Survey Your Customers for Social Media Marketing Results

Salespeople can tell you a lot about your customers, which is why they’re the source of customer intelligence for many companies. Yet because their job is to sell existing products or services, as opposed to perceiving and addressing unmet needs, there are limits to what salespeople can offer. Get your own firsthand view as well by taking a shift on the sales floor or with a service crew.

Better yet, survey your customers directly. What you need to learn from them, says Joan Koob Cannie, co-author with Donald Caplin of Keeping Customers for Life, can be summed up in five points:

• Why they buy from you,
• How they use your product or service,
• What they like and dislike about doing business with you,
• How you compare to the competition, and
• What you do that “annoys, infuriates or delights” them.

Put these points into a short questionnaire and ask customers to return it, anonymously, in the stamped self-addressed envelopes you provide. Ideally, survey all customers during the course of three or four weeks, so that even a small rate of return will give you a meaningful sampling of opinions.

Above all, be prepared to change to solve what customers identify as problems. If they complain of delayed order-processing during peak season, for example, offering apologies or recommending preseason ordering is the response of an internally-centered company. The customer-centered company, by contrast, hires more staff.

Don Gaconnet – With over 17 years of experience at work for you, Don specializes in providing results driven small business marketing services at the forefront of today’s Internet marketing, search engine optimization, web design, web development, social marketing and mobile technologies. To view Don’s featured project portfolio, testimonials or to hire Don for your next marketing project visit his website at: www.gahsonay.com today.