K atie c ouric

Listen to Your Audience
One of Hollywood’s most successful movie producers, media executives,
and investors, Jon Jashni believes in listening to your consumer. He
highlights that you should view them 
as your partner
in this process. If
you’re constantly pushing bite-sized offerings of your artistry to them, you
create a connection. They can receive what you offer and give you
immediate feedback. They can literally tell you that they loved the content
you posted.
It’s valuable to receive this feedback from your social media network in
ways that are understandable and actionable. And be quick to respond to
them because if you take them for granted they’ll go find another platform
that seems to care more.
Search Tools Help You Listen, Test, and Learn
Latham Arneson, former VP of digital marketing for Paramount Pictures,
shares that Google AdWords can be leveraged as a tool to clarify what
people are already searching for. It helps you understand the keywords that
you’re targeting. This is not the same thing as putting content in front of
people through social platforms. The big difference between social and
search methods is that social is a push model, while search is a pull model.
Seeing content in the Facebook news feed is more comparable to TV
advertising than it is to searching on Google for something specific. People
can still comment on content in Facebook, but it’s not the same as going to
Google and seeking out information—that shows a much more active level
of interest.
Search-based tools allow you to test messaging and observe how people
are talking about different topics. You can see if there’s search activity on
keywords related to your brand or product—if people are actively wanting

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to discover more. Search gives you a good indication of how your message
may perform.
When Arneson’s team worked on the 2008 movie 
Cloverfield
, for
example, they noticed that people searched for terms related to the film,
such as “JJ Abrams,” the producer of the movie, and the film’s release date
(they initially used the release date as part of a marketing hook because they
had not yet announced the name of the film). When they observed the
keywords that were searched for most often it created a feedback loop
letting them know which aspects of the marketing materials made the most
sense to push in future campaigns.
AdWords can also help you compare how searchable your content is
against other similar brands and products. Arneson adds that there’s a
public tool called Google Trends, which gives you a relative search level so
you can see if you’re looked for as often as other brands. These tools are
extremely powerful. They give you insight into competitors’ situations that
you can’t get anywhere else. If people are searching for you more often than
your competitors, it’s a strong indication that your product or brand will
sell.
Some of you may not be at the level where people are searching for
your name or product, but these tools can still be used for content
intelligence. Arneson says that if, for example, you’re launching a yoga
brand, you can see what people are searching for in regard to yoga and use
that to direct your content marketing decisions. You can find out if people
are more interested in yoga mats or towels, or if there are any jokes or new
topics related to the yoga world. Knowing this information can help you
determine where to focus your efforts. It can even help you in making
business decisions. You will learn what’s hot and which products to push.
Additionally, these tools can help you determine your market size. You
can get a sense of interest level before you develop a product or piece of
content. Facebook can also give you a sense of interest by telling you that
ten million people “like” yoga, but a search-based tool shows you how
many people are actually searching for a specific product or term. The fact
that people are seeking it out makes it more active and pragmatic.

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