What to Do With Customer Feedback for Marketing

Customer feedback is the golden ticket to growing your business and ensuring people buy the products and services you launch. As a small-business owner, you can find many places to collect customer feedback. From customer support tickets to social media posts, there are plenty of areas on the internet to look for it — and it’s one of the most powerful tools to have at your disposal.

However, if you’re not using customer feedback for marketing purposes, you’re missing out on big opportunities. Try to avoid this mistake by incorporating customer feedback into your marketing strategy. Here’s how you can leverage it today.

Use Customer Feedback to Create Content

Customer feedback is an important part of the content creation process. You can use it to understand what customers want — and address their questions in your own content creations.

When you publish new content based on customer feedback, your audience feels like they’re getting something of value because it resonates with them. Over time, your audience will start to feel closer to your brand and want to keep returning for more.

When using customer feedback to create content, use social media to look for clues about what your audience is asking or saying about your brand. Observe the comments or questions they ask each other in the comment section of your posts.

Listening closely ensures that whatever you create is something people will find useful and share with their friends or colleagues.

Build a Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map gives you a visual representation of the steps each customer takes to complete a purchase. It’s a great way to gain insight into the customer’s perspective to help them achieve their goal. However, most people make the mistake of creating a customer journey they want to see — not one that exists for the customer.

Building a customer journey map is easy when you record all positive and negative interactions with your business. Then, you can use those interactions to improve the buyer experience.

Customers sometimes look forward to completing an action, but this doesn’t always occur. Keep in mind that your customer journey map should always reflect that. Otherwise, it can lead to a poor user experience. 

Turn It Into User-Generated Content on Social Media

Many customers use social media to shop for brands and discover new products. It helps them get a feel for the company’s values, tone and aesthetic when looking at their social profiles.

However, many brands haven’t realized the impact that customer feedback can have when sharing it on social media. Users love to see what others have experienced with the same brand when they’ve made a purchase. It builds trust and maintains a sense of community.

That’s why it’s important to turn customer feedback into user-generated content (UGC) on social media. UGC builds relationships and buzz around your brand, pushing others to take a look at what your company is all about.

So whenever you see a customer publishing a post about your product or service, ask them for permission to repost and tag them.

UGC is cost-effective, and it shows customers your awareness of them.

Personalize Your Communication With Customers

Customer feedback is an excellent way to understand your customers. The more you know them, the better you can personalize your messaging. When analyzing customer feedback, you learn how to speak their language, which allows you to tailor your communication with your audience.

In turn, this allows you to connect with them more effectively. 

Businesses have more than one type of customer, and they group them into different segments to boost targeting and communication. That’s why feedback is so important in this area. 

The insights you gain can enable you to build highly-targeted ads. Understanding your customers makes it easier to adapt your messaging and connect your customers to your brand.

Improve the Quality of Your Marketing Campaigns

Customer feedback can be an amazing tool for marketing campaigns. It can tell you what customers want to see more of and help you identify problems.

By learning about the issues your customers face, you can use that to address their pain points and provide them with solutions you offer through your product or service. 

Below are some of the ways you can use customer feedback to improve your marketing campaigns:

• Make campaigns more interactive. Feedback can give you a better idea of whether your campaign is hitting the mark — and if there’s anything you can do to improve. 

• Target new audiences based on further information about their interests and preferences. When customers express interest in something you offer, they may also be interested in other things. That way, when they return, you can recommend new offers they may be interested in most.

• Monitor campaign performance. You can use feedback to see how your audience reacts and make adjustments to optimize your campaign.

Create Brand Advocates

With customer feedback, you can gauge how much people like your product or service. What’s even better is getting customers to advocate for your brand. By gaining brand advocates, they can elevate your company using word-of-mouth marketing.

Brand advocates may mention your product or service to a friend or family member. They’re likely to share their experience and discuss how amazing your offerings are on social media.

Leveraging brand advocates can be a great way to attract new customers — and the best way to gain them is by ensuring your team creates strong relationships with customers who feel heard.

Ways to Collect Customer Feedback for Marketing

Before you use customer feedback to improve your marketing efforts, you’ll need to collect it to find out what customers want. Yet, how do you know where to collect feedback? There are various ways, including the methods below.

Customer Surveys

Customer surveys allow you to collect feedback from customers and get direct answers. The best part is that surveys are simple and free to use.

However, there are a few things to keep in mind when conducting surveys amongst your customers:

• Ask specific questions that are relevant to your business. That way, you’re asking your customers questions in the right way.

• Give the respondent an option to provide additional feedback or comments. You never know if they have more information to add — which can be helpful for learning.

• Ensure the survey is accessible on all devices, especially mobile phones.

Social Media

If your brand has a presence on social media, you can leverage it to collect customer feedback. However, there are a few effective ways for brands to get their fair share of opinions and experiences.

For instance, social media allows users to post reviews on the company’s social media profiles. If customers have left feedback on your brand’s profile, be sure to take a look at these. 

Additionally, you can consider sending customers a survey through direct messaging — and offer them an incentive to take it. Customers will appreciate knowing that you’re listening and will be more than likely to take a survey if there is something in it for them.

Interviews

Interviews are another great way to collect feedback. When conducting an interview, the first step is to decide how many people to interview and what type of information you need to get from them. That way, you can get the most out of your interviews to enhance your marketing efforts.

Use Customer Feedback to Improve Your Marketing Strategy

You can see that customer feedback is powerful for improving your marketing. You can use it to enhance your campaigns, create buzz about your brand, address customer questions with published content and more. So the next time you gain feedback, try using these tips to turn them into actionable insights to help your business grow.