What is social intelligence, and how can your business use it?
Find out how social intelligence is impacting marketing.
Social intelligence is made up of many things, but as an integrated concept, it is increasingly seen as important in marketing. Here’s a breakdown on the impact of social intelligence on marketing and how that might affect your business.
Why is Social Intelligence Important?
Social intelligence is largely about the ability to understand relationships and communication – essentially the ability to understand people, communicate with them, and build social relationships. There are a few components of social intelligence, including good listening skills, knowledge of social norms in different situations and cultures, and the ability to “read” people and make a good impression.
This is important because understanding how people think and react, as well as, how to communicate and listen effectively (especially to customers), is key for modern marketing campaigns to be successful.
Social Intelligence vs. Emotional Intelligence
There is some overlap in these two areas, particularly in the way that they involve understanding people’s motivations and being able to respond to them. There are also quite a few differences.
Emotional intelligence is understanding how feelings can affect outcomes and deals more with immediate or present circumstances. Having a good emotional intelligence means understanding how to deal with someone with empathy and work with them during an emotional reaction or even predict one.
Social intelligence is a little broader and seeks to understand personalities and the different facets that make up someone’s characteristics and behavior, since not all behavior is emotionally driven. Having a broader understanding of and interest in personality and social dynamics means that you can plan more for the future based on that.
How Social Intelligence is Revolutionizing Market Research
Social intelligence skills come into play when it comes to interacting on social media and conducting market research. Having an understanding of social intelligence skills is crucial when it comes to joining conversations with customers on social media. Engaging with customers in social media spaces has come to be crucial to business success, in terms of both addressing customer service issues and also gathering important information on what customers want from a business and think is important.
Another impact of social intelligence on marketing is in doing customer and market research to construct customer journeys and journey maps that will go on to guide marketing campaigns and efforts. Social intelligence gives you a better understanding of insights you receive from customer data and allows you to ask good questions to push your marketing forward in a way that addresses that data and research.
Having socially intelligent marketing team members is important when it comes to planning and strategizing. Social intelligence allows for you to think about and plan for interactions that may be caused by marketing efforts. It also helps you plan for what the best ways to reach your audience through marketing might be, as you have a better understanding of your customer’s personalities and allows you to communicate to these customers more effectively.
Does your brand employ any kind of social intelligence in your marketing? How do you feel about the idea of the impact social intelligence has on marketing? Do you think having good social interactions and social mindfulness is important for communicating marketing messages to customers?
