Your marketing strategy is essential to the success of your business. It empowers you to extend your demographic reach, boost relations with your consumers, and solidify your brand identity. Yet, it’s important to recognize that developing the best approach shouldn’t be entirely driven by internal factors and goals.
Consumers’ opinions should be a key influence in how you strategize your marketing. Many businesses already use consistent customer trends and pain points to better direct their approach. One of the most powerful resources you have to develop more relevant marketing strategies, though, is direct consumer feedback. When you listen to the things your customers have to say, you have great tools for designing campaigns that connect.
Identify and Gather Sources of Feedback
One of the great things about the current business landscape is that there are various sources of feedback available to you. The more information you have about your intended demographics, the better you’re able to create marketing strategies that align with the nuanced needs and interests of your audience. It’s important to put processes in place to identify the sources of feedback and collect them for analysis.
Some of the potential sources of useful feedback and ways to gather them include:
Online surveys
Surveys and questionnaires are great tools for getting customer feedback about specific topics. If there are aspects of your business practices you’re unsure of or feel might need to be updated, you can design a survey focused on these elements or provide a general survey that covers related topics. Many brands host their surveys on their websites and provide consumers with links to surveys following purchases or in marketing emails.
Social media
Social media platforms are hotbeds of consumer opinions. Consumers may offer feedback via the comments section of your posts, while some users might send in direct messages. It’s also important not to overlook reviews in consumers’ own social media posts. Using social media management software can be a good way to gather this feedback. Many platforms collate comments across all your social media platforms in a central dashboard, while others provide alerts to mentions of your brand in users’ posts.
Customer interviews and focus groups
If you operate not just online but also in brick-and-mortar premises, customer interviews can be a great option. This can take the form of a member of staff in your stores interviewing customers following purchases. You can also work with an external contractor to create focus groups to gain feedback about your products, services, or previous marketing campaigns.
Third-party review sites
Review sites — like TrustPilot and Google — have become popular for customers to read testimonials for businesses they’re considering patronizing. You can regularly monitor these sites, including setting up official accounts with them so you receive alerts about new reviews. From here, you can collate the data in a central database for later review.
Remember that you want customers to provide feedback, so be sure to encourage them. You can do this by ensuring your emails and social media profile pages actively invite consumers to talk about their needs and experiences. When customers have made purchases, arrange for your website to implement pop-ups that direct customers either to your surveys or to popular review sites. In some instances, rewarding customers with discounts on future purchases when they provide qualitative feedback can be an effective incentive.
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Analyze the Feedback
Once you have a range of feedback, you need to analyze it to understand how you can best apply it to your marketing strategy. This begins with organizing it in a way that allows for easy access, interpretation, and review.
Categorization is usually the most effective way of organizing your feedback data. Wherever possible, use simple data-entry systems to keep all the feedback in a single file, such as a spreadsheet with cells for each point of feedback. You can then filter the data by specific words or terms. This enables you to identify common themes, issues, or needs.
If you’re handling large volumes of feedback, data analytics tools are likely to be a more efficient and user-friendly way to proceed. Indeed, specialized sentiment analysis platforms can pull feedback from multiple sources to give you real-time insights into what the common perception of your brand is and how it’s changing over time.
From here, your marketing team can prioritize the categories of feedback. One way of doing this is by establishing what feedback is most actionable. For instance, if there is consistent feedback that suggests that your services or branding are outdated, this may be immediately addressed. Your marketing team can build campaigns that demonstrate the brand’s commitment to cutting-edge tools or refreshed visuals.
More vague opinions, such as consumers not feeling as connected to the company, might require a more long-term approach that your team feels is not immediately actionable. Yet, they can start to plan and execute related campaigns more gradually. By arranging files that store feedback into categories and listed by priority, your marketing team can manage their strategies and revisit this data analysis as their plans develop.
Integrate Feedback into your Strategy
With feedback data analytics categorized and prioritized, you can start to use it to directly shape your marketing campaigns. It’s important to approach this not simply from the perspective of a direct response to customers’ thoughts. First, take the time to examine how these opinions relate to your existing marketing goals and objectives. It may be the case that you simply need to make slight adjustments to your current campaigns to better optimize them to address concerns.
However, if your feedback highlights issues that are more disruptive to your brand reputation or your company objectives, it can be wise to consider the following.
Fresh personas
In all likelihood, you have some buyer personas for your core target demographic that you use to understand your customers. However, it can also be a good idea to develop a selection of more nuanced personas that are connected to the feedback you’ve received from your customers.
This may be related to the different types of pain points customers reveal in their reviews and the specific solutions they may feel your company should be able to provide. You can also shape personas around the different company values reviews suggest customers would like to see you lean into. As with all personas, it’s worth being relatively detailed about the characteristics of these feedback providers, so you can market to their preferences and develop appropriate messaging for them.
Targeted campaigns
It may not always be the case that redesigning your entire marketing direction is appropriate. Instead, you can create targeted campaigns to serve each category of feedback. Naturally, it’s best to set clear and measurable goals for these campaigns to drive your methods and assess the outcomes.
Building fresh campaigns for your feedback personas can be quite challenging, though. You may find it helpful to kick off the ideation process by creating visual planning materials. Mood boards are particularly effective, using images, phrases, and other materials to evoke emotions and help staff visually explore potential themes. Creating digital mood boards can be particularly effective for establishing a collaborative document that all marketing stakeholders can contribute to, no matter where they’re working from.
You can incorporate specific feedback examples as well as colors that represent the moods of the personas you’ve created. From here, your team can start to crystalize the direction of the materials they’ll create to serve the goals of the targeted campaigns.
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Think a Couple of Steps Ahead
Using customer feedback to shape your marketing strategy can feel like a reactive step. However, the opposite is true — getting customer feedback is one of the primary ways to prepare your business for the future. The good news is that you can also use the data you gather on methods to be more proactive in preparing for future campaigns so you feel more in control of the direction of your brand.
You can start by monitoring the direction of sentiment over time. Ensure your marketing staff is vigilant for the early signs that opinions are starting to change. This might be a few more opinions related to different areas of the brand’s activities or the ratio of reviews starting to dip, among other elements. Make this a key point of discussion in monthly marketing strategy meetings so you can all discuss new developments and how to make plans to address issues early or get a jump on emerging trends.
Concept map-making software can be a useful tool for visualizing the relationships between different ideas when you’re using feedback to plan future marketing strategies. Essentially, this tool enables you to assign shapes to concepts and drag lines that connect them to other goals or objectives. You can also connect these systems to tools you already use, such as feedback data files stored in your Google Drive so that you can easily import or link to them in your maps.
As a result, you can begin generating ideas based on changes in the direction of sentiment, and start finding ways to link them to your current marketing tactics. This way, there’s a more natural route to integrate gentle adjustments to your plans, rather than having to manage full-blown brand perception crises from scratch.
Final Words on the Role of Customer Feedback in Shaping your Digital Marketing Strategy
Customer feedback is a great resource for understanding what matters to your demographics, so you can develop more relevant and impactful marketing campaigns. This involves taking the time to carefully analyze feedback for insights, alongside processes that help you successfully integrate and build on targeted marketing campaigns, among other protocols.
Additionally, keep exploring new ways to gain not just more but better quality insights from consumers. Making this easy for them with user-friendly feedback platforms is a good start. Remember that the online marketplace is constantly changing with new technological tools and platforms for engagement. Regularly assessing these for their potential to streamline communication with your customers can be key to more relevant and impactful campaigns in the future.
Growth Hackers is a forward-thinking customer retention agency helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs and business owners use customer feedback to shape a winning marketing strategy, increase their productivity, generate qualified leads, optimize their conversion rate, gather and analyze data analytics, acquire and retain users and increase sales. We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact Growth Hackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
