This article was originally published in the Elevate Your Marketing newsletter and has been repurposed and republished here with the author’s permission. Here is the link to the original article.
“The customer is always right.”
We all grew up in the corporate world hearing this all the time. While this might not be technically correct, given that customers are the most important stakeholders for a business, this is a logical statement to make.
Hence, your marketing activities need to reflect what the market wants by incorporating customer feedback into them. In this blog post, I discuss various techniques using which you can ‘hear the pulse’ of your customer and tweak your marketing accordingly.
The fundamentals of integrating customer feedback into marketing
By customer feedback, I am referring to both customers and prospects. While prospects will give you a sense of how the market is, existing customers will have a deeper view of your business and marketing activities. Both can offer valuable inputs to improve your marketing efforts.
In addition, any interaction your customer or prospect makes with your business or content can be considered for gathering customer feedback (interaction with social media posts for example). Hence, you need to have a broader view and learn how to incorporate findings from all such touchpoints into your marketing activities.
8 ways to collect customer feedback
For you to take the right action, you need to know how to collect customer feedback first. Here are 8 ways in which you can do it:
- Customer interviews
- Customer feedback and survey forms
- Sales conversations
- Analyzing second-party intent or reviews
- Website traffic analysis
- Product usage analytics
- Social media sentiment analysis
- Content interactions
1. Customer interviews
Customer interviews are one of the best ways to know your customers. Here, you have the opportunity to ask specific and tailored questions to your customers to improve the quality of your products or services. You can also use the data to finetune your marketing efforts.
When it comes to conducting customer interviews, Ryan Paul Gibson, the founder of Content Lift has all the answers. Check out this podcast episode by B2B Power Hour where Ryan dives deep into the nuances of customer interviews.
2. Customer feedback and survey forms
Customer feedback and survey forms are similar to customer interviews. Only that you do these in the form of written questionnaires customers have to respond to. The B2B Power Hour podcast episode by Ryan covers the difference between customer interviews and surveys in detail. Do check it out.
3. Sales conversations
This is something most don’t consider as a source of marketing intel. However, whether you win the customer or not, sales calls are excellent sources of collecting customer feedback without them even knowing it.
As the marketing team, you can get insights from sales calls in a couple of ways:
- Being a silent listener on these calls
- Sharing a set of questions with the sales team to be asked on these calls and collecting responses either directly from the respective salesperson or from the recording of the call.
The former is the more effective of the two. However, it consumes a lot of your time. The latter might offer more challenges as for salespeople an activity like this adds to their burden.
So, what’s the way around?
The best way to overcome this is to use a sales and conversational intelligence tool like Gong.
Check out the below video to understand how the tool works:
One thing to note here is that Gong is built for salespeople and not marketers. So you need to distil the relevant information from the insights you get from the tool. You will also have to work closely with the sales team to get access to the data and add any qualitative inputs to the insights.
4. Analyzing second-party intent or reviews for customer feedback
Review websites like G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius give you feedback on what customers feel about your product. You can also look at what the customers of your competitors are talking about their products.
5. Website traffic analysis
We have discussed how to analyze website data in various other articles. In the context of collecting customer feedback, it mostly boils down to how they interact with different pages and elements of your website.
Following are some of the techniques and data points you can use to understand customer feedback on your website:
- Heatmap analysis – uncovers insights on how good or bad the user experience on your website is (use tools like Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar for this).
- Pagewise conversion rates – tells you which pages convert visitors into leads the most.
- Pages with the highest time on page – tells you whether customers and prospects are interested in spending time on the page.
- Most visited pages – gives you an idea about which pages are attracting the highest amount of traffic.
- Accounts visiting your website (use tools like ZoomInfo, LeadFeeder, or Factors AI to get this info).
There are many more metrics you can analyze to understand customer behavior on your website. However. the above 4 techniques should cover 80 to 90% of what you need.
6. Product usage analytics
Wondering how product usage analytics can help with marketing?
Here is the thing.
If specific features and modules of your product are used more compared to others, it means that they are more valuable to your customers. And if you revolve your messaging and content around them, there is a higher likelihood of you converting more customers. This is because if your existing customers love some features, there is a high chance that your future customers will.
7. Social media sentiment analysis to collect customer feedback
This is more relevant if you are a large brand with a lot of following and interactions happening on social media. The idea here is to use social listening tools like Brandwatch or Mention to understand what others are talking about your business on social media.
Also read: Top B2B Social Media Marketing Trends For 2024
You can look for data points such as:
- Information on negative comments (this will help you improve your marketing and business in general).
- Most frequent topics of discussion about your business and brand.
- Types and formats of content you created that are performing the best on different social media platforms.
- Data on time of activity and engagement on your content.
Have a look at the below article from Mention that talks about how social listening can help gather customer feedback that can be leveraged for business growth.
Social Listening: Harnessing Customer Feedback for Business Growth
8. Content interactions
This is basically all the interactions your customers and prospects have with content types that we haven’t discussed so far in this article. These include:
- Video views and engagement
- Email engagement and interactions
- Asset downloads (ebooks, case studies, whitepapers, etc)
- Ad performance
- Newsletter-related metrics
- Podcasts
Essentially, you analyze how the market is responding to the different types of content you are creating. Learn more about how to analyze content marketing performance from the below article:
Content Marketing Analytics – What It Is And How To Build A System For It
How to use customer feedback to improve your marketing
Now that we have learned the different techniques that can be used to collect customer feedback, let us look at how those insights can be put into action to finetune your marketing efforts.
Following are the ways in which you can do this:
- Refine your targeting, positioning, and messaging
- Create content that converts
- Optimize what matters
- Realign and reallocate marketing resources
1. Refine your targeting, positioning, and messaging
This is one of the first things you need to get right when it comes to your marketing strategy. You need to know who needs your solutions. You need to know how to position yourself in the market differently from the competition. You need to know how to convey your position right (which is nothing but messaging).
Let us understand this through an example. Imagine you are into selling a supply chain management software.
By analyzing the industry of the accounts visiting your website, you find out that the vast majority of companies are from the e-commerce space. Based on this information, you can do the following to refine your targeting, positioning, and messaging.
- Run dedicated campaigns targeted at e-commerce companies across multiple channels.
- Create a separate markets/industry page for e-commerce if you don’t already have one.
- In your content, call out the unique differentiators you bring to the table for e-commerce companies.
- Use terms specific to the e-commerce industry in your content and copy.
The above is just an example. Think about more ways in which you can incorporate customer feedback into targeting, positioning, and messaging.
2. Create content that converts
In the last section, we discussed different methods you can use to gather customer feedback based on content interactions. To make the best use of this data, you need to focus on creating content that converts followers and website visitors into leads.
For instance, if your content analysis tells you that your target audience is downloading more top-of-the-funnel content (such as ebooks and whitepapers) than bottom-of-the-funnel content (such as case studies and product documents), you need to invest a little more time into creating the former.
This is not to say that you ignore BOFU (Bottom Of The Funnel) content completely. It’s just that you might be able to bring more people to the funnel by using TOFU (Top Of The Funnel) content.
Similarly, extend this analysis to all types of content that customers interact with and take actions based on how customers respond to them.
Related: B2B Content Marketing Strategy – 7 Mistakes To Avoid
3. Optimize what matters
Optimization in marketing is a huge topic. In the context of integrating customer feedback into marketing (and considering the customer feedback mechanisms we discussed earlier), following are some of the optimization techniques you can apply:
- Optimize webpage layout and content based on the insights from heatmap analysis.
- Improve the titles and descriptions of pages with low click rates (check out this edition of The Skalegrow Newsletter to learn more about this tactic).
- Finetune your ads copy to reflect how different customer segments interacted with your ads (For example, imagine you ran multiple ads with different content types targeting e-commerce companies for your supply chain software. If you see that videos did better than images, use more of them in your ads).
- If you find some elements of your email campaigns (such as subject line, preview text, and copy) performing better in certain campaigns, use more of them.
You could easily add more to the above. But you get the point here. Based on the feedback you receive from customers using different channels and methods, you optimize your marketing activities for better results.
4. Realign and reallocate marketing resources
Customer feedback at times can reveal shocking insights. Maybe a channel that you thought was performing well is not generating any demand for your business at all. So, do a ‘health check’ of your marketing activities by doing the following:
- Focus more on the channels that are generating demand and revenue for your business. On the other hand, ramp down your efforts on channels that are not working (learn about marketing and revenue attribution methods here).
- You might have to realign the responsibilities assigned to different marketing team members to make sure the team focuses only on activities that matter. You will also have to redefine the KRAs (Key Result Areas) and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) of your team members accordingly.
- Redistribute the marketing budget as needed.
- Revisit your spending on marketing tools and technology.
- Modify marketing objectives if required (for instance, if you find that customers care more about educational content, make it a key objective to create more of it in the future).
These 4 steps should help you cover almost everything you could potentially do when it comes to incorporating customer feedback into your marketing efforts.
Final words about collecting customer feedback
As in the case of everything else in marketing and business in general, learning to do something is not enough. You need to take action based on what you learned. So make sure you apply what you learned from today’s article. Feel free to make any necessary changes to the approach to ensure the framework discussed fits your business context.
Skalegrow – B2B brand marketing agency
With marketing getting tougher and tougher, every wrong foot you make might hamper your growth. What you need is the right guidance and a helping hand. This is where Skalegrow can make a sea of difference.
Skalegrow helps IT, tech, SaaS, and embedded systems companies leverage new-age marketing tactics to grow their business. Check out the below intro video to learn more about what Skalegrow brings to the table:
Brand marketing is one of the areas we specialize in. Whether it’s in the form of creating great content, crafting a unique positioning, or ensuring a consistent brand identity, we can help. Write to us at info@skalegrow.com for more details.
About the author
Naseef KPO is the Founder and CEO of Skalegrow. He comes with rich experience across multiple areas of B2B marketing including content marketing, demand generation, SEO, account-based marketing, marketing analytics, revenue attribution, marketing technology, etc. He writes thought-provoking and relevant articles on The Skalegrow Blog and his weekly LinkedIn newsletter Elevate Your Marketing.
Prior to starting Skalegrow, Naseef led large marketing teams in multi-million dollar B2B organizations where he made significant contributions to the topline growth of the business. He has also appeared on numerous podcasts where he shared his thoughts on trending marketing topics such as the application of AI in marketing, startup marketing, ABM, and B2B content marketing, just to name a few. Being the founder of Skalegrow, he is currently focusing on helping its clients stay ahead of their competition by using innovative yet practical marketing tactics.
You can connect with Naseef KPO on LinkedIn.
