How To Use Customer Insight To Power Your Business
Capturing and using customer feedback effectively is essential for growing businesses. Smart companies will use the insights they get from customers in a number of ways; from fixing holes in marketing campaigns to informing product messaging and even developing and co-creating new products. Exploring human reactions and thoughts about your products or services is essential if you are to maintain brand relevance. If you don’t have a collection of customer feedback methods, you won’t be able to use it to help further the aspirations of your brand. Although some ways of attaining such data are tried, tested and traditional, businesses are now finding that modern technology is giving them the upper hand. To keep up with evolving market trends, make sure you take note of these foolproof tips.
Use Online Market Research
Traditional market research is still a tried and tested way of finding out more about your customers. You may have conducted offline focus groups or non-structured interviews as a business, so you will most likely be aware that they are used to gather opinions and responses to stimuli. This doesn’t make them any less useful, and they are particularly popular in the first stages of marketing a product. In recent years the way customer feedback has been collected has moved into online qualitative market research to cut costs and speed up the process. This is as much a reflection on how modern consumers are using and integrating new technology into their lives as it is about methodology. Research is conducted using community platforms or on a one-to-one basis. Most businesses are unsure of how to make the most of such methods. Companies like Further, implementing technology and know-how, can be enlisted to help facilitate this.
Make Use Of Social Media For Listening As Well As Marketing
Social media is used in many ways to market a successful campaign, but its uses don’t end there. It is quickly becoming regarded as one of the most reliable ways to collect raw and honest opinions. You can find the best trends emerging in comments on Facebook Ads and posts, or by monitoring engagement using the elusive Instagram algorithm. Luckily, consumers will often comment to show their appreciation for a product, so you may find a host of positives to focus on alongside some improvements. However, be sure that social media is properly resourced so that any negative feedback and complaints can be dealt with quickly and turned into positive customer service experiences.
Send Out Email Surveys Or Polls
Email surveys have been utilized for market research since the dawn of the internet and remain popular, even as technology offers other more sophisticated forms of collecting customer feedback. This is largely down to the simplicity involved with how consumers interact with them. Usually, a consumer will receive an email in their personal inbox, which will take them a maximum of five minutes to complete. A great way to incentivize customers for their valuable time and feedback is by offering a reward, competition entry, or product discount which will result in a spike in feedback entries. Surveys need to be carefully set-up so as not to introduce bias and, compared to more modern qualitative methods, are a bit of a blunt tool. Statisticians will be able to tell you the significance of answers based on the volume of replies.
Monitor Website Activity
Simple, ubiquitous and not to be forgotten. Using analytic tools to monitor how customers interact with your site can deliver insight into how they respond to messaging and calls to action around the products and services promoted on-site. You can see which clicks translate into sales, where consumers are switching off and which items lay in their basket more often than others. Content management systems enable you to A/B test content so that layout, messaging and text can be honed to drive engagement. Customers may not be telling you anything directly, but their online behavior patterns can speak volumes.
