trends, and the interests of their target audiences.

Using AI sentiment analysis tools set up marketer to keep their fingers on the pulse of their target consumers and be able to proactively adjust to stay relevant to them.

Now that we have covered just a breath of the benefits of AI marketing tools, let’s hop into the AI marketing tools we recommend most!

Best overall AI marketing tool

More companies are expanding their AI usage as they scale or undergo digital transformation from legacy software. And social data is at the center of many marketing transformations.

According to our 2023 State of Social Media Report, 97% of business leaders agree that AI and machine learning (ML) will enable companies to analyze social media data and insights more effectively and use it to improve their overall marketing efforts.

Marketers are using AI in several ways, such as sentiment analysis to understand and respond to customer feedback and crises, competitive analysis to stay ahead of the market and content recommendation engines to improve engagement. AI-driven insights are playing a huge role in behavioral segmentation and other agile marketing strategies as well.

Investing in an all-in-one AI marketing tool that easily fits into your tech stack helps you scale your marketing efforts, consolidate multiple marketing functions and streamline workflows across your entire organization. Enter Sprout Social.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social’s AI capabilities make it one of the most intuitive marketing tools on the market. The all-in-one platform accelerates business impact through social, so you can strengthen collaboration between teams and put your best foot forward when you engage with audiences.

A screenshot of Sprout's AI Assist feature in a compose window, where users can create 3 post options from text or change the tone of a post with the help of AI.

How Sprout helps marketers

Sprout handles a range of marketing functions—from social media and customer care to digital marketing and competitive intelligence—giving you more valuable insights for faster decision-making.

Use Sprout’s AI-powered social tools for:

  • Business intelligence. Some 44% of business leaders are using sentiment analysis to understand consumer behavior. Sprout enables you to harness the power of your social conversations by surfacing business-critical information at the speed of social. Its AI and automation power the processing of 50,000+ messages a second in Listening and 600M+ messages per day.
  • Reputation management. Sprout’s Listening capabilities set you up for early crisis detection and management by enabling you to identify spikes or unfamiliar trending words from customer conversations.
  • Social media scheduling. Sprout’s AI and patented ViralPost technology puts brands in a position to streamline workflows. The latest Suggestions by AI Assist features helps you create high-quality captions in seconds, enabling you to break through writer’s block, inspire new ideas and enhance your post copy. What’s best—this feature is available on all Sprout Social plans.
  • Optimizing marketing workflows. Our AI and automation doesn’t require manual setup or continuous investment, so you can start seeing value immediately.
  • Customer service. About 41% of marketers are using natural language processing (NLP) to improve their customer service. Sprout enables you to build chatbots to handle customer support requests, suggest replies to customer inquiries or route messages to the right team. And the new AI Assist functionality further helps scale customer care efforts by helping you write robust customer responses quickly and effectively using AI-powered tone and length edits.

Start your free Sprout trial

AI marketing tools for copywriting

AI marketing tools help you create messages that resonate with your target audience and speed up the writing process. Here are some tools marketers are turning to for help with copywriting.

2. Keyword Insights

Keyword Insights is a powerful SEO tool with an advanced AI writing assistant designed for modern content creators. The AI writing assistant seamlessly blends content research, writing and optimization into a single platform. Keyword Insights’ writing assistant offers AI functionality with a touch of human-ai collaboration.

With the added advantage of an interactive AI chat assistant, get dynamic responses to diverse writing requests. Need a catchy introduction or specifics on cod liver oil? Ask, and you shall receive.

Keyword insights AI marketing tool screenshot

3. Jasper

Jasper helps you speed up the writing process using generative AI. It features content generation templates for your marketing content, such as landing pages, emails and blog posts. It offers 11,000 fonts, 2,500 categories and 25 languages you can choose from. Plus, its intuitive interface makes it easy to crank out words quickly.

Try Jasper for free or purchase one of their Creator, Team or Business plans for even more features.

A grided overview of Jasper’s content generation templates, including documents, paragraph generator, AIDA framework, product description, blog post topic ideas, blog post outline, creative story, explain it to a child and sentence expander.

4. Writer

Writer is a writer’s assistant for marketing teams, making it easy to efficiently collaborate on content. Writer’s grammar and clarity suggestions transform your writing into professional and accurate copy. Additionally, it maintains your company’s tone of voice and allows you to build your own database of approved company terminology.

Access Writer for free or purchase a Team or Enterprise plan for extended functionality.

A popup window where the user can generate a landing page Writer based on product description, CTA and audience segment.

 

5. Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO helps you improve the content quality of your web pages so your content ranks on search engine results pages (SERPs). It analyzes search term SERPs and compares your content against the learnings of top-ranking pages. It evaluates keywords and other ranking metrics and gives suggestions for optimizing your content for search engine optimization (SEO). Additionally, it offers an outline generator and keyword research tools to create SEO content from the get-go.

Surfer offers Essential, Advanced, Max and Enterprise plans for small teams, agencies or enterprises.

 

Surfer SEO’s Content Planner dashboard where you can plan briefs, write catchy headlines and map supportive pages to help you rank for difficult keywords.

AI marketing tools for editing

Not all marketers are grammarians. Thankfully, there are AI marketing tools for editing that make sure you have error-free copy every time.

6. Grammarly

Grammarly helps anyone, from the CEO to the social media manager, churn out clear communications. It supports many of the platforms you already write on, including Google Docs, Word and Gmail. It also uses generative AI, GrammarlyGO, to help you nail your writing based on context and goals.

GrammarlyGO works in your voice with profile options for tone, formality and professional relevance. Grammarly’s free plan offers spelling and grammar suggestions. For more editing, its paid plan assists with clarity, sentence structure and tone of voice.

You can use Grammarly for free or purchase a Premium or Business plan.

A spotlight on the sentence "Great work on the project!" in Grammarly. The word work is emphasized, and synonyms for the word are provided by Grammarly's AI tools.

7. Hemingway Editor

Hemingway Editor uses machine learning (ML) to identify editing opportunities at a sentence level to make your writing stronger. It analyzes your content and suggests where to make it clear, more concise or improve your diction. Additionally, it gives you a readability score and grade level to assess the overall performance of your content. Hemingway also plans a new beta version of its solution where AI can fix issues for you.

Hemingway is free to use.

The homepage of Hemingway explaining how it grades your content based on readability, simplicity, passive voice and adverbs used.

AI marketing tools for digital marketing

A lot goes into digital marketing. Here are some tools that help with targeted emailing, campaign management and conversion rate optimization.

8. Seventh Sense

Seventh Sense is an email marketing tool that uses behavior profiling to attract customers’ attention. It creates predictive models that analyze the perfect time and day to send email campaigns. The selling point? It does this individually for each contact based on their activity. Marketers can increase email deliverability and improve the sender score. Seventh Sense also seamlessly integrates with HubSpot and Marketo.

Seventh Sense offers flexible pricing that works with HubSpot and Marketo’s subscription model.

Contact engagement dashboard in Seventh Sense, showing a histogram and heatmap of contact engagement on a weekly basis.

9. Optimove

Optimove is a customer data platform providing a unified view of customer behavior and insights, campaign performance, hyper-segmentation, A/B testing and multi-channel tracking. These features give you insights into which campaigns to drop or which customers have been exposed to too many marketing emails.

Optimove offers custom pricing solutions based on your company’s needs.

Marketing plan campaign reporting dashboard in Optimove that shows increase in net revenue, customer response, customers targeted and personalization score.

10. Tidio

Tidio is an AI-powered chatbot platform. It helps you focus on conversion rate optimization (CRO) through customer interactions on your website. Use Tidio to improve web conversions and generate leads with live chat to reduce churn rates and build customer loyalty.

Get started for free or purchase a plan starting at $29.

Messages inbox, automation tracker and chatbot features in Tidio.

AI marketing tools for automation

If you have a lot of robust workflows or if you are a team of one, consider automating your tasks and processes with AI marketing tools.

11. Zapier

Zapier is the tool on the market for AI-driven automation. Automate time-intensive tasks and turn text-based inputs into data to answer simple questions to help your team cut down on manual work and scale your business with valuable insights.

Use a free version or purchase one of Zapier’s plans for more features.

Examples of different “zap” automations you can set up in Zapier with different tools, including new row, new event, send email, create task and create view.

Test AI marketing tools today

If you’re looking to scale your marketing efforts or transition from a legacy tool, it’s worth trying out AI marketing tools. These tools enable you to take back your time, extract insights from customer data and manage your marketing tasks more efficiently.

No matter your marketing needs, there is an AI marketing tool for you. But, if you’re looking for a centralized AI marketing tool that handles a range of marketing functions, consider Sprout Social. Sign up for a free 30-day trial today.

The post 11 AI marketing tools your team should be using in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

]]> The role of artificial intelligence in business in 2024 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/ai-in-business/ Thu, 29 Feb 2024 15:00:44 +0000 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/?p=183220 In business, artificial intelligence (AI) is more than just a trend; it’s a crucial tool reshaping how we approach marketing and customer engagement. According Read more...

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]]> In business, artificial intelligence (AI) is more than just a trend; it’s a crucial tool reshaping how we approach marketing and customer engagement. According to our research, nearly 9 out of 10 business leaders are gearing up to boost their investments in AI and machine learning (ML), especially in marketing.

Why this surge? At the heart of this AI revolution is the ability to segment behaviors and target specific customer groups with precision. It’s about making smarter decisions, crafting more personalized strategies and understanding customer needs on a deeper level, all of which are crucial across various business units.

This article will explore the diverse roles AI plays in enhancing business functions like marketing, operations, product development, human resources, customer support and security. Each domain benefits from AI’s ability to streamline processes, improve efficiency, and provide actionable insights, making every interaction and decision more meaningful and effective.

What is AI?

Artificial Intelligence refers to the simulation of human cognitive functions by machines. It includes a wide range of technologies that enable machines to perform tasks traditionally requiring human intelligence, such as reasoning, problem-solving, decision-making, and learning from experience.

A callout card defining Artificial Intelligence as the simulation of human cognitive functions by machines. It includes a wide range of technologies that enable machines to perform tasks traditionally requiring human intelligence, such as reasoning, problem-solving, decision-making, and learning from experience.

Today, AI is an umbrella term that includes various subfields, such as machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing.

The development of AI has led to the creation of numerous applications, including chatbots, virtual personal assistants (e.g., Siri, Alexa), recommendation systems, autonomous vehicles and medical diagnosis systems. These applications demonstrate the practical implementation of AI in performing specific tasks with high accuracy and efficiency.

Which functions of AI are used in business?

Let’s explore the core AI functionalities transforming businesses today, from machine learning and natural language processing to deep learning for AI automation. Each plays a critical role in enhancing decision-making, optimizing operations and driving innovation.

Machine learning (ML)

Machine learning algorithms analyze data, identify patterns and make predictions based on their results. They power AI tools that enable businesses to gain valuable insights from disparate data to help decision-making. While ML models learn independently as they process data, they can also be updated manually based on your specific needs.

NER and semantic search

Named Entity Recognition (NER) identifies entities defined in the ML model as important to a business, such as geographic locations, brand names, famous people, etc. And semantic search helps provide a contextual understanding of a query input by a user. Together, they help process and analyze large volumes of unstructured data to help you improve search accuracy, automate data processing and extract meaningful insights for informed decisions.

NLP and sentiment analysis

Natural Language Processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis enable businesses to understand and interpret human language, making them essential tools for analyzing customer feedback, social media content and other textual data while automating report generation.

Deep learning (DL) for AI automation

Machine learning uses algorithms and learns independently but may need human intervention to correct errors. Deep learning, on the other hand, uses neural networks to learn and adapt to new data patterns with little to no human input. It’s utilized to automate complex data analysis tasks and processes, including image and speech recognition, enabling businesses to streamline operations and improve efficiency.

How artificial intelligence helps in business functions

AI has revolutionized various business functions, including marketing strategies, product development, sales efficiency, customer support, human resources, operations and security. Marketers and business professionals leverage AI to create stronger campaigns, make smarter decisions and streamline workflows. AI is changing the game and setting new benchmarks for business excellence.

Artificial intelligence in marketing

With marketing, AI transforms how businesses interact with their customers in several ways, offering tangible benefits that directly impact a company’s bottom line.

Social listening

AI-powered social media management tools like Sprout Social integrate AI into social listening to help you analyze social media conversations, translating vast amounts of data into actionable insights. This helps you understand customer sentiment in real time, monitor brand health and respond swiftly to market trends, ultimately fostering stronger customer relationships and brand loyalty.

Content personalization

AI personalizes content based on customer behavior, preferences and demographics. For example, Netflix uses AI to provide personalized movie and show recommendations, enhancing the user experience and engagement for its audience.

Sprout Social’s Enhance by AI Assist uses AI to personalize customer interactions at scale. It tailors responses based on the tone of the incoming messages, ensuring that replies are relevant and resonate with the customer’s emotional state. This capability enhances customer engagement by delivering personalized experiences at scale.

Sprout Social's Enhance by AI Assist uses AI to personalize customer interactions so teams can tailor responses based on the tone of the incoming messages, ensuring that replies are relevant and resonate with the customer's emotional state.

Market research

AI tools dissect large datasets, revealing market trends, customer preferences and competitive landscapes, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions.

Content generation

AI is also impacting content creation and the way we write. For instance, Sprout’s Message Ideas by AI Assist generates engaging content suggestions, helping marketers quickly craft messages that align with their brand voice and audience interests. This tool streamlines the content creation process, allowing users to focus on the strategic aspects of their campaigns.

Competitor analysis

Competitor analysis using AI offers detailed insights into competitors’ strategies and customer perceptions. By tracking essential metrics such as audience growth, engagement and post volume across various networks, marketers can benchmark their social presence against competitors. This comprehensive analysis, including share of voice, engagement, sentiment and impressions, helps identify key areas where a brand stands out or needs improvement.

Sprout’s powerful competitor analysis features aid in discerning which content types are most effective, helping to refine strategies to resonate with target audiences. Regular use of these AI-powered tools for competitive analysis empowers businesses to stay agile, adapt strategies and maintain a competitive edge in their industry.

Sprout's comprehensive analysis report includes metrics such as share of voice, engagement, sentiment and impressions to help identify key areas where a brand stands out or needs improvement.

International marketing

AI’s ability to analyze and interpret multilingual sentiment plays a crucial role in helping businesses navigate the complexities of international marketing by providing language support, cultural adaptation, market analysis and customer insights. This enables businesses to create more effective and targeted marketing strategies for diverse international audiences.

Predictive analytics

AI’s predictive analytics are pivotal in forecasting future customer behavior, a crucial factor in marketing decision-making. By analyzing customer data, AI predicts trends and preferences, enabling businesses to tailor their marketing efforts more effectively. This foresight leads to smarter, data-informed choices, ensuring that marketing strategies are relevant and timely, catering to evolving customer needs and preferences.

Targeting decisions

AI enhances targeting decisions by sifting through extensive customer data to pinpoint the most appropriate audiences. It identifies patterns and preferences within customer interactions, allowing businesses to focus their products or services on the groups most likely to engage. This targeted approach, driven by AI’s deep learning capabilities, ensures that marketing efforts are concentrated where they have the highest potential for impact and conversion.

Media buying

Companies like Volkswagen utilize AI to optimize their advertising strategies. AI analyzes vast amounts of data to determine the most effective channels and placements for advertising, enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of media spend. AI’s application in media buying improves campaign performance and provides valuable insights into consumer behavior and media consumption patterns.

Artificial intelligence in product development

AI in product development helps teams move beyond traditional design and customer preferences. Its capabilities extend to creating more intuitive and customer-centric products driven by data and innovation.

Product design

AI modernizes product design by analyzing market trends, customer feedback and historical data, leading to products that meet current and future market needs. For example, AI prompts can guide designers in creating products that satisfy market demands and predict future trends. This approach enables exploring a broader range of possibilities, ensuring products are both innovative and relevant.

Project management

In project management, AI automates routine tasks, optimizes resource allocation and provides real-time progress insights. By analyzing historical project data, AI enhances risk assessment and mitigation strategies, leading to more productive and proficient project management.

Predictive maintenance

AI’s role in predictive maintenance is pivotal, using data-driven methods to analyze historical data, identify patterns and anomalies, and generate proactive maintenance recommendations. This approach significantly reduces downtime and maintenance costs, increasing overall efficiency.

Integrating AI into product development marks a new era of innovation, where products are functionally superior and deeply aligned with customer expectations and market dynamics.

Artificial intelligence in sales

AI is creating a new paradigm of efficiency and customer engagement. From email campaigns and lead scoring to proposal writing, AI is enhancing both the sales process and the outcomes.

Email campaigns

AI-driven analytics optimize email strategies by creating narratives that strike a chord with customers. By analyzing customer data and behavior, AI crafts engaging and contextual content. It automates the drafting and sending of personalized emails at scale, ensuring each communication is tailored to the recipient’s interests and needs.

Lead scoring

In lead scoring, AI processes huge quantities of customer data to improve accuracy in identifying potential customers. It considers various factors, including website behavior, demographics, firmographics, job title, purchase history and social media engagement. This results in a ranking system that prioritizes leads based on their conversion likelihood, streamlining the sales process.

Proposal compilation

AI also plays a key role in generating personalized, evidence-based sales proposals. By utilizing AI tools, sales teams can create compelling visuals, presentation slides and text that directly address customers’ needs and aspirations, significantly increasing the chances of closing deals.

Artificial intelligence in customer support

AI enhances customer support by enabling businesses to offer more personalized and optimized service. AI enables teams to customize customer interactions, automate the ticketing process and leverage trend analysis to provide deeper insights into customer preferences and behaviors. These applications streamline operations and elevate the overall customer experience.

Personalize customer support

AI empowers businesses to offer personalized support by analyzing customer data and interaction history. This leads to tailored support experiences and recommendations. For example, KFC China’s introduction of facial recognition technology to predict customer orders based on age and mood is a testament to AI’s capability to enhance customer service.

Customer Care by Sprout equips teams to create authentic customer connections at scale. With tools like AI-powered sentiment analysis, Sprout uses this technology to turn customer interactions into insightful data, helping businesses fine-tune their care strategies and content.

Sprout’s social listening solutions further automate FAQs and identify customer sentiment, respectively, supporting a comprehensive and personalized customer service approach. This AI integration is not just about responding faster; it’s about understanding customers better and providing a consistently excellent experience across platforms.

Automate ticketing process

AI streamlines the ticketing process by efficiently routing customer queries to the appropriate agent or department and providing standardized responses for common queries. It also offers self-service portals for customers to find solutions independently, boosting efficiency in customer service.

Trend analysis

AI analytics tools gather and examine large amounts of customer data, offering valuable insights into customer behaviors, preferences and trends. These insights are crucial for businesses to refine their service strategies and product offerings, ensuring they stay aligned with customer needs.

Artificial intelligence in human resources

AI is transforming the HR landscape by streamlining recruitment, enhancing employee engagement and understanding employee sentiment.

Understand the voice of the employee

AI analyzes employee feedback from various sources, such as surveys, performance reviews and social media. By providing insights into employee sentiment, engagement, and satisfaction, AI helps businesses understand and respond to their workforce’s needs more effectively.

Simplify recruitment process

AI automates several recruitment tasks, including resume screening, candidate sourcing and interview scheduling, thereby saving time and enhancing recruitment efficiency.

For example, Unilever uses AI to screen video interviews and analyze candidates’ body language, tone of voice and word choice. Thanks to AI’s ability to eliminate bias, Unilever saw a significant increase in new hires from various gender, racial and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Trend analysis

AI tools gather and analyze employee data, offering insights into behavior, preferences and trends. These insights help refine HR strategies and boost employee engagement, fostering a more satisfied and productive workforce.

Artificial intelligence in operations

AI enhances operational processes by increasing efficiency and supporting innovation via automated processes and optimized asset management.

Automate processes

Intelligent automation blends AI with robotic process automation (RPA) to enhance decision-making and streamline workflows. AI’s cognitive capabilities and big data understanding enable predictive outcomes, allowing companies to proactively refine processes.

AI-powered automation is critical for Business Process Management (BPM). BPM automatically analyzes optimal methods at different stages, creating replicable models. An example of BPM in procurement is automating the entire purchasing process. Advanced automation increases profitability, accountability, productivity and flexibility. It saves time and reduces errors.

Inventory management

AI plays a critical role in optimizing inventory management. A notable example is Heineken, which uses machine learning algorithms to forecast demand and maintain optimal inventory levels. AI-driven inventory management lowers storage costs and increases profitability and customer satisfaction by ensuring products are readily available when needed.

AI is also shaping a more proactive, data-driven approach to business management. This sets a new standard for business agility and customer responsiveness, where operational excellence is intrinsically linked to intelligent technology.

Artificial intelligence in fraud detection and security

The global cybersecurity AI market is poised to reach $38.2 billion by 2026. Utilizing advanced algorithms, AI proactively detects, counters and minimizes potential risks, processing extensive amounts of information in real time to spot patterns and anomalies that could signal breaches or fraudulent activities.

Monitoring media threats

AI helps monitor media dangers by continuously scanning digital spaces for potential security threats to brands. This capability is vital in today’s digital-first landscape, where threats can emerge from numerous online channels.

Identifying physical anomalies

AI algorithms are also adept at detecting unusual patterns, significantly contributing to sectors like retail, banking and public safety. Swift recognition and response to physical threats are made possible by AI’s keen pattern recognition, enhancing security measures in these critical areas.

For example, Mastercard is helping banks predict scams in real time and before any money leaves a victim’s account. This enables the organization to thwart fraudulent attempts swiftly and effectively, minimizing potential damage.

What does the use of AI in business mean for different stakeholders

Integrating AI in business encompasses a spectrum of benefits and use cases for diverse stakeholders.

For employees

AI’s role in business processes translates to an enhanced employee work experience. By taking over routine tasks, AI frees employees to focus on strategic, creative activities, increasing job satisfaction and opening up avenues for career development. This shift towards high-value work fosters a dynamic and innovative work environment.

Education and training in AI ethics and application enable businesses to inform their workforce about AI’s potential and limitations and how to leverage it responsibly.

For businesses

AI equips businesses with tools for enhanced efficiency, deeper customer insights and innovative product development. It drives a competitive edge and lays the groundwork for future growth, enabling businesses to make informed decisions, create stronger marketing campaigns and develop more effective workflows.

Defining an organizational structure for AI governance is key. This includes assigning roles and responsibilities and introducing an independent body to oversee AI compliance for responsible and ethical usage.

For investors

Investors should focus on AI solutions that enhance a company’s existing strengths. AI should drive long-term impact and act as an ‘exoskeleton’ to business processes. It’s crucial to select strategic AI partners who understand the nuances of control, ownership and accountability. Look beyond the immediate allure of AI and focus on sustainable, value-driven integration.

For the public

As AI integrates deeper into our lives, it becomes vital to digital literacy. Ethical AI frameworks set clear guidelines and principles for AI development and deployment. This ensures AI systems prioritize transparency, fairness, privacy and accountability, serving the greater good without harming individuals or communities.

Continuous monitoring and auditing are critical to upholding these ethical standards. Regular audits by trained experts are necessary to assess AI performance and identify potential issues like biases that may emerge over time. Informed consent is another crucial aspect, where the public’s voluntary and informed agreement is obtained for AI-related processes, and individuals are fully aware of how their data is used.

Adopting these measures allows businesses to respect privacy rights, handle sensitive information securely and mitigate potential risks associated with AI.

Future of AI in business

AI and automation solutions provide businesses with targeted insights and capabilities to navigate the complexities of today’s digital landscape.

By embracing AI with a focus on strategic and ethical implementation, businesses are preparing for the future and actively shaping it. They are creating a landscape where technology and human ingenuity converge to drive unprecedented growth and customer satisfaction.

By leveraging Sprout Social’s AI-driven tools, businesses can anticipate customer needs, speed up personalized content, craft messages that resonate, and develop data-driven and customer-centric strategies.

Schedule a demo to discover how Sprout can transform your marketing and care strategies.

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]]> What is a Net Promoter Score (NPS) and how do you measure it? https://sproutsocial.com/insights/net-promoter-score/ Wed, 21 Feb 2024 16:00:28 +0000 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/?p=182802 The modern customer journey exists across multiple channels and countless touchpoints. To get a truly cohesive view of your customer experience, you need to Read more...

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]]> The modern customer journey exists across multiple channels and countless touchpoints. To get a truly cohesive view of your customer experience, you need to be tracking your Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Net promoter score is more than just a customer service metric. It offers the combined power of quantitative and qualitative feedback, giving teams the chance to make substantial improvements to their customer care strategy.

In this article, we explain the basics of NPS measurement. Plus, we also walk you through how you can collect NPS data using Sprout.

What is a Net Promoter Score

A text-based image that says, “What is Net Promoter Score? Net Promoter Score measures customer loyalty by gauging whether or not a customer would refer your business to a friend or colleague. It’s calculated by asking customers to rate the likelihood of their referral on a scale of zero to ten."

Net Promoter Score measures customer loyalty by gauging whether or not a customer would refer your business to a friend or colleague. It’s calculated by asking customers to rate the likelihood of their referral on a scale of zero to ten. Anyone who provides a score of zero to six is a “Detractor”, while scores of seven to eight are “Passives” and scores of nine and ten are “Promoters”.

Although NPS is a type of customer satisfaction benchmark, it’s different from a customer effort score or customer satisfaction score. It measures the overall sentiment that a customer feels towards your brand, rather than focusing on a specific purchase.

Why your Net Promoter Score matters

Your Net Promoter Score is a key customer service metric. It’s a straightforward assessment that can serve as a powerful roadmap toward new and improved customer experiences—for fans and critics alike.

Understanding and tracking your NPS opens your business up to major opportunities, including:

Spotting customers at risk of churn

Your Net Promoter Score data will show your brand’s biggest promoters—and its harshest critics.

While their feedback may be hard to swallow, it’s absolutely crucial. When you proactively identify your detractors, you also create an opportunity to win them back. Once you’ve fine-tuned your NPS survey process, you can then establish a structured approach to following up with detractors. This outreach can transform negative experiences into positive ones, salvaging customer relationships along the way.

Eventually, your NPS data will be able to do more than just save one-off customers. With enough data, AI analytics tools can predict churn patterns and provide recommendations for intervention, contributing to a stronger overall customer experience.

Activating your biggest fans

Customer expectations are higher than ever. Imagine the level of satisfaction required for someone to rate a business a nine or ten out of ten in a feedback survey. Being able to accurately identify those superfans is more than just helpful—it can drive meaningful impact for your business.

Regularly measuring your Net Promoter Score gives your most enthusiastic supporters a chance to identify themselves. This information can be used to create tailored engagement programs that generate excitement and most importantly, word-of-mouth recommendations.

Once you start consistently engaging your promoters, you turn them into brand ambassadors. These advocates are invaluable, especially now that brand authenticity is at the top of everyone’s minds.

A text-based image that ranks what consumers say they don’t see enough of from brands on social media. The top response is, “authentic, non-promotional content”.

Supporting marketing efforts

Your NPS data offers valuable information about the aspects of your products, services or brand that resonate most with customers. These are more than just wins for your team—they’re valuable differentiators that can be used to support marketing efforts.

For example, say you work with a retail brand that collects NPS survey data. After analyzing trends in NPS feedback, you realize that customers love your brick-and-mortar experience—especially the help they receive from your thoughtful and experienced staff.

These insights provide the perfect foundation for a social media campaign promoting the level of service customers can expect when they shop with your brand. You might even center the campaign creative around real staff members and store locations to build a sense of community and familiarity.

Securing a competitive advantage

Tracking your NPS allows you to benchmark your performance against competitors in your industry, providing valuable insights into customer perception relative to your peers. By comparing your NPS with industry averages or competitor scores, you gain a clearer understanding of where you stand and how you stack up against others in the market.

Benchmarking against competitors also allows teams to set more realistic goals for their overall customer experience strategy. When you aim to outdo your competitors, you set your business up for great market share within your industry.

Improving customer experience

Feedback is the gift that keeps on giving. With Net Promoter Score (NPS) feedback, you can enhance your overall customer experience, resulting in more satisfied customers.

Your NPS survey data is a treasure trove of valuable customer feedback that can be segmented and analyzed to uncover pathways for improvement. This data makes it easier to align business priorities with customer needs and preferences, powering more strategic decision-making throughout your organization.

There isn’t a single department that wouldn’t stand to benefit from Net Promoter Score data. When every team is rallied around the customer, the whole business wins.

How to calculate Net Promoter Score

Calculating your Net Promoter Score starts with distributing NPS surveys at key points throughout your customer journey. This critical feedback will provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction and loyalty. For a thorough assessment of your customer retention practices, you’ll want to distribute NPS surveys:

  • Shortly after customers make a purchase
  • At the conclusion of support interactions
  • At regular intervals (quarterly, bi-annually, etc.)

It seems like a lot, but don’t worry—there are plenty of customer service software tools that can automate survey distribution. The right solution should allow you to send out a large number of surveys at the right time to the right people in just a few clicks.

Once you begin collecting responses, you can calculate your score. To calculate Net Promoter Score, ignore Passive respondents then subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. As a reminder:

  • Detractors are customers who gave a score from 0 to 6
  • Passives are customers who gave a score of 7 or 8
  • Promoters are customers who gave a score of 9 or 10

Your NPS can range from -100 to 100, with a positive score indicating that you have more promoters than detractors.

How to collect Net Promoter Score feedback with Sprout Social

You can send out NPS surveys at the conclusion of any social customer care interaction on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly known as Twitter) with the Sprout Social Advanced plan. To do so, navigate to Settings by clicking on your initials in the lower left corner of the app. From there you’ll click Customer Feedback under Inbox and Review settings.

The Customer Feedback configuration settings in Sprout Social. Users can choose to automate the collection of Net Promoter Score data using Sprout’s Customer Feedback tools.

You can use the profile picker to configure customer survey distribution for each of your social profiles. Be sure to select “Net Promoter Score™ (0-10)” as the Feedback Type for setup across all networks. This will ensure that users are prompted with the right Feedback Questions to accurately measure NPS.

You can report on your NPS using the Customer Feedback Report, which aggregates all customer satisfaction ratings collected via X, Instagram and Facebook Feedback survey responses. The report offers an overview of feedback results, along with performance data by team member and feedback responses.

What is a good Net Promoter Score?

Generally speaking, any score above zero is considered a good Net Promoter Score. However, a great customer experience strategy aims to exceed customer expectations at every touch point. To remain competitive, your true goal should be continuous improvement.

Analyze qualitative customer feedback, historical NPS score data and industry benchmarks to determine your goal Net Promoter Score. Set your sights on something realistic and achievable, and you’ll be on your way to creating a more competitive customer experience.

Are you getting the full picture when it comes to your Net Promoter Score?

People of all ages and demographics turn to social media to share praise, air grievances and everything in between. When you disregard Net Promoter Score data from social, you compromise the accuracy of your customer experience insights.

Sprout Social will help you get a more complete picture of your customer care story. Sign up for a free trial, and find out how you can drive more meaningful connections from social today.

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]]> Business intelligence reporting: making sense of your organization’s data https://sproutsocial.com/insights/business-intelligence-reporting/ Wed, 21 Feb 2024 15:00:12 +0000 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/?p=182750 Most businesses collect a wealth of data daily. From consumer and competitor insights to social media analytics, this data helps you make smarter decisions, Read more...

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]]> Most businesses collect a wealth of data daily. From consumer and competitor insights to social media analytics, this data helps you make smarter decisions, spot trends and stay ahead of the curve—if you know how to make sense of it.

This is the power of business intelligence (BI) reporting.

The right BI tools turn mountains of data from various sources into actionable, easily analyzed documents or dashboards. Instead of guessing or sifting through piles of data, BI reporting does the heavy lifting for you, saving you time and headaches.

Bringing social media insights into the mix adds a whole new dimension to your reporting as well because you get real-time feedback from your social media audience, competitors and campaigns. This gives you the most up-to-date insight into how people perceive you and engage with your brand.

Read on to find out all you need to know about business intelligence reporting, why you need it, the best reporting tools and business intelligence best practices.

Table of Contents

What is business intelligence reporting?

Business intelligence reporting is the process of collecting data from various sources, such as customer databases, financial information systems and digital marketing channels, and presenting it in a digestible and actionable format.

Screenshot of Sprout Social’s Analytics Reports dashboard that shows reports on various key performance indicators such as engagement, team inbox, task performance, etc.

Business intelligence reports help organizations understand what’s happening with their business, and make sense of critical data in order to make more informed decisions and predictions. The result? Often more growth and a bigger bottom line. According to a McKinsey report, data-driven organizations experience above-market growth and earnings increases of 15 to 25 percent.

Business intelligence reports can also be tailored for specific departments and stakeholders. For example, marketing business intelligence helps organizations contextualize marketing data and connect marketing metrics like social media engagements and follower growth to broader business goals. It also helps businesses predict the future by spotting trends and identifying potential problems before they get out of hand.

What is the importance of business intelligence reporting?

The biggest benefit of business intelligence reporting is that it reduces guesswork. Instead of relying on gut feelings or hunches, data provides concrete evidence to guide decisions.

Here are a few other key advantages of business intelligence reporting.

Faster decision-making

According to research from Oracle, 74% of people say the number of decisions they make every day has increased tenfold over the last three years. Business intelligence reporting addresses this decision fatigue by providing instant access to critical insights. Whether you’re analyzing budgets, planning a marketing campaign or optimizing internal processes, BI helps you make quick, intelligent decisions on the spot.

Customer insights

Customers today are pickier about where they spend their money and which brands they trust. They like brands that understand how they think and feel. Business intelligence reports help you tap into your customers’ needs and even predict their wants by uncovering in-depth behavior and trend data.

Competitive analysis

Analyzing business intelligence data on competitive analysis insights like competitor engagement, follower growth and content strategies helps businesses understand what’s going well for their competitors and identify opportunities to refine their social media strategies. For example, if a BI competitive report shows you that a competitor’s video content has been doing exceptionally well lately, you might consider incorporating more video content into your social media strategy.

Cost optimization

BI reporting also uncovers operational inefficiencies, such as production bottlenecks, slashing unnecessary expenses. You can also proactively monitor key performance indicators like cost per unit produced or cost per sale, to address them and be on target. Lastly, combining historical data and predictive analytics helps companies forecast future costs more accurately, leading to better resource allocation and budgeting.

Streamlined process

Have you ever wondered when you should publish a social media post or what types of content resonate most with your audience? BI reporting tools analyze data from social media platforms to give you data-driven content strategy recommendations. The result? Less time experimenting and more time producing more of what your audience enjoys at the right time.

Reliable data quality

Business intelligence tools consolidate data from various sources into a single platform, reducing the chances of errors due to manual data entry or siloed information. They also often have data cleaning features that catch inconsistencies and duplicate entries. Many BI tools also offer real-time or near-real-time data updates, so you always have the most current information at hand.

Data-driven culture

With customizable and personalizable dashboards, BI tools empower your employees to make more data-informed decisions, ultimately benefiting the whole organization. When everyone can access, analyze, share and act on relevant data it fosters a more data-driven culture.

Business intelligence reporting challenges

Business intelligence tools make it easier but synthesizing data from different sources into one accessible dashboard or report isn’t so simple. Understanding all that information and ensuring the data is accurate, relevant and helpful is also tough.

Whether you’re already using business intelligence tools in your organization or getting ready to implement a solution, here are some common challenges you might encounter.

Technological advancements

Technology advancements make business intelligence reporting tools more impactful, but have certain challenges. Take cloud-based solutions, for instance. They handle vast amounts of data but also need tight security to keep that data safe. Rapid advancements also mean frequent software and system updates, leading to higher maintenance costs and additional training required to keep users up-to-date.

Data governance

Business intelligence reports contain sensitive information, so you need clear rules and processes around access to keep your data safe and accurate. Think of data governance as the rulebook for how a company handles its data. It involves deciding who’s responsible for what, ensuring the data is clean and reliable, and keeping it safe from hackers or unauthorized access using encryption or other safeguards. Controlling who sees what data is critical.

Linguistic challenges

Business intelligence reports often have technical terms and complicated data that might leave non-experts scratching their heads. Also, if the report’s language isn’t consistent with the terms your employees already use, they’ll struggle to understand it and become overwhelmed. Sprout understands this. That’s why our social media intelligence reports, for example, include topic summaries so report viewers can quickly view the top performance metrics they care about.

A Listening report from Sprout Social that shows metrics on Topic summary, total engagements, audience sentiment, etc.

User adoption

Some people in your organization might resist using business intelligence software because they’re used to other methods or feel overwhelmed by new technology. Plus, some BI tools are pretty complex, even for the tech-literate. Getting everyone on board with BI reporting means providing the right support and showing them how it will make their jobs easier.

Top business intelligence reporting tools

Business intelligence can be a game changer for your company. However, with so many platforms on the market, it’s tough to know which business intelligence tools would best fit your organization.

Here are a few of the most popular choices on the market and their capabilities.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social makes spotting business trends and opportunities a breeze. Sprout has plenty of built-in reporting tools and templates, like our Social Listening and Sentiment Analysis features, that will show you how your company stacks up to competitors and how your audience feels about your brand. Sprout also integrates with Salesforce and Tableau, allowing you to see your social data alongside other business intelligence insights and get a 360-degree, unsiloed view of your business data.

Screenshot from Sprout Social's social listening tool showcasing metrics like share of voice, total engagements and average positive sentiment.

Need more customization? Use our reporting features to build custom reports from scratch or personalize existing templates with widgets to hone in on key data—like the sample Go-To-Market Product Launch report below. Our digestible and user-friendly social media reports are also easy to understand and share with teams.

Go-To-Market Product Launch Report in Sprout Social

With Sprout, you’ll be able to contextualize social media insights by seeing which interactions and campaigns attract leads and drive revenue growth.

Databox

Databox is an analytics platform that simplifies data management for growing businesses. It centralizes your data for better decision-making and performance improvement. With Databox, you get a centralized source of truth, quick access to insights and better decision-making informed by data. As a result, you’ll spend less time creating reports and more time focusing on strategy.

Databox data visualization dashboard that shows metrics such as sales pipeline, customer locations, ad performance, etc.

HubSpot

HubSpot simplifies business intelligence, providing a comprehensive platform for all your customers’ needs. The all-in-one platform connects your marketing, sales, customer service, content management, operations and commerce processes, providing deep insights into every customer interaction. From marketing automation to sales tools, HubSpot helps organizations connect with and better understand their customers.

Hubspot marketing report that shows various KPIs such as new contacts, marketing qualified leads, website visits, etc.

Business intelligence reporting best practices

Using business intelligence tools without following best practices is like taking a road trip with a broken GPS. You’d probably get lost and make some wrong turns. Similarly, misusing BI tools could lead to inaccurate conclusions, poor strategic decisions, wasted resources and missed growth opportunities.

Here are a few best practices to get the most out of your business intelligence tool.

Define your stakeholders

Who will be accessing your business intelligence reports? Marketers? Customer service representatives? Product developers? Executive leadership? All of the above? Before generating a report or creating a dashboard, identify who will be using those reports. Then, based on their needs, technical skills and knowledge, include only the most relevant information.

Choose the right metrics

When picking metrics to include in your reports, consider the following three questions:

  • Your business goals. Are you focusing on long-term or short-term objectives?
  • Your audience. How do they impact decisions?
  • The bigger picture. What metrics will paint the most comprehensive story and guide your next steps?

Use data visualizations

Let’s face it—numbers and spreadsheets are a little boring to review and challenging to understand on their own. That’s why visuals are super helpful for data reporting and storytelling. Just don’t overdo it. Don’t cram too many graphs and charts into your reports. Leave some white space between your visuals for clarity.

Drop-downs and filters also help users focus on the most relevant insights. For example, in the Sprout Social Profile Perfomance report pictured below, the filter button (in the top right corner) enables users to select the profiles they want to view data for throughout the report.

Sprout Social Profile Performance report that gives you an overall performance summary and individual graphs on KPIs such as impressions, video views, post link clicks, etc.

Ensure data reliability

If your data isn’t reliable, it’s unusable. To ensure your business intelligence reports present trustworthy data, regularly check your data sources and verify that they’re pulling the most accurate and up-to-date data. You should also double-check your data for errors or inconsistencies. Lastly, secure your data using multi-factor authentication, encryption or other measures.

Leverage AI

AI is a powerful tool for interpreting business intelligence data. AI can review historical data to predict future trends, which could help you manage inventory or project sales. It also assists in abnormality detection, notifying you of unusual data patterns like sudden drops in website traffic.

The future of BI reporting with AI

Business intelligence is a powerful tool in its own right. However, adding AI brings a whole new level of capability. For example, if AI handles most of your data analysis, trend spotting and report creation task, you’ll have more time to focus on strategy while making faster decisions and predictions.

We’re already incorporating AI into Sprout’s social business intelligence features. For example, our Smart Categories tool automatically identifies, classifies and groups data in your Listening Topic (i.e., specific keywords, hashtags, brands, or industries you follow). The Sentiment in Listening feature also uses AI to classify messages as positive, negative or neutral.

Ready to see what AI-powered business intelligence can do for your organization? Request a personalized Sprout Social demo today.

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]]> Template: Social Media Customer Service Training Deck https://sproutsocial.com/insights/templates/social-media-customer-service-training/ Mon, 19 Feb 2024 17:44:15 +0000 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/?post_type=templates&p=182677 Social media is unlike any other customer service channel. It exists in a middle ground between marketing and customer support, blurring lines between the Read more...

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]]> Social media is unlike any other customer service channel. It exists in a middle ground between marketing and customer support, blurring lines between the two teams. Success in this space starts with clear guidelines that curb confusion. 

Create better customer experiences by ensuring your support agents understand the nuances of providing care on social. This social media customer service training deck will help you explain everything they need to know about the channel, including:

  • Tips on delivering brand-friendly customer service across key social networks
  • Instructions on when and how to escalate customer service inquiries
  • Crisis management procedures, including what to do and who to call

Be the partner your customer service team needs. Download this social media customer service training deck and set your support agents up for more social media success. 

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]]> How to supercharge your marketing strategy with AI automation https://sproutsocial.com/insights/ai-automation/ Mon, 19 Feb 2024 16:00:39 +0000 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/?p=182623 The intuitive collaboration between artificial intelligence (AI) and human effort is driving innovation across a range of industries such as health sciences, supply chain Read more...

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]]> The intuitive collaboration between artificial intelligence (AI) and human effort is driving innovation across a range of industries such as health sciences, supply chain management, manufacturing and research & development. In the business world, AI automation equips companies to create impactful product and marketing strategies and enhance operations to increase productivity.

AI automation powers AI marketing, which marketers, like you, can use to pivot your campaigns seamlessly based on real-time market indicators, empower your customer service teams and grow holistically. You can create highly personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with the audience, publish content at optimal times for maximum engagement and execute targeted advertising seamlessly.

In this article, we talk more about AI automation, how it benefits organizations and what its most common applications are in the business world.

What is AI automation?

AI automation is the integration of AI with the automation of repetitive, rules-based tasks. This combination enriches regular automation by embedding AI capabilities, like the ability to learn and adapt from previous tasks, into the process. It is used in several areas to enhance efficiency such as customer service, manufacturing, supply chain management, e-commerce, quality assurance, product design and more.

Call out card describing AI automation. It reads, AI automation is the integration of AI with the automation of repetitive, rules-based tasks. This combination enriches regular automation by embedding AI capabilities, like the ability to learn and adapt from previous tasks, into the process.

AI automation has revolutionized how brands approach their business and marketing strategies. AI marketing tools automate repetitive tasks with speed and efficiency and enable you to analyze vast amounts of data, such as customer or employee feedback and social conversations, at speed and scale, to surface necessary insights that can be instrumental in improving a business.

Take for example, Sprout’s AI-driven Social Media Listening solution. The tool enables you to analyze social listening data—up to 50,000+ messages a second and up to 600M+ messages a day— so you can automatically sift through billions of data points and get key brand insights within seconds. This enables you to make faster, more impactful decisions that resonate with your target audience and help you meet and exceed customer expectations.

What is intelligent automation (IA)?

Intelligent automation is the blending of AI with robotic process automation (RPA) and is often used synonymously with AI automation. By combining AI tasks like machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) with traditional rules-based automation, intelligent automation systems handle complex AI analytics to improve decision-making and workflows.

Call out card defining Intelligent automation. It reads, Intelligent automation is the blending of AI with robotic process automation (RPA) and is often used synonymously with AI automation.

This translates into streamlined operations and improved productivity. By integrating the cognitive capabilities of AI with understanding big data, intelligent automation helps with predicting outcomes so companies can proactively improve processes.

For instance, intelligent automation can be used in multi-step email campaigns, like a promotional campaign where each step can be automated based on the recipient’s behavior. This eliminates the need for manual reading of every response for further action as it gets automated based on pre-defined conditions. Thus, making you time-efficient while enabling campaign management at scale.

How AI automation benefits businesses

AI automation enables companies to automate workflows and get actionable insights through AI tasks like sentiment analysis so they can make tangible changes to drive growth. Let’s dig in further to see the benefits of intelligent automation.

1. Enhanced productivity

Intelligent automation increases team productivity because it automates and optimizes workflows based on analytical models that ensure maximum productivity. It also reduces cumbersome, time-consuming tasks such as feedback data analysis by automating them using machine learning. This enables AI tools to automatically analyze millions of data points from numerous data sources in minutes to extract insights that would have otherwise taken several manual hours to complete. It also reduces the risk of miscalculations common when analyzing complex data manually for patterns and trends.

2. Sentiment mining

Similarly, AI automation tools use machine learning to automatically identify sentiment in data as postive, negative or neutral, and thereby give you insight into how people perceive your brand and services. Sentiment analysis can also be applied to automatically prioritize customer complaints so customer care teams know which cases to handle first.

In Sprout, you get sentiment analysis metrics of your brand automatically in the form of graphs and reports. These sentiment insights are based on social conversations around you from a certain timeline, from different demographics or on various topics, to help you understand how your product/brand is faring in the public eye.

Sprout Social’s sentiment analysis features including charts tracking overall sentiment.

This is a crucial advantage, considering 44% of business leaders think sentiment analysis is critical in understanding consumer behavior and are already using it to guide their strategies, according to our 2023 State of Social Media Report.

Data visualization card that says 44% of business leaders think sentiment analysis is critical in understanding consumer behavior and are already using it to guide their strategies

3. Cost-efficiency

AI automation doesn’t just help with productivity: it also enables you to smartly reallocate team efforts more strategically. Plus, since AI tools can take over mammoth data analysis projects in minutes (and more accurately than humans), they also reduce the costs associated with identifying and rectifying mistakes based on incorrect insights.

4. Competitive advantage

AI automation uses advanced tasks like NLP to analyze and filter text with pre-defined topics and keywords so you can keep a tab on what people are saying about your brand and its competitors. These algorithms let you dig into the identified data further to investigate potential market drivers.

In Sprout, you can do this by applying Listening Alerts to notify you of shifts in conversation around your preferred Listening Topics. This functionality ensures you never miss out on relevant conversations happening around your brand or competitors.

Screenshot of Sprout's Alerts functionality that ensures you never miss out on relevant conversations happening around your brand or competitors.

And because intelligent automation enables you to process big data from disparate sources simultaneously, you get valuable insights in real-time so you can alter your approach promptly.

5. Scalability

Unlike traditional systems that require an increase in team size to manage higher volumes of tasks and their complexities as a business grows, intelligent automation handles those same tasks while maintaining efficiency. This enables you to scale quickly and efficiently while ensuring flexibility in your work environment.

6. Risk management and compliance

AI automation helps you build an effective risk management strategy by identifying inflammatory or sensitive comments about your brand. This also enables you to manage your influencer marketing more effectively to ensure your influencers are following brand guidelines. Similarly, AI automation identifies financial and legal fraud by scanning outliers in data patterns to support compliance.

How AI automation works

Several AI tasks work behind the scenes to power AI automation—including technologies such as named entity recognition (NER) and sentiment analysis, which are pivotal in managing brand reputation and quality assurance. For example, these technologies can automatically identify anomalies in data patterns such as potentially provocative comments based on pre-determined entities and keywords and alert the end-user. This capability helps PR, social and customer service teams to immediately address such comments and take appropriate action.

Here’s a brief look at what happens behind the scenes in an AI automation process and how data engineers build a model.

Image listing the steps in building an AI automation model., which are data collection, data preparation, model training, data processing and continuous learning

Step 1: Data collection

Data is collected from different sources such as social networks, customer forums, news articles and survey responses. If we’re building a model to identify sentiment in data and send alerts and notifications when an inflammatory response is detected, data from a wide range of social media conversations is collected. The bigger the data, the more accurate the model will ultimately be.

Step 2: Data preparation

The gathered data is cleaned by removing outliers and inconsistencies and then formatted to suit the AI tool that will be used for data analysis.

Step 3: Training the model

The tool is now trained with this clean data, which is annotated or labeled so machine learning algorithms can identify and understand word patterns and associations. NLP and part-of-speech taggers help in text analysis while deep learning algorithms ensure the model remembers these patterns so it can apply to similar data analysis in the future.

The results are validated against the testing data, and the cycle is repeated until the results are optimal.

Step 4: Data processing

The AI tool can now process data like social listening or customer feedback and will swiftly pick up @mentions and keywords it has been trained to identify. The model is further refined so it is specific to your business and industry.

For example, if the model picks up a post that violates social media guidelines by detecting negative words built into its vocabulary, it will automatically take pre-defined actions such as hiding the post, curbing its reach and alerting the admin through notifications.

Step 5: Continuous learning

Neural networks help the AI tool be in continual learning mode so it remembers the results and notable data points from each data analysis cycle. It will also automatically add new words and @mentions to its vocabulary from any fresh data it analyzes. This makes it smarter, faster and more efficient with time.

What are the applications of AI automation?

From influencing the content we watch on our favorite streaming channels to enriching patient care and hospitality management, applications of AI automation are abound.

Let’s dive into some of them in detail.

Marketing and advertising

One of the most significant contributions of AI automation to marketing is in drawing insights from conversational analytics and enhancing business efficiency through software like RPA and business process management (BPM). Companies today have access to innovative market research methods that can bring key insights within minutes, compared to traditional time-consuming approaches like written surveys and focus groups.

These insights help brands personalize content for marketing and advertising. They also serve to influence other departments, including product or PR, to enhance brand engagement and ensure growth.

Robotic process automation

RPA software is used to automate rules-based tasks (such as report generation) and to power marketing automation like setting up automatic workflows for publishing content. This ability is pivotal in helping remote teams collaborate better with greater transparency in workflows.

For instance, Sprout’s Optimal Send Times feature, powered by our ViralPost® technology, identifies the best send times for posting your content on a specific day. The capability calculates a list of suggested times based on engagement factors to optimize the reach of your content so you can ensure your efforts are result-driven.

A screenshot of Sprout's Optimal Send Times feature, powered by our ViralPost® technology, which identifies the best send times for posting your content on a specific day.

Business process management

BPM helps in automatically analyzing what methods are optimal at different stages in the approval cycle of a project so they can be replicated to reach the desired result. This requires the software to identify an effective strategy, create a process management model, and then analyze and measure the effectiveness of that model.

A common application of BPM is in procurement. BPM-powered AI automation automates the entire purchase process, which involves stages such as creating a purchase order, its approval, processing, delivery and payment.

Customer experience

AI automation tools can predict customer needs by analyzing demographic and behavioral trends in historical data, enabling you to anticipate market gaps and act accordingly. You’re also able to streamline customer interactions across different channels like your website, social, app and brick and mortar stores to provide a seamless experience.

When all these elements come together, they serve to enhance your overall customer experience and brand satisfaction.

Customer service

Intelligent automation enables customer service AI so teams can identify common issues and frequently asked questions to program rules-based chatbots and virtual assistants. These tools are critical during peak times with high service requests as they can handle a multitude of inquiries efficiently and quickly. In turn, this AI-powered approach reduces wait times and allows you to offer customer support 24/7 while ensuring your customer service teams are not burnt out.

If incorporating a virtual assistant on your social channel or website seems daunting, consider beginning with a rules-based one to enrich your existing customer care approach. Sprout’s rules-based Bot Builder helps you map out a conversion tree for every question and response between you and the customer. Plus, you can train your chatbot to move the conversation to a live customer care team when the request becomes too complex.

Sprout Social's Bot Builder workflow, using a rule-based chatbot set up that resembles a flowchart, offering different paths for users to take depending on their needs.

Conversational AI

AI automation tools enable businesses to understand customer data contextually through conversational AI. These tools remember the previous interactions with a user by analyzing the tone in their responses and identifying them as positive or negative. They then help you apply those insights to an ongoing conversation so you can adapt your responses based on the perceived emotions of the customer. This personalization enriches the quality of the interaction and makes you more memorable to the user.

AI automation is also pivotal in understanding and developing voice-based systems, enabling speech recognition, real-time transcription and voice generation to mimic human-like spoken responses for easier interactions. Siri and Alexa are common examples of conversational AI.

The future of intelligent automation

AI automation is helping companies across industries innovate and tap into newer market segments. It’s helping them increase market share and geographic reach, explore new product innovations and optimize costs. So whether you’re looking to master competitive benchmarking, improve your content strategy or build your brand reputation more strategically, embrace the power of intelligent automation to pave the best path forward.

See how Sprout’s AI and automation can help you improve your business.

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]]> Audience engagement: What it is and tips to improve it https://sproutsocial.com/insights/audience-engagement/ Thu, 15 Feb 2024 16:00:15 +0000 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/?p=182589 Audience engagement is all about the connection your audience feels with your brand and the actions they take as a result of it. In Read more...

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]]> Audience engagement is all about the connection your audience feels with your brand and the actions they take as a result of it. In general, audience engagement, and social media engagement in particular, isn’t easy to come by. Social media users’ feeds are flooded with content competing for their attention. But when you hit the right chord, you can expect increased brand health, higher-quality leads and an active social following.

In this article, we’ll explore audience engagement benefits and strategies. Plus, we’ll show you some shining examples of what audience engagement looks like.

What is audience engagement?

Audience engagement is any interaction between your target audience and your brand. When an audience is fully engaged, they don’t sit back and passively scroll through your social posts. An engaged audience takes action, which can include clicking on a link or sharing content with a friend. This action furthers their connection with your brand.

If your audience doesn’t engage with your brand, it may be a sign that your content does not resonate with them. It’s vital to track audience engagement so you can be sure your content interests the people who matter most to your organization.

Types of audience engagement

There are several different ways audiences can engage with your brand on social media. Some forms of engagement require little effort, while others are much more involved. Here are some examples of common types of audience engagement:

Likes and reactions

Likes and reactions are one of the simplest ways for an audience to engage with your brand on social media—all your target audience has to do is click or tap a button. But when your audience does so, their followers see it in their feeds, which exponentially increases your brand’s visibility. That’s why likes and reactions are important metrics to consider when analyzing your content performance.

@sproutsocial

A content platform ForYou, joining a powerful platform For You. #socialmediamanager #socialmediamarketing #contentcreator #contentmarketing

♬ louis theroux still dre by Leonz – Leonz

Reviews and mentions

Reviewing or mentioning your brand is more involved than simply liking or sharing your social media posts. It shows that your audience is actively engaging in a conversation about your brand. They are passionate about what you do and want to tell people about it.

Comments and replies

Similar to reviews and mentions, comments and replies show that your target audience wants to engage in a conversation about you. They may converse directly with you by replying to your brand’s posts or comment on another post relevant to your brand. Either way, they’ve got something on their mind and they want to share it with others.

Shares and resharing

Sharing and resharing brand content seems like a simple form of audience engagement. However, it’s actually more complicated than that. When your audience shares or reshares your content, they are taking things a step further than just passively enjoying it.

Website interaction

If your target audience clicks through a link to your website from a social post, it shows they are committed to learning more about your brand. They liked what they saw on social enough to go off-platform and hear what you have to say.

Why is audience engagement important for your content strategy?

Audience engagement matters because your brand doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s not possible to have a successful digital marketing strategy or social media strategy without it. Here’s a peek at some of the many ways audience engagement can benefit your brand:

Increase brand loyalty

When your audience engages with your brand, especially more than once, they are more likely to stick around for the long term. Your target audience feels that your brand understands them and their needs, which leads to brand loyalty. An engaged audience will also learn about your company’s mission, vision and core values, and see how they align with their own. This further builds their connection to your brand.

Boost visibility

Social media algorithms reward audience engagement on your social posts by displaying them to more people. It tells the social platform that your content is interesting and that other people may also want to see it. By increasing audience engagement, you also increase visibility for your brand to new audiences.

Gain feedback

Tracking audience engagement helps you learn how your target audience feels about your brand. If they don’t engage with your content very much, it’s a sign that your posts aren’t relevant to your followers. You need to go back to the drawing board and see where you went wrong.

If they engage positively by commenting, sharing or liking your post, you must be doing something right. However, if you see negative comments, it’s time to scan through their feedback to determine what is causing the issue. Social listening tools like Sprout help brands surface the big issues, from customer service hold-ups to product defects and more.

Improve user experience

When an audience engages with your brand, they actively interact with you through likes, shares, comments, clicks and more. These actions give you insights to further tailor your content to your audience, and so creating a better user experience for them.

How to engage an audience

Getting your audience to engage with your content takes time and effort, and begins with your social media marketing strategy. With the right tactics and tools, you can be on your way to capturing the hearts and clicks of your target audience. Here is a list of strategies you can use to engage your audience better:

Understand your target audience

The most effective way to engage your audience is to get to know them. Your target audience shares specific characteristics, so a best practice is to look at commonalities within, such as:

  • Demographics
  • Geography
  • Behaviors
  • Psychographics
  • Buying intent
  • Subcultures
  • Interests, hobbies and values

This will help you determine what your audience cares about most, what day-to-day challenges they face and how you can best support them.

Knowing your audience will also help you determine which social channels to focus on. If you want to increase engagement, it’s best to move your resources to the channels your audience frequents.

Leverage AI and social listening

Social listening gives you access to the unfiltered opinions of your target audience. Social media management tools like Sprout help you conduct sentiment analysis with artificial intelligence so you can easily review and measure what people are saying about you—and topics related to your brand and industry—across social media.

These insights help marketers and larger teams understand exactly what needs to be improved, such as products, price, store locations, customer service or anything else you discover through social listening. Thus, helping you gain a competitive edge over the rest of the industry.

Preview of Sprout’s Sentiment Summary dashboard showing Net Sentiment Score and Net Sentiment Trend.

Define the metrics

How do you know what success looks like? You must determine how you’re going to measure audience engagement to track it. There are several metrics you can track, including:

  • Likes
  • Comments
  • Shares
  • Video views
  • Click-through rate (CTR)
  • Followers
  • Time on page
  • Conversion rate
  • Video completion rate

Track the metrics over time to spot trends or anomalies. For example, you may notice when you post about trending topics, your likes and shares go up, and when you plug your product, your comments go down. Tracking metrics enables you to adjust your social media strategy to increase audience engagement.

Sprout’s 2023 Content Benchmarks report is a good resource for understanding how you stack up against industry benchmarks. For example, the average daily inbound engagements per post in 2023 was 14. How do you compare?

A data visualization that shows that the average daily inbound engagements per post in 2023 was 14 across all industries, per the Sprout Social 2023 Benchmarks Report.

Use modern audience engagement strategies

We’ll get to modern audience engagement strategies in a bit, but the main message here is to understand what audiences want today.

Online trends move quickly, and brands have to keep up with the evolving tastes of their target audience. What may be popular one day could quickly drop out of favor the next. Keeping tabs on the types of content your audience wants and engages with most will help your brand stay relevant.

Track performance

Tracking performance using specific metrics, as we defined earlier, will also help you optimize your social media performance.

For example, if you get a lot of comments on your posts but take two days to respond to each one, you may be stopping a possible conversation. Track what happens when you respond to each comment within a day or within a few hours. Does that increase the level of engagement?

In this example, Wendy’s social media team does a great job of responding to audience comments, keeping the conversation going

 

A Facebook post from Wendy’s, with comments from the social team responding to audience comments and engaging in the conversation.

Try A/B testing

Conduct A/B testing to determine what your audience responds to most. You can test headlines, subheads, post text, images, post formats, post length, time of day, day of post and more. Ensure you only change one variable at a time. That way you will have a clear answer of what specific element caused your audience to engage differently.

Modern audience engagement strategies

How can you get your audience to consistently like, share and comment on your social media posts? Here are some of our favorite strategies for you to try.

Use visual storytelling

Users respond more favorably to posts that include visuals like graphics, videos and photos. However, it’s not enough to include just any video and image from your library. Curate the visuals so they signal the brand’s identity to your target audience without them ever seeing a logo or brand name.

Chanel’s Instagram account provides an excellent example of visual storytelling. The visuals are so consistent in style that any Chanel fan can spot them as being associated with the brand.

Chanel’s Instagram account photo grid as an example of visual storytelling.

Share personalized content

Social media users don’t react to generic content. They only engage with content that speaks to their hobbies, interests, values and other characteristics. Use attention-grabbing content tailored for specific groups of your audience. Personalizing content is one of the most effective audience engagement strategies because it shows your audience you understand their needs.

In this example, Nike appeals to soccer fans by using a specific hashtag and tailoring the copy and image to soccer players.

Be responsive

Social media is not a one-way communication tool, especially if you want to increase audience engagement. By being responsive to user comments, reviews, shares and other forms of engagement, your brand can address potential issues, build relationships with customers and foster loyalty.

For example, Coca-Cola responds quickly to all user posts about their brand, whether positive or negative, so its audience always feels heard.

A social post from Coca-Cola with quick responses to user posts about their brand, both positive or negative, so its audience always feels heard.

Engage influencers

Influencer marketing is an audience engagement strategy that can help connect your brand to new audiences who are already highly engaged. Influencers have a dedicated social following of people who trust and value their opinion. If an influencer vouches for your brand, their audience sees this as a form of social proof.

Zoe Sugg is a lifestyle influencer and entrepreneur with 9.2 million followers. She often posts about the products and services she uses in her day-to-day life which are also products that she thinks will appeal to her audience.

Build a community

Create a place where your target audience can gather online and connect with like-minded people. Online communities, like forums and private groups, strengthen your audience’s connection to your brand through the people they meet in the communities. For example, The Arboretum, Sprout’s online community, serves as a gathering place for 10,000 social and marketing professionals to connect for support, ideas, questions and industry updates.

Sprout's community channel, The Arboretum, that serves as a gathering place for 10,000 social and marketing professionals to connect for support, ideas, questions and industry updates.

Leverage user-generated content

What better way to get your audience engaged than by using their content in your social media posts? Try reacting to the original post or resharing the original post. Or, ask users to create content based on a specific prompt and share their content on your social channels. User-generated content makes your audience feel like they are a part of the brand and that they have a platform to share their experiences.

For example, Away uses content that customers of the brand have created. This makes Away’s audience feel special while providing social proof for potential customers.

Include interactive elements

Many social channels come with built-in interactive elements, such as quizzes and polls. These are useful for increasing engagement with your target audience and getting their direct feedback. Simply ask your audience a question and give them a couple of responses to choose from. This provides your audience with a voice and tells them you are listening.

24 Seven Talent makes excellent use of LinkedIn polls because they ask questions related to topics their audience cares deeply about.

An interactive poll from 24 Seven Talent to engage audiences.

Try contests

Sometimes, your audience needs an incentive to engage with your brand on social media. A contest is a great way to offer them a prize for their engagement. Social media contest entries can include liking or commenting on a post, tagging a friend or creating a video or photo entry, for example.

Take a look at this post for a giveaway contest from Nuba, which asks followers to enter by completing a number of actions, such as liking the post and tagging their friends. These actions increase visibility for their brand, in addition to engagement.

Audience engagement examples

Check out some of the other ways brands can get their audiences to engage beyond social media.

Webinars

Webinars are an excellent medium for Q&A sessions. Get your audience involved by asking them questions during the session, and open it up for them to ask questions too. You can also solicit questions from your social media followers to answer during your webinar, and spur excitement about the content you’ll cover.

A post about Sprout's webinar as an example of how to get your audience involved by asking them questions during the session, and opening it up for them to ask questions too.

Social media presence

Make your social media presence unique by establishing a distinct voice, tone and brand personality. If your social media personality aligns with your target audience, they will likely want to interact with you online.

Check out how Innocent Drinks uses its quirky personality to get its audience engaged by using humor and tying into timely topics unrelated to its products. This creates an authentic social media presence that stands out from other brands.

A post from Innocent Drinks that uses its quirky personality to get its audience engaged by using humor and tying into timely topics unrelated to its products.

Online reviews

Social proof, which includes reviews and testimonials, helps build trust with your target audience. Ask your customers for reviews after they interact with your brand. Then, share those reviews with prospects to build credibility. You’ll need an online review management strategy to ensure you maximize the benefits of any reviews.

WPX Hosting regularly posts customer reviews on X (formerly known as Twitter) to show potential customers how its audience perceives its products and services.

WPX.net's social post that shows social proof, which includes reviews and testimonials and helps build trust with their target audience.

Conferences and events

If your organization hosts live events, increase engagement online by asking attendees to post during the experience with an event hashtag. Be sure to post event updates and ask followers to join in. The hashtag should be short, unique and memorable.

Apple often uses the #applevent hashtag for its different conferences so fans of the brand can follow along live during the event. The hashtag is used in hundreds of thousands of posts.

Surveys

Surveys and polls provide a range of engagement opportunities. Ask your audience about product or service-related preferences, get their feedback on your customer support offerings or ask a question about the mundane parts of their day.

For example, we use polls at Sprout Social to get customer feedback because we value their opinions and want them to share their thoughts with us.

A post from Sprout Social with a survey to get customer feedback as a mean of building audience engagement.

Get your audience engaged

Whether you want to have better conversations with your followers, improve the quality of your leads or enhance overall brand health, increasing your audience engagement will help you get there. And, with higher audience engagement comes stronger brand loyalty.

While you can get audience engagement on many different marketing channels, social media in particular is a good one to start with because users are naturally inclined to engage on this medium. If you’re having trouble understanding what your audience thinks about your brand, sentiment analysis may be the answer.

Mine the opinions of your audience to get a contextual understanding of their engagement to enhance your brand. Learn all about sentiment analysis and how it can benefit your brand.

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]]> Everything you need to know about online reputation management https://sproutsocial.com/insights/online-reputation-management/ Mon, 29 Jan 2024 15:00:52 +0000 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/?p=181695 Your business’s online reputation may be digital, but that won’t stop it from making a serious impact IRL. A strong reputation management strategy can Read more...

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]]> Your business’s online reputation may be digital, but that won’t stop it from making a serious impact IRL. A strong reputation management strategy can attract new customers and deepen existing relationships. A lax approach, on the other hand, can alienate both audiences.

Make sure the web is working for you, not against you. Use this article to learn how to establish a comprehensive online reputation management strategy.

What is online reputation management?

A text-based graphic that says, "What is online reputation management? Online reputation management involves actively monitoring and influencing how your business is perceived online. The main goal of this process is to control the online conversation surrounding your brand using various strategies to ensure that when people search for you online, they come across information that paints a favorable picture."

Online reputation management involves actively monitoring and influencing how your business is perceived online. The main goal of this process is to control the online conversation surrounding your brand using various strategies to ensure that when people search for you online, they come across information that paints a favorable picture.

Why does online reputation management matter?

Your online reputation management impacts more than just your marketing team. Do it well, and teams across your org chart will feel the benefits in the following key areas.

Brand image

When people search for information on your business, everything they find works together to paint a picture of what it might be like to be a customer. Strong brand reputation management practices ensure that the picture is a good one.

This work is important everywhere but especially online, where good and bad customer experiences live on in perpetuity through social media posts and reviews. With online reputation management, you can bolster praise and account for feedback, giving you more control over your business’s brand image

Risk mitigation

Managing your online reputation requires you to be proactive. That proactivity plays a major role in crisis prevention and risk mitigation—two must-haves for growing businesses.

Continuous reputation monitoring allows businesses to detect potential issues or negative trends in sentiment early on. This early detection supports intervention before a situation escalates into a crisis that might cause lasting damage to your brand and company.

Business expansion

A good reputation has a snowball effect. The better your reputation gets, the more customers you attract. In the past, this work was relegated to slow-moving offline endeavors. Today, the internet can get this process going faster than you can say “avalanche”.

A steady drumbeat of positive attention online creates a strong environment for business expansion. After all, you’ll likely need more space and resources to meet the needs of all your new and existing customers.

Investor relations

Your business’s online reputation matters to more than just your customers—investors also use the internet to vet potential investments.

A screenshot of a TikTok search for #Stock. The search pulled six popular videos on the topic, four of which have over a million views.

In recent years, social media platforms like Reddit, TikTok and X (formerly known as Twitter) have become especially popular destinations for retail and institutional investors to discuss and analyze market trends. Without an online reputation management strategy in place, your brand could potentially miss out on business critical conversations.

Consumer insights

At the end of the day, your business’s online reputation is made up of feedback—praise, ideas and concerns ranging from “inconsequential” to “absolutely vital”.

A key element of online reputation management is ensuring that critical feedback gets to the people who can do something about it. When your processes bring your customer to the center of the conversation, you strengthen your business’s ability to deliver on what they want and need.

What factors contribute to online reputation management?

The internet can be a bit of a double-edged sword. There are so many ways to build your business’s reputation online. There are also a lot of ways for that reputation to be damaged.

An online reputation management strategy powered by routine sentiment analysis can help you make sense of the many factors that contribute to your business’s reputation across the web. Those include:

Social media

Social media has brought a new level of transparency into consumer conversations. Whether they’re evangelizing for a brand they love or ripping into a poor business practice, people turn to social to speak their minds.

This constant stream of commentary can work for or against your company. According to a study from GWI, over a third (43%) of consumers across all ages turn to social networks when looking for more information about brands, products or services. Social is the new search engine, making it a bedrock of your online reputation management strategy.

Luckily, managing your brand’s reputation on social doesn’t have to mean hours upon hours of scrolling. Brands can use social media listening to synthesize these conversations into actionable insights. For example, Cummins, a global leader in power solutions, uses Sprout’s social listening tools to monitor their brand health and reputation across major social networks in real time.

Learn more about Cummin’s strategy

Review sites

Your business’s star rating follows your brand across the web. Reviews are easier to find than ever, especially when you consider the rise of mobile search. If someone’s looking for information about your business on the go, chances are they’re also going to find your average review rating at the top of those search results.

A screenshot of the the Google location snippet for City Lit Books. The store has a 4.8 star rating.

The more positive reviews you get, the more reassurance potential customers get out of all those positive experiences. In fact, it may be what pushes them to finally procure their goods or services.

A person browsing through reviews is more likely to have a higher purchase intent than an individual passively browsing the rest of the web, which is why online review management goes hand-in-hand with online reputation management.

News publications

News publications impact more than just traditional public relations initiatives. In this day and age, any reputable news outlet has a digital publication that can be found by individuals well beyond their typical publishing audience. Think about it: How often have you found yourself reading an article online, only to find out it’s from a local paper miles away from where you currently reside?

Today, positive news coverage can be amplified across the web through social media and other digital channels, allowing brands to get more bang for their buck with their media relations efforts.

Influencers

In a way, influencers are like their own digital publications. After all, they create content for a specific audience they’ve grown over time. An endorsement from an influencer within your target market can have the same impact as positive media coverage, if not more.

Your influencer marketing strategy can do more than just improve your brand’s reputation online. It can play a major role in shaping that reputation, allowing your business to expand into new audiences and markets.

For example, Dave & Buster’s and TikTok influencer @CorporateNatalie seems like an unlikely pair at first thought. However, the two were able to make 9-to-5 comedy work for an arcade restaurant for this paid promotion.

@corporatenatalie

Zero regrets on the tattoo @Dave & Buster’s #ykywt #personalityhire #coworker #9to5 #happyhour #comedy #ad

♬ original sound – CorporateNatalie

Content like this can challenge existing beliefs about your brand’s reputation online. For Dave & Buster’s, it expanded their target audience to include working professionals who will likely have to schedule a team bonding session at one point or another.

Better online reputation management in 5 simple steps

Whether you’re introducing these practices for the first time, or you have a few online reputation management processes in place, these tips will help strengthen your approach to better protect your business.

Identify the channels used by your market segment

Where is your reputation being forged online? A qualitative and quantitative approach to market research can help you zero in on where your audience is discussing your brand and industry online.

Taking both into consideration will help you account for the full spectrum of where your audience hangs out online. Analytics tools and market research can reveal some sure bets, while open-ended research methods—like customer interviews and surveys—can shine a light on more up-and-coming platforms for brand discovery and research.

This information will help ensure your strategy is focused on the channels that will make an impact on your business.

Monitor your online reputation through mentions

If we were to think about online reputation management through the lens of a Crawl, Walk, Run strategy, monitoring your online mentions would fit squarely within the “Crawl” stage.

When a user tags your brand handle in a social media post or leaves a review on a business page, they expect a response quickly. According to the 2023 Sprout Social Index™ Report, 69% of consumers expect a response within the same day. If you don’t have a process for monitoring your brand mentions online, you are disappointing customers which can cause lasting damage to brand reputation.

The easiest way to safeguard your brand reputation online is to use a tool that organizes all those notifications in one, centralized platform. For example, Sprout Social consolidates inboxes across social media networks and popular review sites like Google My Business, Yelp, TripAdvisor and Glassdoor, so you never miss a mention.

Screenshot of Sprout's review management features.

Identify the topics around your business needs

Once you’ve got reacting to mentions down, it’s time to get more proactive with your approach.

Staying on top of the conversations tangentially related to your brand will supercharge your online reputation management strategy. For example, say a competitor’s highly-publicized product recall is driving a ton of discussion online. By proactively monitoring the conversations happening within your industry, you gain a clearer understanding of consumer concerns so you can craft a response strategy that enhances your competitive advantage.

These conversations can be more difficult to track than mentions alone, but the results are worth the effort. Plus, there are social listening tools that can help you uncover trends and develop actionable insights without any complex data aggregation processes. Sprout’s social listening tool makes the process ultra-accessible with our user-friendly and intuitive Query Builder.

A screenshot of Sprout Social's Query Builder in the Listening tool. From the Query Builder, you can provide a query title, description and sources, and see a preview of the results.

Figuring out what topics to follow will take a bit of trial and error, so we recommend starting broad and narrowing as you go. For example, if you operate within a specific geographic location, consider tracking key conversations happening at a local level and fine-tune your approach from there.

Take charge of the narrative

As you gather insights from your online reputation management processes, you’ll begin to identify trends in consumer sentiment. These emerging narratives can control how people perceive your brand for better and for worse. If you want to maintain control over your brand image, you need to take charge.

Do this by using everything you’ve learned to inform cross-channel communications. If consumers frequently cite the quality of your product as a reason they keep coming back, give your audience a behind-the-scenes look at how it’s made. If your shipping times continuously come up as an area of improvement, create content that builds transparency around what causes those delays.

By addressing the positive and negative, you take back control of your business’s online reputation.

How to choose the best reputation management software for your business

The internet is a big place. If you rely on an individual or even a single team to manage your reputation online, chances are you might miss something vital. If you want to do online reputation management right, you need a tool to help get the job done.

Here are some questions you can ask to ensure your reputation management software procurement process leaves you with the best option possible:

  • Does the tool offer a collaborative workspace? You may be driving your online reputation management strategy, but teams across your business will need to contribute to truly get the job done. Your reputation management software should allow internal and external teams to collaborate and carry out tasks without any unnecessary overlap.
  • Is the tool scalable? Online reputation management means working with external platforms that can add, remove or update features at the drop of a hat. Check to see how your vendor has responded to these changes in the past. How long does it take them to add new features? Are new workflows intuitive, or do they require training? These questions will help you get an accurate read on whether or not the tool can grow alongside your organization.
  • What channels does the tool integrate with? Compare your list of priority channels with a list of integrated channels provided by your vendor. If there are too many gaps, then you may find yourself doing work alongside your software solution to ensure nothing is missed.
  • What reporting capabilities does the tool offer? If you’re putting all this work into your strategy, you probably want to see the fruits of your labor. Your online reputation management tool should offer insight into how your reputation is trending over time.
  • Does the software offer AI and automation? Synthesizing the countless conversations that take place online calls for some seriously smart tech. Ask your vendor about the AI and automation tools they currently provide, as well as what is on their product roadmap.

Take a smarter approach to online reputation management with Sprout Social

Your time is valuable. Don’t use it to sift through the countless comments and posts made about your brand on the web. Instead, leave that to Sprout Social. Our tools aggregate mentions and conversations about your brand, competitors and industry so you can focus on identifying trends and creating action items.

Put Sprout to the test today by signing up for a free 30-day trial.

Start your 30-day trial

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