Why User Feedback Should Be a Part of Your Marketing Stack

Everything your company does is a form of marketing. From customer service to your product’s performance, all touchpoints with your company leave an imprint on the user. With such high stakes, it’s crucial to listen, gather user feedback and understand what will resonate positively with them. Here are three ways you can make use of user feedback and integrate it into your marketing strategy.

Defining Direct Load Attribution

Attribution is a key part of any marketing plan. It’s important to know which channels are effective and which to cut back on, especially when there’s a budget involved. But when it comes to direct loads—web traffic without the benefit of a tracking code or a specific source— marketers know that some of their efforts have likely contributed to that traffic. Where should we attribute a direct load user to the site? It’s a good idea to simply ask.

Qualaroo can help demystify the direct load population, solving a problem for most marketing teams. By using survey filters, you can exclude those visitors who came to your site by clicking on an ad or from other known sources with campaign parameters in the URL. This enables marketers to ask direct load visitors whether any other marketing efforts influenced their decision; asking “How did you hear about our company?” and offering options representative of your marketing efforts can do the trick.

Furthermore, you can segment users to receive your surveys based on geography, allowing for insights relative to specific locations. If, for example, you have a billboard up in certain cities or are focusing digital efforts in a particular country, you can segment out direct load visitors from those locations to ask if those efforts influenced them. This qualitative data provides context for your direct load traffic and allows for better attribution and more actionable insights.

Focusing on Product/Service Improvement

User feedback is key to driving improvements. Pay special attention to leads who never become customers and poll them. We take this advice to heart at Qualaroo. All prospects who “go dark” and fall out of the sales funnel receive personalized messages from our CEO asking why they ultimately chose not to join Qualaroo. Obviously, it would be nice to revive the prospect and turn them into a customer, but the goal of this inquiry is first and foremost to understand what is holding them back. This information enables the business to improve in a few ways:

• Optimize the messaging/website for particular buyer personas by serving them only the most up-to-date and relevant information.
• Understand and define the weaknesses a prospect perceives in the company. By getting user feedback, you can go beyond saying, “15% of users drop off after the second demo” and get to the why. You can state, “15% of users drop off after the second demo, and of that cohort, 60% said it was because they didn’t fully understand all of the features.”
• Continue to improve by learning what isn’t working and continually refining the user experience.

Validating Research

With any type of rebrand or new product rollout, it’s easy to get caught up in market research and competitor analysis. But one of your most important “data points” is user opinion. This is not to say that market research is obsolete. On the contrary, it yields very important information; however, that data should be validated by what the consumer actually wants.  

This benefit is evidenced by e-commerce company Art.com, which applied user feedback to better position ArtView, their augmented reality gallery wall product, in the marketplace. Art.com knew that gallery walls were trending on Pinterest and had developed an application to facilitate the creation process for consumers. But until they got user feedback, they didn’t know exactly how to position the product in the marketplace. That user feedback informed messaging for ArtView to the press and consumers alike, as well as garnering mentions in industry publications such as TechCrunch. Read the case study to learn more about their process. 

Combining market research and user feedback allows a company to see that magic overlap of market trends and what consumers actually want. Targeted messaging, positioning and a more personalized approach are all possible when you gather context for the overarching market research data.

Surveys allow marketing teams to make more informed decisions about messaging, define successes and weaknesses and create a more personalized experience for users. So, when in doubt, why not just ask? Gathering user feedback can assist with efforts across the entire marketing stack.