Monitoring social chatter to better understand your customers

In a world where trends seem to change almost daily, so do the demands and interests of consumers. The good news is that with all the social media outlets that capture consumers’ thoughts, likes, shares, and other expressed interests, you can continuously monitor the issues, attitudes, ideas, inspirations, and aspirations that are most on your customers’ minds. Browsing responses to posts related to your business category on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn can present valuable insights for your brand, messaging, and customer experience strategies.

Get started by identifying the social channels your customers use and follow for information, social interaction, and news. And follow them yourself. The most common social media among young and more mature adult audiences include

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• TikTok

Note the news, stories, photos, and videos that are trending and the themes that are getting the most likes, comments, and shares. Monitoring and engaging in dialogue with customers and prospects provides some of the best insights you can possibly get. Studying social websites is a bit like studying anthropology, as you will become familiar with the language, values, and culture of the time in which you operate.

Take advantage of your own social media followers. Ask your virtual friends what’s on their minds and for opinions, suggestions, and ideas about topics of interest related to your industry. You can also do polls on LinkedIn and Facebook. You’re not likely to get enough feedback from social page surveys to have statistical significance for any new idea or recommendation, but you’ll gain insights on how some of your customers feel and you may identify trends you want to research further.

Keep in mind that the results of these informal polls may be biased because you’re polling people connected to you through some common experience or association. You may miss out on diversity of responses and thoughts. It’s important to consider that the views, needs, and struggles of people from different backgrounds are not always represented equally, if at all.

Social listening tools enable brands to monitor what customers are saying about them online. You can monitor personas reflecting your customer segments and listen to their collective dialogue through various sites, and you can also track individuals, helping you identify which customers you’re at risk of losing, which present new opportunities, and which are spreading ill will about your brand. These tools also give you a unique opportunity to respond to an unhappy customer or misguided consumer in real time, something other generations of marketers only dreamed about. These platforms, which are typically offered as a software as a service (SaaS) model and charge monthly for each license, include the following choices:

• Brandwatch
• Mention
• Falcon.io
• HubSpot
• Sprinklr
• Sprout Social
• Hootsuite

“Listening” to reviews on Google My Business, Yelp, and other review platforms is also helpful. Make it a regular routine to read reviews on review platforms like Yelp, Google, and so on. Bad reviews for quality or customer service have a serious impact on brand reputations and need to be addressed. You can often respond to posters publicly on review sites, including those that list top product recommendations in given business categories, so all visitors can see a commitment to resolution, or a defense if it’s warranted.

Following relevant blogs

Take the time to monitor blogs by research firms, industry authorities, and influencers. No matter your industry, there are many voices out there, and you need to identify the ones to which your customers listen most. For example, if you’re positioning your products for people who value minimalist living, subscribe to the most popular blogs addressing that topic.

After you identify the influencers in your market, be sure to not only subscribe to their blogs but also work to develop content and story ideas that support your products and encourage these bloggers to write about them. Just like journalists, they’re always looking for new ideas, products, and insights to write about so they can remain relevant and gain more followers. These people should be on your recipient lists for press releases, news bulletins, story ideas, and so on.

When asking for input and information on websites and in virtual communities, be honest about who you are and why you’re asking for advice. If you tell people you’re in charge of marketing your product and you want to know what they think of your new ad, many will offer their views gladly and freely.

Paying attention to information resources

The big accounting firms and specialty groups conduct regular research on just about every aspect of business, and often provide their findings for free. Groups that publish regular reports on data for specific industries as well as market and consumer trends in general include Nielson, Deloitte, Accenture, Forrester, Think with Google, and many more. Just google a topic and you’ll see a list of new reports from a variety of firms.

You can also find rich data on what other companies are doing to grow their business. For example, if you want to see how other businesses spend their advertising budgets, you can find many associations and research firms like the Winterberry Group that provide annual reports on actual behavior and projected trends. Knowing how similar brands are spending their advertising dollars can provide valuable data on which channels work best in your space. Large brands in both the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) sectors spend thousands on research to determine the best path to a strong return on investment, so pay attention to what they’re doing.

Good sources for information on advertising trends include Forbes, eMarketer, and Statista. These and other groups publish frequent updates on marketing, media usage and expenditures, and commerce across digital and traditional platforms. Return to these sites often to stay on top of trends and identify ways to use your resources wisely as consumers and markets change.

Uncovering what really drives your customers

As Chapter 2 explains, the success of any marketing plan for any business category depends on your ability to identify the emotional selling propositions that best apply to your core customers.

How consumers feel about your brand, your customer service policies, and their experiences determines your short- and long-term success. Conducting regular research can help you identify, understand, and eventually manage consumers’ emotional reactions and attitudes so that you can communicate with psychological relevance and stand out in your category. Instead of just asking routine questions related to product or service satisfaction, include questions that help you identify how customers feel about their experiences with you.

Here are some ideas for questions to discuss with customers during or after a transaction, during a sales presentation, or in focus groups — if you can get anyone to participate. Getting some feedback on these issues will help you pinpoint emotional drivers of choice.

• What was the emotional or functional fulfillment they sought when making a purchase?
• What is their main goal when purchasing in your product category?
• After doing business with you, how did they feel? Did they feel valued, appreciated, and excited to do business with you again?
• Did you make them feel any different than they felt when they purchased from a competitor?
• What attracted them to your brand?
• What was the primary reason they chose to purchase from you versus from a competitor?
• What are their decision criteria for your product category?
• What are the primary expectations they have for the brands they are considering?
• What do they like most and least about your brand?
• How happy have they been with purchases and experiences from others in your category? What generated their happiness or lack of it?

Draw a chart to reflect negative and positive feedback and ratings of your product or service. When you do this, chances are, a few elements will stick as notably negative, and others as notably positive, letting you know the weaknesses you need to fix and the strengths you should build on.

Determining the right format for the metrics you need

A good metric to use when asking customers to evaluate their experience with you and your product is a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being low and 5 being high. Anything more complicated can make it difficult for people to answer and can increase the dropout rate, jeopardizing your opportunity to gain important and verifiable information. For example:

You can change the variables to Disagree Strongly, Disagree, Neutral, Agree, and Agree Strongly, or other options.

Your high-rating attributes from a given survey represent the features you should be promoting to consumers and talking about in your social media posts and online sites. The low scores can help you identify your failings and set priorities for improving your customer experience. To clarify which ones are worthy of the most attention, you can ask customers to rank the importance of each listed item so you can focus your improvement efforts on the more important attributes. Many online survey tools allow you to use a wide range of options for answers, such as ratings, rankings, and open or essay responses, all of which give you a different perspective.

Most online survey platforms provide guidance on writing and formatting questions. Articles and tips they offer will help you know how to best use ratings or rankings and multiple-choice or open-ended questions. In many cases, you will be able to adjust a template to reflect your specific questions or view examples of successful survey tools to help you see firsthand what works best. Take your time to browse the tools available to find one that fits your budget and can grow as your needs grow.

You may want to set up your surveys among demographic groups within your industry to identify different decision processes, emotional needs, price points, purchasing cycles, and so on. You should also sort out groups based on their relationship with you. These groups may include

• Lapsed customers
• Current customers
• Potential customers with prior contact (often referred to as a warm list)
• Prospects with no prior contact (often referred to as a cold list)
• Male versus female shoppers
• Baby boomers versus millennials

A survey is only as good as the insights generated and your ability to get people to respond. Take the time to write meaningful questions clearly, format them to provide the most actionable insights for you, and adapt them for various customer segments.

The response rate to surveys is declining across categories, and given how distracted consumers are, largely because of all the marketing communications they get across all channels, 24 hours a day, from marketers like us, that’s not likely to change. Use surveys sparingly and be sure to communicate how answers to your questions will benefit participants.

Survey fatigue is a key reason for declining response rates. Fatigue results from asking too many questions and surveying too often. Asking one to three questions tends to work best. Just asking customers to give you a 1- to 5-star review, and nothing else, upon completing an online transaction or customer service interaction can also provide great insight for you without asking too much of your customers.

Defining your objectives

Before you can craft a survey that provides the insights you seek and gets the response you need to act with confidence, you should ask yourself the following questions:

• What do I need to know about my customers to really be able to serve them better?
• What is missing in my body of knowledge about my customers in terms of who they are, what goals they seek to fulfill with my products, and how my products simplify or improve their lives?
• What do I need to know about customers’ personality traits, emotional drivers, and feelings toward my category and brand in order to prepare more relevant creative and promotional campaigns?
• How do I plan to use the information I collect?

After you define your information goals, it’s time to start developing your survey. Your questions should be crafted in a way that’s clear to respondents and easy for them to answer quickly.

Using clear, concise wording

Here are some guidelines for asking questions that get answered and provide valid results:

• Ask only one question in each inquiry. Avoid questions like Do you think customer service and product variety are important? If your response mechanism is yes or no, you really can’t determine whether respondents are answering yes to customer service or product variety.
• Don’t ask about things you don’t need to know. Do you really need to know your customers’ income or education level in order to serve them?
• Don’t get personal. If you ask questions that go beyond their public activity or presence, customers will feel uncomfortable and may be concerned about how you will use the information.
• Ask questions about things you can act on. This way, your customers will see how answering your questions can impact them in a positive way. For example, asking Do you agree that the wait time for us to serve you can be improved? clearly shows that you want to know what you can do better.
• Mix up the format of your questions. Instead of asking all multiple-choice or yes-or-no questions, intersperse all types of questions throughout your survey to keep respondents’ minds sharp and give you additional insights.
• Always include one open-ended or essay question. This allows you to hear your customers’ voices.

Be careful to use words that are clear, simple, and do not have double meanings. For example, use exaggeration instead hyperbole, contradiction instead of dichotomy, and so on, so that your meaning is clear to all participants regardless of their vocabulary skills.

When you create surveys for customers, not only are you asking them questions about themselves, but you’re also sharing information about your brand. Use these tools to communicate key differences about your products or services in an informative manner. For example, you may want to ask, Did you know that ABC Brand maintains the highest customer satisfaction rates in the quick print industry? A leading question like this helps you identify how effectively your message is getting across and lets you share something of value at the same time.

Net Promoter Score

One of the most common benchmarks for how a brand is doing is its Net Promoter Score, or NPS. This is primarily a score on how high you rate for customer referrals, yet it also serves as a strong indicator of social proof (see Chapter 2) for prospects. In short, NPS is an index ranging from –100 to 100 that shows the likelihood of customers recommending your company’s products or services to others. It helps marketers determine the possibility of referrals and loyalty among current customers.

NPS categorizes respondents into three types: promoters, detractors, and passives.

• Promoters are customers that scored their likeliness to recommend your brand as a 9 or 10. These are your happiest customers and the ones you should be nurturing for referrals and case studies.
• Detractors are those that scored their likelihood of recommending you as a 0 – 6. Clearly, these customers are at risk, and you need to explore ways to improve satisfaction and retention among them.
• Passives are the customers giving you a 7 or 8, who tend to be neutral about your brand. Prioritizing relationships with these customers would be a strong action to take to prevent them from becoming detractors or lost customers in the future.

These categories help you understand what your NPS really means for retention, attrition, and likely referrals.

Many marketing platforms include the NPS questions and calculator, which can help you tabulate an accurate NPS. These resources range from online survey platforms to customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and companies like Satmetrix, a leading SaaS platform for NPS systems and findings that provides easy-to-use tools. One example of a free service you can use is www.npscalculator.com.

To give you some perspective, the average NPS for life insurance companies was recently reported to be 31, department/specialty stores averaged 58, and internet service providers scored 2 (yes, 2) on average.

You can calculate your own NPS using these simple steps:

1. Subtract the number of detractors from the number of promoters.
2. Divide the number from Step 1 by the total number of responses.
3. Multiply the final number in Step 2 by 100.

Here is an example that includes 100 total responses:

• 70 promoters – 30 detractors = 40

• 40 ÷ 100 = .40

  .40 × 100 = an NPS of 40

A good benchmark is to look up the average NPS for your industry. It’s hard to find out specific brands’ scores, so focus on beating your category averages and delivering the kind of experiences that keep your score rising rather than declining. For consumers doing research on which brands to buy and which to avoid, and for brands that want to build retention, these scores matter!

Beyond asking questions to determine consumers’ likelihood of purchasing from you and referring your brand to others, your surveys should ask questions to guide you in developing your product line. For example, if you’re in charge of a two-year-old software product that small businesses use for their planning and financials, you may want to ask questions that will help you determine the following issues:

• Should we launch an upgrade or keep selling the current version?
• What features do you use and gain the most from, and what is missing now that you’d like to see in the future?
• Does our brand messaging reflect the experience you’ve had with our product?

Level of confidence

You need to decide what level of statistical significance you’re willing to accept and base your actions on. Typically, you should strive for at least a 95 percent confidence level. Many online survey tools have the ability to determine the number of responses needed for a given confidence level. For example, if you want a 95 percent confidence level and a 5 percent margin of error for your survey results, you’ll need a sample size of close to 370 among a population size of 10,000.

If you are looking for general feedback to guide your thinking rather than the concrete actions you should take, you may be okay with lower confidence levels for ideas you can test and vet over time.

Qualtrics.com offers a free sample size calculator. This tool also helps you determine the confidence levels you achieved with a past survey based on the number of responses you received. You can see the different confidence levels that occur when you manually adjust the margin of error for your results. For example, if you got 137 responses to a survey, and you adjust the margin of error to 7 percent, you will be at a 90 percent confidence level. If you adjust the margin of error to be lower than 7 percent, that confidence level will surely go down.

To increase the validity of the data you get from survey responses, you need to increase the response rate. Consumers are more willing to answer surveys if you make it about them and not just about you. Ask questions about what type of personalized information would be meaningful to them and add those variables to your customer profiles.

Don’t over survey. Use discretion as to how much information you request and how often you ask for feedback. Keep surveys short and infrequent.

Preface your survey by indicating that you’ll use the information to better serve your customers. If you plan to keep their answers confidential, tell them that. Transparency about how you plan to use and share their information is critical to building trust with your customers and getting them to complete your surveys.

Getting feedback from prospects without purchasing expensive lists

Getting a list of prospects to survey is the greatest challenge. Purchasing lists can set you up to become a spammer, and lists can be expensive even if that wasn’t the case. You can overcome this challenge by looking for opportunities to add questions to a survey being conducted by an industry publication or research firm.

Survey or research panels enable you to pose your questions to a group of people who reflect your target audience and have agreed to take surveys on an ongoing basis. This approach is an affordable solution for getting insights from potential customers you wouldn’t likely have access to otherwise, and for a fraction of the cost it can take to identify and reach them.

You can engage research panels multiple times and typically collect responses quickly. Keep in mind that these participants get paid in cash, gift cards, and other rewards to do surveys.

According to GreenBook, a data collection company that offers a directory of business services, leading providers of research panels include Logit, CatalystMR, and OvationMR. You can also look for options at Qualtrics.com and SurveyMonkey. Browse the latest lists of survey panels through a Google search or look at sites like www.surveypolice.com, which ranks polls based on feedback from users.

In most cases, you can purchase survey accounts on a monthly or an annual basis. And in some cases, you can use these online tools for free — if you’re willing to accept limited access and data collection. Research panels give you access to national and global consumers so you can determine where it makes sense to expand and when.

If your website gets a good number of visitors a day, put questions on your home page, one at a time. Your CRM platform can link to surveys on your website to collect data for you in the same way they collect and store information from Contact Us form submissions. A question with general appeal (something everyone’s invested in or curious about) may actually boost visitors at the same time it generates useful data for your marketing decisions.

Don’t fall into the trap of doing all your customer research online. Make a point of talking to people face-to-face, in groups and individually. This gets you in the habit of asking salespeople, employees, customers, and strangers on the street for their ideas and suggestions. You never know when a suggestion may prove valuable and lead to another idea.

Using low-cost and free ways to build knowledge

As a marketer, you’re never done gathering information. When you think you know all you need to know about your market and customers, that’s when you’ll start to lose your competitive edge and see profits tumble. You need to build and execute ongoing research and learning plans that help you stay up to date on all aspects of your market, your brand, your products, your customers, and the opportunities and threats you face.

Some of the information your research efforts should help you understand include

• Who wants what?
• Which markets and consumer segments are projected to grow and which are not?
• What societal, political, and other influences drive choice among various customer segments?
• How do different generations react to different messages, themes, and promises?
• What functional alternatives exist to your offers, and how do they impact your goals?
• How do your target consumers view your competitors, and which of their promises and distinctions threaten your brand?

Without information, you may be like many businesses and other entities that stagnate by working hard but not working smart to really know how to build a sustainable business.

The following sections cover a lot of ways — some cheap and others free — to boost your marketing intelligence.