Buying intent signals or “triggers” are indicators that a potential customer is interested in purchasing your product or service. 

But how do you find these signals and use them to your advantage in your Sales outreach strategy

That’s where social listening comes in.

Why are buying intent signals key for Sales Outreach ?

There are different levels of buying intent signals.

The most easy and powerful buying intent signals to identify are the “incoming signals” :
website visits, lead magnet downloads, Sign-ups for a free trial, or Social media followers. But these are pretty “obvious”, and hopefully, you are already tracking them and reaching out to these high potential prospects.

Now, how do you find potential customers that are interested in what you have to offer but do not come to you directly ? 

More and more outreach tools include « buying intent triggers »  or « buying intent signals » features. 
Mostly they identify prospect companies that : 

• are hiring 
• had a funding round 
• show rapid growth 

While these information certainly help, they remain very generic and not specific to your business.
You want to reach out to people who face the pain points your product solves, leads that understand the value you can bring or unhappy customers of your competition.
And that’s why you need social listening for Lead generation.

Social listening is the process of monitoring and analyzing online conversations about your brand, your industry, specific topics, or your competitors.

It helps you understand what your target audience is saying, feeling, and thinking about products and services, as well as their pain points, needs, and goals.

By using social listening, you can identify and target prospects who are showing these buying intent signals on social media platforms and more.

And you can leverage this information to craft personalized and relevant messages that address their specific needs, thus increasing your chances of converting them into customers.

Let’s see how you can do.

Use Social Listening to reveal Buying Intent Signals

Here are some steps you can follow to use social listening to find buying intent signals and improve your sales outreach:

Define your keywords and topics.

The first step is to determine what keywords and topics are relevant to your brand, your industry, and your products and services.
These can include your brand name, your product name, your competitors’ names, your industry terms, Niche keywords, or specific pain points.
For example, if you sell a social media management tool, you might want to monitor keywords and topics such as “social media marketing”, “social media tools”, “social media analytics”, “social listening”, and so on.

Choose your social listening tool.

The next step is to choose a tool to help you monitor and analyze the online conversations around your keywords and topics.
There are different social listening tools available, such as buska.io, which is tailored for Sales Teams in Startups and SMBs.
Buska tracks mentions of your keywords from every major social media platform, and also online communities (like Quora, IndieHackers…), websites, and blogs.

Identify and segment your prospects.

Once you have your keywords / topics, and tool ready, start looking for prospects who are showing buying intent signals.
Some examples of buying intent signals are:

• Asking for recommendations or opinions about your product, or a similar one
• Expressing dissatisfaction or frustration with their current solution or provider
• Showing interest or curiosity in your product category, or a related topic
• Engaging with content related to your industry or niche.
• Mentioning a specific problem or need that your product or service can solve

You can use your social listening tool like buska to filter and segment your prospects based on these signals. You can also use features like “sentiment analysis” to target negative positive mentions only (about a competitor for example).
This will help you create a list of qualified leads that you can reach out to with personalized and relevant messages. 

Push qualified leads into your Sales Outreach tool.

Once you’ve listed them, you’ll need to enrich the leads to get their email/linkedin contact information.
Outbound automation tools like lemlist include enrichment features and email verification to ensure you have the right info to reach out to your prospects.

Craft and send your outreach messages.

The final step is to craft and send your outreach messages to your prospects.
The goal of your outreach messages is to create interest and build relationship, not to be salesy or pushy.
Here are some tips to help you craft effective outreach messages:

• Use a conversational tone, and address your prospects by their name
• Refer to the specific buying intent signal that you found through social listening, and show that you understand their situation.
• Raise a pain point that the prospect must encounter in their business, related to the intent signal found.
• Mention shortly how you can solve it, or how you helped other companies solve it, and provide proof.
• End with a very short CTA to create interest, like “sounds interesting ?”, “worth a try?”…

Here is an example of an outreach message based on social listening:

Hi John,

I saw your tweet about your struggle with social listening, and I thought I’d reach out.
Managing your social media presence can be overwhelming and time consuming.
[Company X] used to spend 5 hours each week on social listening. 
We’ve helped them take it down to 30 min. 
Would you like to see how? 
Cheers,

Conclusion

Social listening is a complementary way to find highly targeted buying intent signals for outreach.
It will help increase your sales and conversions.

By monitoring and analyzing online conversations, you can identify and target prospects who are interested or really concerned by what you offer.
And then craft personalized messages that address their specific situation.

To get started with social listening, use tools like buska.io to monitor different platforms easily.

If you want to learn more about how to use social listening to find buying intent signals for outreach, you can check out our blog.