Digital marketing is an ever-changing industry. In the past year alone, the meteoric rise of generative AI has reshaped content writing and the rapid expansion of automation has dramatically improved out-funnel marketing.
Adjusting to the changing digital marketing landscape can be tricky. However, you can’t afford to fall behind on consumer trends if you want to position your brand as accessible, relevant, and well-informed.
Consider using feedback loops to continuously improve your marketing skills and customer insights. Feedback loops help you acknowledge changing consumer profiles and develop content that delivers higher engagement rates. Maintaining feedback loops can also improve your brand image and help you address common complaints.
What are feedback loops?
Understanding your consumers is key to success in modern marketing. Without a clear understanding of who is buying the product, your campaigns are all but destined to fail. However, as a marketer, you may find it difficult to acquire high-quality, useful feedback from your customers.
Establishing a customer feedback loop can improve the quality and quantity of the feedback you receive. Unlike most reviews or customer surveys, feedback loops are designed to create a two-way conversation between consumers and your brand. This is particularly helpful if you want to build a compassionate, understanding brand image, as responding to feedback shows that you authentically care about consumer insights.
In general, feedback loops can be categorized as either “negative” or “positive”.
Negative feedback loops generally occur when there’s a problem with your product or service. A consumer then enters your customer service portal or finds your customer service page on Facebook. When creating a negative feedback loop, it’s your job to address customer concerns and protect your brand image. Typically, this means you’ll offer some form of discount or promotional product in a bid to keep the consumer happy.
Positive feedback loops are a marketer’s dream. Positive loops occur when you’ve delivered on your promise, and folks take time out of their day to send a great review or a “thank you!”. These folks are a treasure trove for quality feedback, as they’ll let you know why they love your brand, product, or service. Engaging with positive feedback can help you understand customer perception and lend authority to your future marketing plans.
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Continuous Improvement
When leveraged correctly, feedback loops can help you embrace an ethos of continuous improvement. This is particularly important today, as volatile global markets and high rates of inflation have shaken up consumer spending across multiple industries.
You can use negative feedback loops to address areas for improvement. While it’s important to avoid an overreaction following negative feedback, consistently poor reviews are a sure sign that something needs to change.
Use the feedback you gather through polls, surveys, and social posts as evidence when you speak to other departments. Often, the other departments in your business may not even know that there is an issue with the product or service that you provide. Collate the negative feedback you’ve gathered and pick out a few common issues. This will empower decision-makers to make meaningful changes with the ethos of continuous improvement in mind.
When reviewing the feedback you’ve gathered, be sure to guard against fake reviews. You can spot fake reviews by digging into the reviewer profile a little. Is their profile picture a stock image? Do they have a suspicious persona online? Are they tied to an illegitimate business model? A quick background search can save you plenty of headaches and help you parse out fake reviews.
Remember to use positive feedback when targeting continuous improvement. Positive feedback loops help you consolidate your strengths and figure out what is working. This is particularly powerful if you’re working for a smaller firm and are working with limited data. Utilizing positive feedback can convince decision-makers to dedicate more resources to high-performing products and future iterations of similar goods or services.
Voice of the Customer
Understanding the Voice of the Customer (VOC) is essential. Capturing the VOC ensures your marketing content is relevant, engaging, and optimized for your user base. You can obtain VOC data with methods like:
- Customer interviews
- On-site surveys
- Live chat with website visitors
- Social media engagement
These methods of VOC collection can help you establish useful feedback loops as well. For example, if you collect VOC data using customer interviews, you could then follow up with an email in response to the interview. This opens a two-way conversation between your brand and consumers, which will naturally enrich your understanding of the VOC.
Try to give your consumers as many ways to respond to calls to action for VOC data collection as possible. Some folks may love the idea of on-site surveys, while others would rather type up their feedback from the comfort of their own home.
Gathering data from multiple platforms can protect your feedback loop from bias. Social media users may give a disproportionate amount of negative feedback, which could skew your decision-making. Balance this out by giving consumers as many touchpoints as possible.
Once you’ve captured the VOC, act quickly to make strategic improvements to your brand identity. The VOC is always changing, meaning consumer preferences may have moved on if you react slowly to the data you gather.
Increasing Customer Engagement
Feedback loops are worth their weight in gold. However, you may struggle to build engagement amongst your customers if you fail to incentivize engagement. This is a serious issue, as low engagement rates can lead you to believe that anomalous data is actually reliable.
Bolster your customer engagement and increase the reliability of your feedback loops by incentivizing engagement. Trial strategies like:
- Run prizes and giveaways for folks who participate
- Create “members only” polls for existing customers
- Repost user-generated content and highlight helpful followers
If you still fail to generate meaningful engagement, you may simply need to increase your follower count. Try to build a long-term social strategy and encourage highly qualified leads to join your email list with discounts. Growing your presence online will naturally yield more responses, as doing so will increase the visibility of your surveys, polls, and posts.
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Social Loops
Social media is a treasure trove for customer feedback. Folks who respond to comments, fill out polls or send you DMs give you plenty of free feedback that can be used to continuously improve your customer insights.
However, before you go all-in on social media, you need to address any disconnect between the folks who follow you online and those who actually buy your product. This is particularly important if you sell a premium product or service, as many of your followers may not actually represent the needs and insights of your clientele.
You should also be hyper-aware that your social feedback loops are publicly available. That means everyone will know how you respond to negative reviews or complaints.
If your brand is going through a tricky period, consider posting content that generates more positive feedback. Intentionally gathering positive feedback can protect your brand image and help you get a fair assessment of brand sentiment. Respond to positive comments and pin helpful reviews to the top of your comment board. This approach helps you gather customer insights while promoting a healthier brand image.
Optimizing Your Loops
Search engine optimization (SEO) strategies focus on making your business easier to find online. As a digital marketer, SEO is essentially your bread and butter. However, you may want to tweak your approach slightly if you want to generate reliable feedback loops.
Increase the integrity of your feedback by tracking referral traffic. Your referral traffic shows how respondents landed on your website, meaning you can tell if folks came from a social post, email marketing link, or a SERP like Google.
When evaluating your feedback, focus on high-quality referral traffic. For example, if you only have a few hours to respond to an online form, you should probably focus on folks who came directly from your email list first. Those who are on your email list are usually highly qualified leads and/or repeat customers. This means they have the most meaningful insights to offer due to their hands-on experience with your product or service.
If you’re unsure how to start a feedback loop, take a leaf out of the SEO playbook and emulate high-performing competitors. Industry leaders usually do their research before posting a poll or survey. They know how to format feedback forms to generate meaningful results and can help you redesign your existing questionnaires and digital documents.
You may want to set aside some of your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising budget to promote your polls. However, you should be aware that this may detract from sales and will likely bring folks who are not already customers to your website. As such, surveys that you promote while using PPC advertising should focus on gathering feedback related to your competitors and should conclude with a clear path to your point of sale.
Conclusion
Feedback loops open an important two-way conversation between your customers and your brand. This yields important insights that you can use to continuously improve your offering. Focusing on feedback loops can also protect your brand image, as you’ll address consumer complaints and queries while attending to your digital presence. Be sure to value negative and positive feedback equally, as hyper-focusing on critiques can dilute your brand’s strengths and inadvertently undermine the veracity of your decision-making.
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