From the course: Small Business Marketing

Solicit feedback often and early

From the course: Small Business Marketing

Solicit feedback often and early

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- As you look to begin overhauling or even kicking off your marketing endeavors, it's important to keep in mind the power of feedback. At each step of your journey, there's an opportunity to collect feedback and improve. You can ask colleagues, friends and even family to weigh in on what you've done or what you're planning on doing. But the most important feedback comes from your customer. Take every opportunity you can to strike up a conversation with your customers. You might have a handful of clients or 100 people moving through your store each day. When there's a chance, ask a question. Prompt them to share with you. If you can't connect with your customers in person, or over the phone, build a digital survey. You can leverage surveymonkey.com or Google Forms to put together a very short survey and then offer the customer something in exchange for filling it out. You might even consider turning to the concept of measuring your Net Promoter Score. NPS is a way to measure customer loyalty and it was developed by Fred Reichheld. The idea is it gives you a sense of whether your customers are likely to be detractors of your brand, passive in regards to your brand, or promoters of your brand. The calculation is based on a response to a single question. How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague? The customer then responds on a scale of one to 10 which puts them into one of three groups: Promoter, passive, or detractor. A promoter would score a nine or a 10. They're huge fans of the product or serve and they'll go out of their way to advocate for it. A response of a seven or eight makes that customer passive. This person probably liked what you had to offer, but there was no wow factor. They may have had a few issues or didn't see much value over your competition. A passive customer isn't likely to steer others away from your company, but they're not going to recommend it. And finally, anyone answering with a score of six or below, becomes a detractor and the detractor will take any chance they can to push people away from your product or service. Detractors are often more vocal than promoters, because they're level of dissatisfaction is incredibly high. The ratings are then used to develop one numerical score and this metric allows companies to quantify how changes to a product or service impact the customer experience over time. And you can learn all about NPS at netpromoter.com. The biggest takeaway here, is that your brand needs to be working to secure loyal customers and you need to have a way to measure if you're achieving that goal. Evangelistic customer loyalty is one of the most important drivers of growth. Loyal customers spend more over time, they turn less and they work to introduce the company to their friends, family, and colleagues.

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