You Can Boost Your Marketing with Customer Feedback—Here’s 4 Ways to Collect It

There are two kinds of customer feedback; both can be incredibly helpful to the business that pays attention to what is said. Negative feedback can help identify and correct shortcomings and friction in your processes, and positive feedback can be used to bolster your business’ marketing.

Let’s focus on the latter use case, discussing how you can use your clientele’s good feelings to benefit your marketing efforts and how to collect this feedback more effectively.

What Makes Customer Feedback So Important?

In short, customer feedback gives you a clear impression of how your audience feels about your products and services, making it an incredibly valuable form of data for you to collect and utilize at every opportunity.

Going deeper, this feedback can help you determine what your clients are seeking out, what works for them about what you do, and what challenges they are dealing with that you might help them resolve. Plus, asking for feedback invites them to notify you about things they have been bothered by. This signals that you are as invested as they are in their experience as clients. They’ll see you’re interested in improving for their benefit.

Basically, your customers' feedback gives you a cheat sheet to more successful operations and some particularly impactful material to incorporate into your marketing.

The question then becomes how to collect this feedback from your contacts and use the data it supplies. Let’s discuss a few options that today’s businesses have to acquire the information required to draw their needed conclusions.

Engage in Social Listening

Social listening is the practice of searching review sites, forums, and social media platforms for commentary about your business to see what public perspectives are like concerning your business and services. In addition to reviews and comments on your social media profiles and Google reviews, try to find local business review sites to see what people have to say.

While it is important to consider everything you see about your business (within reason), you should also remember that most people will fall somewhere in the middle and likely won’t have strong enough opinions to share… unlike those who had either a great or horrible enough time to write about it organically. That said, more positive word of mouth is infinitely better than none or more negative, so you should work to ensure that perspectives skew in that direction in any way you can.

Utilize Website Heatmaps

Imagine if you could be a fly on the wall and watch one of your website visitors interact with your website… seeing where they hovered their cursor and what caught their attention the most. It doesn’t take Don Draper to see how that knowledge would be marketing gold… and it’s the kind of knowledge a website heatmap can give you.

A heatmap can show you where your website visitors most frequently hover their cursors on the page, indicating where most of their attention is directed on each page. As a result, you better understand what is working well and where improvements could be made.

Follow Up with Existing Clientele

We’ve discussed the importance of continuing your relationship with every client you work with. Checking in and collecting feedback is a great way to do just that.

We’ve also discussed how the sale is not the end of the marketing funnel and that the smart move is to continue your relationship with your happy clients to help encourage future business. Interviewing these clients after the fact or sending emails to inquire about their experience proves you care about their perspective and have remained invested after their check clears. It also helps you collect the kind of data and insight you can use to boost your operations and reputation further.

Bribe Them!

To be perfectly clear, I am not suggesting, recommending, or implying that you should buy positive reviews from your clientele. I am saying that you should reward them in some way for providing any feedback, good or bad.

Remember how we discussed how polarizing reviews often are back in the social listening section? Offering some form of incentive—regardless of what they say in their review—is a good way to motivate more clients and customers to share their thoughts more freely. By offering something in return for some honest impressions, you can collect more of them, giving you more data to work with.

We Can Help You Use This Data to Benefit Your Marketing!

Whether you want to target your ideal customers more closely, identify ways to publicly improve what you offer, or simply sprinkle some complimentary words about your services into your marketing, we can help. We’re here to help managed service providers succeed through tried, tested, and true methodologies.

Contact us today to learn more about what we can do to help you at 888-546-4384.