3 Ways to Listen to Your Customers Beyond Google Analytics
When I was the director of content for a digital marketing startup, I did what any smart marketer would do: I started an instagram account for my dog. We took her to about 25k followers in 6 months.
My colleague and I spent some time and energy to grow her because we knew it would be a nice proof of concept for clients, and also it would give us a great testing ground for things we wanted to try with client accounts. Beyond looking at the obvious metrics of shares, bookmarks, and likes, we found a few weird trends that helped to increase her growth.
- Photos that clearly showed her eyes had 18% better performance than those that didn’t.
- Extreme close up photos of her face got almost double the likes that funny situational photos and “dog in costume” posts did.
- Photos including Jovie and a human did the best of all.
These insights were as valuable, if not more, than the usual “this post got this many bookmarks, this many forwards, and this many comments,” because it told us what we could use to capture more of our audience’s attention. More importantly, it taught us patterns and trends to look for in our client’s content and what to do more of across all of the content we were producing for them.
Customers (and potential customers) are everywhere and they are telling you what they want across all your digital platforms. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a marketer, product developer, or talent, the key to getting them to part with their dollars is by listening.
What to listen to and what to do with the info when you have it? Here’s some ideas.
- Video: the two most crucial points
Being provocative and telling your audience nothing may work for perfume ads but it doesn’t work for 99% of content.
Normal people will be screaming at your video to get to the point if it’s not obvious in the first 10–30 seconds. If they stick around that long. So the first most crucial point is getting to it, and fast. How you do this depends on the point of the video: In its lessons, Masterclass outlines what you’ll learn in the video you’re about to watch. On their YouTube channel, Red Bull uses a lot of jump cuts of exciting sports achievements with a personality narrating the story. Either way, the audience is immediately told enough of what they’ll be seeing to make a choice to stick around.
Once the audience has that information they then make crucial decisions: stay or go. Data point #1: is your audience interested in the big picture of the video?
The second data point comes later and can give you even more compelling information: how long did the audience stay around and at what point did they leave? You can do a lot with this information: splice the content before that point into ads, look at the info you’re giving in those crucially watched moments and make more videos about that, understand more about the length of videos your audience wants. The data can give you so many insights and direction in your strategy, use it.
2. Push out content: quantity is just as important as quality.
Stop letting perfect be the enemy of good. You’ll never know what people want from you if you don’t get the content out there so you can start looking at data and refining your product offering. The beauty of digital is that there’s always the delete button.
My former boss used his social media profiles to build his product. He was a master of this. He would make Snapchat stories that were 30+ minutes long, which seems counterintuitive to what the platform was intended for. But it gave him tons of data. We’d look at what snaps got the most screenshots and use those elements to build shot lists of upcoming videos. If he got a lot of messages about a certain type of entrepreneur he was talking to, we’d find more people in that field to participate in our online education videos. Email sequences were built around a random rant that got a lot of reactions. All of this data helped to build an 8 figure company in less than 3 years.
This doesn’t just work for influencers; brands like Vaynermedia and Peloton built their success off of this concept. Look back at their earliest videos and you’ll see a very different product than you do now. And now that they have their success have they slowed down their output? Nope. If anything, they have doubled down on it. And it’s working.
With so many brands, influencers, and ads competing for our attention, you are easily forgotten. Unless you are repeatedly getting in front of your audience. This doesn’t mean put out content that doesn’t align with your brand just to get something out. But it does mean clearly defining your brand pillars, creating a lot of content around it, and getting it out there.
3. Ask for feedback.
As important as listening to what your customers are telling you through their behavior is asking them for it. Socrates said it best, “You don’t know what you don’t know,” and the insights you can get from talking to your customers is equally as important as what you get from google analytics.
I was working with a celebrity trainer in LA who was launching a fitness product that could be used for home workouts. In addition to the usual email customer satisfaction surveys, we also asked buyers if they would be willing to get on the phone and talk to us about their likes and dislikes of the product. The insights we got from this feedback told us that even more than the product, people enjoyed the content. We quickly pivoted out marketing to focus equally on the video vault you would get access to when you purchased the product and encouraged our client to do more live workouts on YouTube. Both of these actions increased sales but were not something we could’ve learned just from the hard data.
The bad news is that Covid-19 has increased competition for attention in the digital marketplace. The good news is it’s giving you even more data you can use to build customer loyalty, repeat business, and a product with staying power. People are telling you what they want; are you listening?
