In today’s hyper-connected world, understanding what your audience truly wants isn’t just a competitive advantage; it’s a necessity. At SAY, we believe that the key to unlocking customer insight lies in listening to them, leveraging every opportunity to unearth their pain point and wishes, including monitoring social platforms.
The Power of Social Listening
Social listening goes beyond tracking mentions or hashtags. It’s about understanding the emotions, desires, and expectations of your audience. By tapping into real-time conversations in online communities like LinkedIn, X, and Reddit, brands can:
- Gather a wealth of insights into the doubts, misconceptions and concerns that users and potential buyers have about B2B technology solutions. This is priceless marketing intelligence that can be used to proactively tailor messaging, refine positioning and create content marketing materials that address customer concerns before they arise.
- Uncover hopes and wishes that companies can leverage to ensure their product and marketing message meet expectations and needs.
- Reveal honest, unfiltered opinions about your competitors, giving marketing and sales teams the market awareness they need to understand their strengths and weaknesses, driving the conversation in the right direction by anticipating possible objections and responses.
- Identify industry trends, enabling marketing and product teams to assess upcoming risks and opportunities for their brand.
Wimbledon 2025: Who do Fans Want to Win?
To demonstrate the power of this approach, we turned our attention to something close to home: the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament, the Grand Slam that every year lights up SAY’s neighbourhood. Using our proprietary Listening Station, we analysed online conversations to uncover who tennis fans most want to win this year’s tournament. The results were revealing, not just in terms of fan favourites, but in how the method of listening can dramatically affect the insights you gather.
We analysed thousands of online mentions to determine which of the top 10 seeded players fans are rooting for. Here’s what we found:
Men’s Singles – Rising Stars Vs Legends
Carlos Alcaraz leads the pack, closely followed by Sinner and Djokovic, showing a clear preference for the new generation of tennis stars and a desire to see them clash against old legends.
Here are some of our favourites comments:
Women’s Singles – A lesson in listening
Initially, we analysed mentions by surname, which resulted in a very close tie between the top two seeds Aryna Sabalenka and Coco Gauff.
But when we reran the analysis using first names, the picture changed dramatically: Polish player Iga Swiatek surged to the top of the list, leaving the world’s No. 1 in third place!
This discrepancy highlights a crucial insight: setting the correct search parameters is essential. Fans often refer to players by their first names, especially in the case of globally recognised stars like Iga and Coco. If we had relied solely on surname data, we would have significantly underestimated their popularity.
Why This Matters for Your Brand
This Wimbledon case study is more than a fun look at tennis fandom; it’s a practical lesson in how to listen effectively. Whether you’re launching a product, planning a campaign, or refining your brand voice, the way you structure your listening queries can significantly impact your strategy.
Key Takeaways:
- Precision matters: Use variations of names, terms, and phrases to capture the whole conversation.
- Context is key: Understand how your audience naturally talks about your brand or topic.
- Act on insights: Use what you learn to shape messaging, product development, and customer engagement.
Ready to Hear What Your Customers Are Saying?
At SAY, we help brands tune into the conversations that matter. Whether it’s tennis fans or tech enthusiasts, we turn social noise into strategic insight.
Want to know what your audience really wants? Let’s talk.
