By Brian Lindamood, Manta Content Director – March 9, 2017
Don’t spend millions on market research! Check out these free ways to learn about your customers and put the results to work for you.
Every successful marketing strategy is built on the same foundation: Giving customers what they want. But how do you know what customers want? That’s simple—ask them!
Where to Ask for Customer Feedback
Big companies spend millions of dollars on this kind of market research. But with a little time investment, getting feedback on your small business can be easy—and cheap! Look for these opportunities to ask customers what they think:
Social media: Asking for feedback on your social accounts is as simple as posting a question. On Twitter, you can add a multiple-choice poll to your tweet by clicking the “Add poll” button. You get a nice visual display of the results, but be warned that this is visible to all your followers. Facebook doesn’t have a built-in polling function, but you can ask followers to use different emojis—Love, Wow, Sad, Angry—to respond to your questions.
Surveys: You can formalize the feedback process with free online survey tools like SurveyMonkey or SurveyPlanet. If you use a multiple-choice format (such as a satisfaction scale of 1 to 5), you can quantify the results: an average satisfaction score, or a percentage of customers who are satisfied. Following these results over time will show how your business is performing.
Comment cards: Paper cards dropped in a comment box have the benefit of being anonymous—customers may give blunt feedback they wouldn’t want to say to your face. If you visit customers’ homes, leave behind a postage-paid comment postcard. Or create a digital version with a comment submission form on your website.
Lucidity SBM 