How to Use Customer Feedback to Improve Content

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Is the content you’re promoted through your website, newsletters, advertisements, and eBooks to your target audience attracting them to visit your online and/or offline location?

If you do not see any results, how can you improve your content to increase sales and revenue?

You can use customer feedback to improve your content. Your potential customers may not find your content appealing, causing them to turn their back on your products and services.

If you don’t want them to exit out of your website, you need to ask your customers how you can improve feedback of your website, eBook, and any other advertising medium you are trying to lure them through into buying your products and services.

Today, you are going to learn the different ways you can use customer feedback and the various methods to ask for customer feedback. Before we start, let’s tell you what customer feedback is and why it’s important.

What is Customer Feedback?

Customer feedback provides you insights, information, input, and issues shared by your target audience. Your target audience informs you about their experiences with your brand, product, and/or service.

However, in your case, it’s finding out if your content is worth a read and, if not, what improvements do they suggest you make it.

For instance, you could ask them to provide you with a few subjects they would like you to base your content on. You can write an eBook on the subject they suggested. If several people show interest that they want you to write your eBook on a certain subject, the more chances of them downloading your eBook.

More importantly, do not take negative feedback as criticism. You need to use the negative feedback, including any suggestions you receive, to improve your content and work on it to turn it around into positive feedback.

The Importance of Asking for Customer Feedback

Customer feedback acts as a guide to help you grow your brand. Through customer feedback, you know what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. It helps you see your brand through your customers’ eyes.

When you know the likes and dislikes of your customers, it allows you to reshape your content strategy. Whether it’s changing the content on your website or changing directions with your eBook and other marketing materials, customer feedback serves as an important tool in helping your business succeed and meet its goals and objectives.

5 Ways Customer Feedback Can Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy

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Customer feedback allows you to identify the flaws in your content marketing strategy and then correct them. For instance, your content strategy involves spreading awareness about your brand through an eBook. You can release an eBook and then ask the people who have bought it for their feedback on it.

Additionally, you could ask customers who haven’t bought your eBook to provide you with a reason why they haven’t bought it and what would persuade them to buy it. Remember, the entire point of customer feedback is to generate leads through various content marketing mediums. Here are a few ways you can benefit from customer feedback:

1. Maintains Effective Customer Support Service

You need to provide your target audience with an excellent customer support department. If you have that, you are already encouraging feedback. Customer support departments can forge a connection between you and your customers.

Let’s stick with the eBook example. You wrote an eBook, but your customers found mistakes in the information provided. Perhaps, it was a factual error they spotted. You want them to provide you with a means to report it to you.

Having a robust customer service department and giving them several ways like phone, email, and virtual chat to provide it to you helps. An easy way to ensure your eBook doesn’t have any factual inaccuracies is to invest in an eBook proofreading service.

You need a responsive customer feedback department. Ensure you provide your customers with timely responses. You also need to implement customer feedback into your content marketing strategy.

2. Provides You an Advantage to Use Negative Customer Feedback to Make Improvements

Negative feedback needs special attention. Although you can’t negative feedback and reviews from coming, you could use them to your advantage. You need to respond to negative feedback with a solution. If a customer didn’t like your eBook, you could ask them the reason and their suggestions, which you can use to produce an even better eBook next time.

By acknowledging negative feedback, you tell them you care. The next eBook that you publish won’t have the same mistakes. Still, you can’t make everyone happy, so don’t beat yourself over it if you still get negative feedback.

3. Use Customer Feedback for Content Ideas

You may not always have an idea of what your next blog or eBook needs to be about, and that’s where customer reviews come in handy. Customer feedback can provide you with ideas on the type of content you need to be writing.

For instance, you may have written a blog that received a lot of traction. Several people left positive comments and shared it all across social media. You can write an eBook on the topic and go into more detail.

4. Customer Feedback Informs You of Your Customers’ Changing Wants

When a potential customer shows interest in downloading your eBook or buying your product or service, they will read the customer reviews first and decide to buy based on what they see. Apart from seeing customer reviews on your website, they will also visit all your social media platforms to see what others are saying about you.

If you have written an eBook on an outdated subject, you will know through the reviews. If your product no longer impresses them because their wants have changed, you can consider adding different products or upgrading your existing one to cater to their changing wants. Your customers are your greatest source of helping you improve and update your content marketing strategy and your brand as a whole.

5. Make Customers into Your Brand Ambassadors

You can send a positive message to your target audience through your loyal customers. You can turn your customers who have left positive feedback on your product or service into brand ambassadors. You can reach out to them and ask them if they would be interested in being your brand ambassador.

Once you have a couple of brand ambassadors on board, you can ask them to promote your eBook, for instance, on various social media platforms. This will allow your brand to be seen by several people and create brand awareness. In return, this will increase website site traffic, and with it, your sales and revenue.

Conclusion

You need to seek out both positive and negative customer feedback and reviews and then see how you can use them to enhance your content marketing strategy. You can use customer feedback as a promotional tool, as well.

5 Methods to Obtain Customer Feedback

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When a customer has negative feedback, they are quick to leave a review on your website or social media platform. When a customer has positive feedback, the chance of them leaving a review is slim because most of them need to be prompted to leave it.

Again, we’re going with the eBook example here. You chose a topic and then asked an eBook proofreading and writing service to write an eBook. Next, you published it. A few people downloaded it. However, you don’t know whether they liked it or disliked it.

You need to prompt them to leave feedback regardless of whether it’s positive or negative. How do you ask them to leave feedback? That’s what we’re here to tell you.

1. Develop Customer Feedback Surveys

The best part about the internet is how easy it is to develop and share customer feedback surveys. You could share the surveys on your website, through email, and on your various social media platforms. You can ask your customers questions about your eBook, such as:

• Did you like our eBook?
• If you didn’t like our eBook, can you please tell us why?
• What would you like us to base our next eBook on?
• Do you have any suggestions for us?

You can choose a long-form or short-form survey. You can even ask them one question and wait for their responses. The type and length of your survey will depend on your target audience. Most customers prefer short-form surveys over long-form surveys, as they are quick and easy to take. It also increases the chance of them taking it and not leaving it halfway through. Here are some tips to ensure your customers complete your survey:

• Ask questions that help you achieve your goals and objectives.
• Write thoughtful and respectful open-end questions.
• Avoid writing loaded or leading questions.
• Develop consistent rating scales.

Once you receive the answers, you and your team can evaluate the answers. What are you looking for? You are looking for the similarity between the answers from different customers. If more people thought your website was not user-friendly, you need to analyze your website to make it more accessible to your customers, for instance.

2. Send Email and Set Up Customer Contact Forms

You can send emails to your customers asking them to provide you with feedback by clicking on this link. You can provide them with customer contact forms on your website to fill and send them back to you. However, you may run into a slight problem.

How to increase the likelihood of a customer providing you with feedback? You’ll find your answer below.

• Establish Clear Expectations

Some customers are reluctant to provide their feedback to businesses because they assume that the business doesn’t care what they have to say. The only time you may hear from a customer is when they are extremely unhappy, but what about the slightly unhappy customers? You want to hear from them as well. However, most businesses don’t.

This is why it is so important to show all your customers your level of engagement with customers who have left feedback. Whether it’s positive or negative customer feedback, you need to reply, even if it’s just a thank you.

In your emails, you can tell them that they can expect to hear back from you soon. You can also be specific about the hours and days they can expect a reply from you. This will help you earn their trust.

• Create Organized Customer Feedback

You don’t want any feedback you receive from your customers to slip through the feedback. If it does, you will lose valuable insight, which you could have used to improve your content. You can download software that allows your entire team to view and manage feedback from more than one online platform. This allows you to address all customer feedback in an organized manner.

• Send Customers Personalized Replies

Do you want candid feedback from customers? You can increase your chance of receiving them by sending them personalized responses. Trust us; customers can differentiate between automated and personalized responses. Make an effort to address them. You can assign different people from your team to send them personalized responses.

On social media, businesses assign a social media manager to keep track of customer feedback and reply with a personalized comment. Your team can reply with memes even. Your customers will see you taking the time to reply to them individually.

3. Perform Exploratory Customer Reviews

Direct outreach through exploratory customer reviews can provide you with beneficial customer feedback. You can reach out to your customers directly to open up a dialogue. You can send them a direct message on Twitter, for instance.

Customers can explain in detail how they feel about your product or service. If they shared negative feedback about your eBook, you can reach out to them directly to understand why they felt the way they did. It can help you create an even better eBook next time.

Moreover, direct interviews with customers also allow you to clarify any false assumptions they may have held about your business. When you talk to your customers either in-person or over social media, keep these tips in mind:

• Begin an Open-ended Dialogue

When you talk to your customers, you want to ask open-ended questions. This allows customers to give a more detailed answer according to their personal experience with your business. Additionally, open-ended questions decrease the risk of customers being biased as well as prevent leading questions.

• Allow You to Ask Specific Questions

As you interview your customers, you can go into more detail by asking more questions. If they give you feedback, you need to use them to ask another question. Doing so will really help you get to the bottom of the problem and learn how you can fix it.

• Practice Listening More and Talking Less

Don’t be that interviewer who constantly interrupts the person being interviewed or who can’t stop talking. You need to let your customer talk by practicing active listening. You need to maintain good eye contact throughout the interview and show them that you are listening by nodding and asking follow-up questions.

Your customers are taking time out of their schedule to sit with you for the interview, so it’s important that you listen to them and view things from their perspective. You can conduct the interview in-person or through a video conference app such as Zoom.

4. Use Social Media to Receive Candid Customer Feedback

Social media is a great tool to receive candid customer feedback. Customers use social media to contact the business with their complaints, questions, and praises. However, mentions and direct comments aren’t the only way to obtain customer feedback.

Most social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook offer the option of conducting a poll. If you have a few ideas for your next eBook, you can list them all in the poll and ask your customers to vote. You can write an eBook on the most voted idea.

5. Receive Instant Customer Feedback from Your Website

You can embed an on-site widget into your website to collect instant feedback from your customers without asking them any questions. If you don’t know what the next topic for your eBook should be, your on-site widget will tell you what customers are into these days.

The on-site widget can collect data from the most popular blogs and show them to you. You can use the articles as inspiration for your next blog or eBook.

Conclusion

Collecting customer feedback is important and shouldn’t be overlooked. Whether you’re writing an eBook or selling phone covers, you need to ask customers for their feedback. You can use customer feedback to improve your content marketing strategy and come up with new ideas for your eBook and blogs.

You can even use customer feedback to improve the content on your website. Perhaps, it takes customers time to find your contact information or products due to how you have laid out the content on your website. Customer feedback can help you make your website more user-friendly. Never underestimate customer feedback, as it’s more crucial than you think, especially in the age of technology.