Indian brands can outperform global competitors in customer engagement: David Low

Talkwalker, the leading consumer intelligence and deep listening company, recently announced a strategic partnership with Khoros, an award-winning leader in digital-first customer engagement software and services. The idea is to expand services and provide brands with world-class social media management, intelligence, and deep listening experience. The partnership, globally and across regions, will equip brands with the tools they need - from insights to action - to remain attuned, responsive, and adaptive to market trends and audience shifts.

Khoros customers are now equipped with in-depth insights through deep listening and Talkwalker customers can now leverage an integrated social media management solution with tools to take action on insights at scale and the ability to thoughtfully engage with and meet customers wherever they are.

In this interaction with Adgully, David Low, CMO, Talkwalker, elaborates on the idea behind this partnership, the growth of social listening marketing, globally and in India, what does this association with Khoros bring to Indian clients, how can brands benefit by using social listening tools, does it help during festive season marketing, and much more. Excerpts:

What is the idea behind Talkwalker’s partnership with Khoros?

Talkwalker is dedicated to helping brands close the gap between brand and consumer, and our strategic partnership with Khoros is helping us to realise this vision for truly consumer-centric brands. Through the partnership, Talkwalker and Khoros users can access best-in-class consumer insights and customer engagement capabilities in a single, seamless experience.

This reduces the time to action for marketing, consumer insights, and even customer experience/ customer success teams, which is the need of the hour, especially for large, enterprise-level brands that are sitting on a lot of consumer and customer data.

How is social listening marketing growing, globally and in India?

India is a rapidly evolving market, with digital and social media services in high demand. This gives rise to a multitude of use cases for an advanced social listening and consumer intelligence platform like Talkwalker.

In India, most brands are already familiar with the traditional use cases for social listening (such as crisis monitoring and media monitoring). Advanced social listening teams are increasingly turning to social data for category insights, improving the customer experience, and even trend forecasting; Talkwalker's consumer intelligence platform supports these future-shaping use cases.

What does this association bring to Indian clients?

Given the size and development potential of the Indian market, it is possible that home-grown brands may soon outperform their global competitors when it comes to utilising consumer intelligence and customer engagement for business strategy and innovation. We’re already seeing signs of this owing to research for our Brand Love 2022 report, whereby brands like Colorbar and Bombay Shaving Company are ranking high on the global index.

How can brands benefit by using social listening tools? Does it help during festive season marketing?

At Talkwalker, we typically consider social listening use cases using three lenses: Protect, Measure, and Promote. The majority of brands are already engaged in the first category of actions, that is, Protect; their social listening efforts are directed towards ensuring brand safety, and responding to potential crises and negative sentiment.

However, for brands that are growth-focused and looking to scale new heights, limited and lagging indicators are not as useful. These brands need to implement more appropriate measurements in order to help choose the right influencers, monitor competitors, study consumer communities, and keep up with the latest social media trends. Ad-spend analytics, performance marketing trials, and other paid channel indicators shouldn’t be the only ways to gauge success.

Talkwalker, which supports 187 languages across 196 countries, offers real-time insights into the conversations taking place across global media, including social media, news, blogs and forums. Consumer insights can be used to design local outreach and engagement strategies, as well as holiday marketing efforts that have a stronger impact on a brand's target audiences.

Our consumer intelligence platform is already being used by marketing teams to identify these hyperlocal subtleties, connect with organic champions of a brand, track a campaign’s omnichannel activations, create an overall picture of the campaign’s impact, as well as dig deeper into audience feedback.

How are new-age data and technologies like AI and ML used to offer services?

The use of AI in social listening and social media management results in time and cost savings as well as empowers teams to place consumers at the heart of all decisions.

Talkwalker’s Blue Silk AI engine analyses over 170 million videos and photos every day, offers custom sentiment analysis (with 90% accuracy), and has been trained on at least 2.3 billion data points.

Through our partnership with Khoros, these capabilities, which are used for social data and online news sources (across text, image, video, and speech formats), can now also assist Khoros users in collecting and analysing customer conversations and interactions that take place across the platform.

What are the latest trends in the sector of consumer intelligence?

For consumer goods, finance, and tech brands especially, it’s not all about customer acquisition. Brands today need to find a way to encourage client loyalty and retention by constantly improving the customer experience, and finding new opportunities to become consumer-close. This can be particularly challenging given the rapidly evolving digital landscape.

To help make sense of it all, Talkwalker and Khoros consulted 70+ marketing experts on the latest trends to watch, and published these findings recently in our recent Social Media Trends 2023 report. Here are just a few that I find will resonate with consumer insights professionals:

Personas are over, think ‘communities’
Customer experience will get even more social
Predictive analytics will disrupt marketing.