Getting reliable answers from your customer research is important – but getting short cuts by asking the right quesions is more than half the battle.
We got a great set of four questions in the mail today.
4 Questions for customer insight
- Why did you (sign up to our mailing list)?
- What made you nearly not (sign up)?
- What would make you spend more with us?
- What’s your biggest question about (our product or service)?
What an awesome list.
Why these questions are golden
Why did you sign up? – give you real understanding about what the customer thinks drove them to click that button. Remember, you can cross check this against your stats to see if this aligns. And you might learn a lot from what the customer thinks drove them…
What made you nearly not (sign up)? – again, understand the principal thing that nearly stopped your desired action happening. Can you affect that or influence it in future? You betcha – this could be the insight that leads to the biggest improvement in your CTR.
What would make you spend more with us? rather a forward question – but you never know. Some people may just need a tiny nudge. Or they may perceive your pricing versus features incorrectly. It may not be a matter of switching budgets or reducing your price. Listen hard to these answers.
What’s your biggest question about (our product or service)? Great insights come here from your user because this shows where mis-understanding or mis-communication has occurred. Could also give you ideas for new features or products for the future.
Do this for your brand
Don’t use a check box or pick list for this. Free text answers will give you the best insights.
Adapt the questions to suit your situation. The words I’ve put in brackets can be adjusted to suit your situation.
And figure out the best place to do the work… on the blog, in a newsletter, when someone unsubscribes or subscribes…. Let us know how you get on.
How big does your company need to be before you use marketing professionals?
For brands who are growing and becoming profitable there comes a time when you choose to professionalise your marketing. Many businesses decide at this point that they have two choices: to hire a staffer or to buy in expertise from an agency.
Why you need better marketing
The needs are clear – you want more traction with your marketing, you suspect that there are better ways of doing promotion and marketing to get inbound leads and you can afford a budget just for marketing. These are good signs.
You have identified clearly that your brand has a need and the possible shortcomings of your current set-up.
Hire versus buy: the dilemma
There are advantages and disadvantages – the internal member of staff will need to have well-rounded skills in a range of marketing disciplines (web, advertising, PR, copywriting, print design) and therefore a senior hire with this range of skills is more expensive than a junior.
Using an agency also requires decisions about their skills and area of expertise compared with the type of marketing and communications activity your brand has done in the past or plans to do in the future.
Costs are usually the determining factor
It may be less costly to hire external advisers compared to the cost of a senior member of staff – compare the full cost of hiring and paying (including office costs) a new senior marketer with the price an agency would charge you.
Have a couple of ‘chemistry’ or getting-to-know-you meetings with local marketing agencies and ask their advice. Also ask to speak to a couple of their recent clients to see if they also made the same transition.
A third option worth reviewing is using a freelancer. You don’t have the full hire costs of a full time person but can often get very experienced people at lower fee rates. Check out the freelance hire websites like eLance.com and Freelance.com, Freelancer.com and guru.com. I’ve successfully hired people for my agency and for clients using eLance.
Creative Agency Secrets has two current clients who use us for mentoring work. They hired a junior marketer and we speak weekly to review their work, priorities and give guidance. Could this work for you? Give us a call – we always offer a free 20 minute first call.
In the meanwhile here are a few other articles that may help you figure out what to do
- Advertising – do it yourself or hire
- Hire a PR firm or do it yourself?
- Do it yourself internet marketing, or hire
- Hubspot offers inbound marketing tutorials for people using its website / content marketing system.
- Read Creative Agency Secrets’ assessment of Hubspot and how to do it yourself
- SEO do it yourself or hire a professional
- Small Business marketing – DIY or hire a pro?
- Web design – do it yourself or hire someone
- DIY or hire a market research company?
Today we publish our e-book – the B2B leads research guide.
A quick look at how to find the name of the right person at the business you want to pitch. Using both free and paid-for resources, we illustrate good websites to use and the tools they offer new business development professionals who are trying to start conversations with prospects.
Enjoy and download your own copy here.
An introduction is the very best way of getting a meeting or speaking to a new business prospect company. Thanks to Alex Krupp I checked out a new service called Go Hachi.
It uses your existing connections on social media sites, to suggest the best person to connect you to your target.
Read our slide deck about our trial.
Here’s my connection link you help me get my beta invite by clicking here to make the connection.
See how Go Hachi describes itself
Related articles
- Hachi Shows You How To Meet New People (crenk.com)
- Emerson tests out how to meet Zuck (emerson social media.com)
Many conferences ask for feedback after the event and the Interactive SXSW one arrived today.
As a research survey it was flawed in three ways.
First error – question structure
Take this example of a question on the first page
Overall, how satisfied were you with the information distributed in our print publications? 5= Very satisfied, 1=Very unsatisfied
Looks all good But then two questions later they ask
Please respond to questions on a 1-5 scale, 1 being very unsatisfied, 5 being very satisfied. If questions do not apply to you, leave them blank.
Did you notice the inversion of the 1 to 5 scale?
Why change the scale? This is going to test the respondents. Many will skim read and the outcome is they’ll get inverted results as respondents assume the scale was the same.
Second flaw – Giving the feedback I wanted
I always think that any survey that enables me to give exactly the feedback I want by asking the right questions is both well-constructed and the survey designer has a deep understanding of the event in order to ask the right things. This fulfilled neither.
Having ‘catch-all’ comments is not ideal for survey analysis – especially of large response events. I reproduce below all the free-text answers I gave. This shows that there should have been space for qeustions about
- excellence or poor performance in panels / sessions
- overcrowding
- travel arrangements to venues outside the convention center
- wifi / AV / power sockets in venues outside the convention center
- value for money perception
- learnings / business opportunities or transactions
Third flaw
The over-high reliance on free text answers. A question on the trade show didn’t have pick lists of exhibiting companies; a question about audio visual only focused on the convention center not on other venues just seems to raise the likelihood of added analysis workload. Plus insertion of seemingly erratic questions about sponsors and perception awareness of contributing brands some of which had such a low profile I never noticed and others seemed to be ‘trick’ questions e.g. listing both Pepsi and Pepsi Max… were both there?
There also seems to be a green agenda going on…. which wasn’t in evidence at the event at all.
Does your company pursue green/sustainability initiatives?
Does your employer or organization require proof of sustainable choices in housing or transportation during your time at SXSW?
My detailed answers
Interactive Panels, Conference Events and Party Comments:
One of the branding / marketing panels was not prepared [client knows best #sellideas] and Day Stage session by Colin Shaw #beyphil promised 7 tips for customer experience and didn’t give out any - he was AWFUL.
I went to 5 talks at non-convention center venues and 2 were full when I got there. None had adequate power points and AV was less good. Very disappointed that many talks were repeating old material and only two advanced sessions #rdbdeath and #healthapps were “leading edge”. The quality is lower and the overcrowding of venues spoilt my enjoyment. In value for money terms SXSW is now 50% lower than my previous visit. I may not come back.
I wish I could read more blog posts on SXSW.com about?
Liveblogging each session. I did this on my site (creativeagencysecrets.com). I think you should leave a permanent record of each session online like TED does. A written liveblog plus audio would be a valuable addition to online knowledge.
I missed 2 sessions because of overcrowding – there was no way to hear what was said in the hallway and no record after of what was discussed = VALUELESS.
Trade Show/Exhibition comments:
Wish it had started on Sunday as I had to leave Monday after lunch.
Which sponsor(s) enhanced your SXSW experience and how?
Samsung in Bloggers lounge – good food and drink, great interaction with other bloggers, OK book signing by Guy Kawasaki and other interviews. The not for profit lounge had the BEST people inside using it. Verizon in the Hyatt – their lounge had nothing in it but fancy white sofas – not of any value at all.
Any other comments?
The overcrowding this year was noticeably greater than in 2009 when I last attended.
Fewer sessions had ‘leading edge’ thinking. Many sessions were too populist and frequently speakers were “content-free”.
Mediocre to awful panel chairing skills e.g. Gigi Peterkin of Edelman, Alessandra Lariu at McCann Ericson and Allison Mooney of Google meant we got less from these sessions.
The committee needs more influence over panel selection to weed out the time-wasters.
Also suggest you cut number of ticket sales and adjust room allocation based on attendees’ likely topics of interest so popular tracks like Marketing / Branding get larger venues.
I love Robert Rosenthal’s Mothers of Invention marketing agency – not only does it have a great name and a strong following online, he comes up with a heap of great outbound marketing tactical campaigns.
I just received his latest – a survey. Called the “Fascinating Marketing Survey” he’s all out to get good information and whether you’re a brand or an agency, you’ll almost guaranteed to learn something from his researches.
I commend you to take part and sign up to receive the findings.
Here’s a quick excerpt…. look away if you plan on answering it yourself and come back here laterI love the way Robert inverts the yes / no answers here to prevent bias. Great questioning technique.
- Image via CrunchBase
Zemanta is a superb recommendation tool for blogs – we’ve bee using it here on Creative Agency Secrets for years after seeing it on David Cushman’s blog. Its easy to use, helps us create professional content in minutes and best of all enables our content to feed back to other blog sites.
What gave you the idea for Zemanta?
My co-founder and I were working on a project for national TV as journalists, we noticed that professional media journalists have a huge machinery of assistance and research, proofreaders and picture editors to ensure the article they write at the end is perfect.
An individual blogger has none of this. He is on his own.
At the time, blogging was becoming an important media channel online. By using smart technologies we could create a similar experience for a blogger as a professional jounalist.
We did a proof of concept and we raised angel funding. Version 1 got seed funding and launched.
From day one every blogger who tried it totally liked it. We got rave reviews calling Zemanta the “blogging god”.
In 3 years we have almost no complaints or people saying it is useless.
What does Zemanta do?
Zemanta is your friend that helps you tell a story on the internet in the most interesting way. By listening closely to your ideas you type in the blog post draft, Zemanta finds pictures and explanations to illustrate what you want to say. By looking at other ideas that are similar to yours Zemanta lets you know where they are and how they connect. You then click and drag them into the post draft as images, related content, links and so on.
What are the main features of Zemanta?
People are excited about how much time it saves and discovering content that they didn’t know about before. Every blogger who uses it has the right to share his blog content into our network to become recommended quotes for other bloggers creating cross-promotion that wasn’t possible before.
How many bloggers use Zemanta?
Tens of thousands.
How is it useful for business bloggers?
It is even more important that business blog posts look professional and are set out and featured as a professional article would be with references, illustrations and pictures. Creating a “rich” post is even more important.
At the same time business blogs have more interest in being promoted on other blogs as references and bringing in more traffic.
What is your business model to make money?
Two ways – we offer our core technology as an API,to clients like Flight Share and Lonely Planet, who want to categorise their content.
Promoted recommendations is the second method of monetization; some businesses who are not our users would still like to contribute content to us so we charge them based on the number of times we recommend their stuff.
Their stuff is of core value so it goes into the same recommendation engine but when it displays, the word ‘promoted’ is next to the link. Yahoo Finance is our largest client for this service.
Take the Zemanta demo yourself – post any text into the box and watch the images, tags and related content recommendations display for you. Suggestion – use one of your recent blog posts as the text!
This is a guest blog by Larry Kim, Founder & VP of Product Development.
Over the past seven weeks I’ve covered six steps that can transform your search marketing campaigns into lead- and revenue-generating machines. We’ve come to the final step:
Step 7: Do it all over (and over) again!
SEO and PPC are ongoing endeavors. The more you put in, the more you get back. To see continuous improvement, you need to commit to continuous effort in the areas of:
- Keyword Discovery and Negative Keyword Discovery
- Keyword Grouping and Organization
- Keyword and Keyword Group Analysis
- Content Production, Content Optimization and Prioritization
- Search Campaign Refinement
It sounds overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. With one robust platform that handles all these keyword management tasks, you can create large-scale, high-performance search marketing campaigns without sacrificing productivity or blowing away your advertising budget.
If you want to start taking steps to build a better search campaign, contact us today to set up a live demonstration with one of our customer service representatives, or start a free, 14-day trial to see what WordStream Keyword Management can do for your business.
]]>This is a guest blog by Larry Kim, Founder & VP of Product Development.
He is outlining seven highly effective keyword research tactics that will help you generate more leads and sales from your search marketing campaigns.
Step 6: Clean up your Research with negative Keyword Discovery
Last week’s email covered the importance of prioritizing workflow based on your top-performing keywords. Now we need to talk about the keywords that aren’t working in your campaigns.
Focusing on top keywords is important, but it’s just as crucial to your long-term success to identify keywords that are hampering performance and filter them from your research.
This will save you time and money on both the paid and organic fronts. For PPC, negative keywords reduce wasteful spending on irrelevant impressions that drag down CTR and irrelevant clicks that don’t convert, ultimately boosting your Quality Scores. Eliminating those same keywords from your SEO research prevents time and money being wasted on optimizing content for the wrong audience.
So how do you go about finding negative keyword candidates?
- You can start by brainstorming. For example, if your business is cabinetry, your negative keywords should include “cabinet members” and other queries that reference the U.S. Cabinet. In addition, you can find negative keyword lists online for your industry.
- You can look at your search query reports and identify negatives on a case-by-case basis. This will help you catch negative keywords that wouldn’t have otherwise occurred to you.
- You can set up rules, or filters, that actually learn from your behavior and eliminate irrelevant PPC or SEO keywords from your research before you use them in your campaigns.
WordStream’s smart negative keyword tools do just that—it’s faster and easier than identifying negatives keyword by keyword, so you can start saving money faster. To try out our keyword tools with your own data, sign up for a free trial of WordStream Keyword Management for PPC or SEO.
Next week you’ll receive the last email in our “7 Steps to a Better Search Campaign” series. There’s just one more element that will bring everything we’ve talked about together for high-performance search marketing.
]]>This is a guest blog by Larry Kim, Founder & VP of Product Development.
He is outlining seven highly effective keyword research tactics that will help you generate more leads and sales from your search marketing campaigns.
Step 5: Focus on your top Keyword Performers
Web analytics are a window into your search campaigns’ performance, and integrating analytics with your keyword workbench enables you to act on that valuable data, as we discussed last week. The next step, of course, is to actually start taking action!
There’s no end to the number of activities you can carry out in search engine marketing. The trick to finding continued success lies in being able to determine where best to spend your time (and your money). The most powerful way to prioritize workflow? Use analytics to ensure you can closely follow your best performing keywords and recognize opportunities you’re not currently capitalizing on.
There are a couple of ways to approach this:
- Focus on the groups of keywords that drive the most traffic and spend. Remember, your top-performing keyword group may not be the same as the single top traffic-driving keyword. Target your ad campaigns and organic content at these groups first.
- Identify gaps in your PPC and SEO campaigns by analyzing them side by side and against potential traffic gains. With keyword source analysis, you can easily compare the performance of keywords from paid and organic search to each other and to traffic estimates from a keyword suggestion tool.
A great way to start identifying your most important keywords is to take advantage of a free trial of WordStream’s PPC Management Software or WordStream’s SEO Tools depending on your search focus.
All this positivity is good, but for fully optimized search campaigns, we need to spend some time on negatives too. Next time I’ll talk about how identifying negative keywords can reduce wasteful PPC spending and even save you time and money on the SEO side.
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