How do I build a Market Research Listening strategy?

You can use Sprout’s Listening features to conduct market research. With access to millions of conversations on social, use Listening’s insights to find new audiences, track perceptions of brands or products and discover areas for expansion.

Before you create a Market Research Listening strategy, it’s useful to understand how to build a Listening query.

Creating a Market Research topic

To create a Market Research topic, navigate to Listening Templates > Custom Topic.

As you start setting up your topic, think about what your goals are. A Market Research topic gives you access to unfiltered thoughts, opinions and feedback. In this example, Sprout Coffee Co., a nationwide artisan coffee shop, is looking to expand its drink menu but isn't sure what the biggest opportunity is for non-caffeinated drink options. We'll build a topic to help Sprout Coffee Co. learn more about which non-caffeinated drinks audiences are talking about. This market research will help the product and marketing teams decide which non-caffeinated drinks should be added to Sprout's menu and how to best market these new drinks.

Identify the keywords you want to use in your query. We chose to build our topic around non-caffeinated drinks so we could track their popularity on social media. We searched for keywords like “beverage” but specifically excluded words like “coffee” or “water” to narrow down the topic.

In the Conversation Tab, you can see a breakdown of the most common words and phrases in your Topic. In our example, the term “green tea” has the most engagements.

Filters

You can apply filters to narrow your query by language, types of content, location and more.

While filters can be useful if you want to target specific content, many users do not specify location information and using these filters may inadvertently exclude conversations that you’re interested in. You can add place names to your keywords if you want to surface conversations around your topic and a specific place.

Themes

You can create themes to categorize and better understand patterns in your Listening data. In our example topic, we’ve created themes for each of the drink types we added as keywords.

In the themes tab, you can view the messages that appear in your themes, analyze trends over time and view top messages. These features can help you identify which themes are generating the most activity and what kinds of conversations people are having.