How do you tell if your marketing is working? While tracking conversions and sales leads can take you so far, it’s important to hear from customers directly about what is and isn’t working when it comes to marketing. In the enVisioning Success podcast episode, Feedback is Gold: Using Sales Insights to Refine Marketing, co-hosts Laura and Julia talk about tracking sales and CRM tools to improve marketing. Today, we will focus on getting customer feedback, including: how and when to do it, useful tools to aid in the process, and how to use this information to refine your marketing.
Losing Clients on the Customer Journey
Both in the above podcast and on this blog, we’ve talked about the customer journey several times. It’s the stages of client acquisition, from their awareness of your brand to initial purchase to becoming recurring and loyal customers. We talk about it a lot in our article, The Marketing Analytics Behind Your Customer Journey. In the five main stages of awareness, consideration, acquisition, retention, and advocacy, reviewing all the marketing data you can (and requesting feedback when possible) lets you identify where your marketing is strongest and weakest.
Marketing Tools for Getting Customer Feedback
The tools available to you to actively and passively get customer feedback are as varied as the platforms you’re using for your marketing, from social media to Google Analytics. Below are the most common tools and how to use them:
- Marketing Analytics: Analytics tools are most useful at the top of the funnel for tracking things like impressions/reach, pageviews, clicks, and other customer actions. Whenever you change marketing, review analytics to see how your customer actions change.
- Ad Conversions: Most forms of paid ads have conversion and goal tracking—seeing what it takes to turn a click into a filled lead form or a purchase. Making sure they are set up correctly and working can not only improve ads but marketing/sales relations.
- Email Marketing: Collecting and using the email addresses of both interested and current customers to create marketing funnels, drip campaigns, and retention marketing like email newsletters can help move people from looking to buying and keep current customers coming back for more.
- Reviews & Testimonials: One of the most direct forms of feedback comes from customers in the form of reviews and testimonials. These can be publicly posted, such as on Yelp, requested as part of the sales or email process, and can even be used as a marketing tool.
Once you have this feedback, the next step is to use it. This will require communication between your sales and marketing departments, the use of CRM tools to manage all the data (Go High Level was mentioned in the podcast), and trying new marketing as data shows new opportunities.
About the enVisioning Success Podcast
This article is based on topics discussed in enVisioning Success, our weekly podcast hosted by Vision CEO Laura DiBenedetto and COO Julia Becker Collins. In it, they discuss all things business and marketing, from lead generation to leadership. Find us on PodBean to download from your platform of choice, or subscribe to our mailing list to get new episodes and other news delivered directly to your inbox.
While the main point of marketing is to make sales, using the information in the sales and marketing process to improve your marketing can be a game changer. However, it takes tools, expertise, and a dedicated marketing department to make that happen. Not all companies have that. That’s where Vision comes in. We work directly with existing executive, sales, and marketing teams to identify weaknesses in current business and marketing strategies to build multi-channel marketing plans and execute them. Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can help.
