Gain customer feedback to help shape your marketing and encourage sales
Taking action to gain customer feedback is another great way to get your marketing on track whilst you’re experiencing a bit of downtime due to the pandemic.
The first rule of marketing is – know your audience; who are your customers? The next step is to know why they bought from you. And finally, understand how you made them feel. By gathering that information, you can then target the right kind of people with the right kind of messaging in a way that’ll resonate with them.
Now is a good time to request customer feedback, lots of people have a little more time on their hands and so you’re more likely to gain a response.
Here are the most effective ways to request customer feedback:
Customer surveys
Ask your customers a shortlist of questions that’ll help you and include a section for a testimonial. You could use an online survey tool, we like Typeform, and there are lots of others such as Survey Monkey and Google Forms.
This is a good way to gain regular feedback about your products or services and performance. But don’t ask the questions and never do anything with the responses. Make it a part of your process and service. When signing up new clients, let them know that your business undertakes customer feedback every six months or annually to help you learn and improve your service.
Case studies
If you’ve done a really good piece of work for a client, make sure you do a case study on it. It’s a valuable way to show other potential customers how you operate, solved a problem, and delivered great results. Case studies can be an effective way to pick up new clients in the same sector. Make sure it includes a testimonial section.
Add the case studies to your website and turn them into professionally designed PDFs that you can send to prospects as part of your sales process.
Google reviews
*Please note, Google has temporarily disabled Google reviews due to COVID-19* However, we’ve still included it in this blog because you should do it once the functionality is restored.
To request a Google review, it’s best to send the link to your Google My Business listing so your clients can then just click the URL, login and leave a review with ease. Click here for a great tool for finding your URL and you can share this link in other ways to encourage Google reviews, such as in your email signature.
Having Google reviews is an effective way to increase your SEO; it’ll often bring you up higher than your competitors in local search results.
Social media reviews
Our advice is to focus on the social channel that gives you the most results. That may be Facebook reviews or LinkedIn recommendations, for example.
Make sure you promote your testimonials on your social media channels to help encourage others to use your services, buy your products or recommend you to others.
Remember, gaining customer feedback is not about getting lots of nice comments, feeling good and then plastering it all over your marketing. Make sure the questions you ask enable you to better understand why your customers use you, how you add value and how you make them feel. It’s about learning what your contribution is and then how to resonate with more customers who are in search of that experience.