In our 5 Lesson series, we’ve stressed upon the fact that in Expectation Marketing it is important to know how to meet customer expectations. That translates into answering your audience’s questions.
But there is one dilemma on your team’s mind:
What are these questions?
So in our bonus lesson today, we’ll show you how you can find out what your audience is searching for. We are also going to recommend some great tools and systems to constantly receive your audience’s questions.
Gathering Your Interactions Not Just Answering Them
We’ve mentioned in the past articles that comments, reactions, and tweets from your social media audience should always be answered. It’s a great way to encourage your audience to keep on interacting with your brand.
At the same time, it’s a good inspiration for your posts. Your audience will:
- have questions,
- point out bad experiences,
- or share their enthusiasm for the brand.
All these should be taken into account in your content strategy. A plan on how to meet customer expectation is to create pieces that will educate them on how your product or service actually works.
But you can’t generate these articles for your Expectation Marketing Strategy unless you have a system that helps you keep track of them.
Make sure your team knows they should document all relevant messages. Everyone in your marketing team should have access to them.
It’s also important to remind content creators to look over the list regularly especially before coming up with topics for future articles.
Some of the messages you should document are :
- Questions, especially the ones that get repeated often on social media
- Bad feedback, or upset clients/users. You can learn a lot from them and it’s great to address these to show your brand is not hiding from trouble.
- Great feedback, reflections that should be highlighted in your content to make sure more people get to have the same awesome experience.
There are messages you can ignore if they are too vague or just give a general feedback to the content or product.
Support and Sales Conversations
If you offer support either by phone or email you have a great way of interacting directly with your client base. It can also offer you a lot of insight on how to meet customer expectations. Same aspects apply to the sales process as well.
There’s only one tricky part in creating the right content here. Make sure these questions and issues move from the sales and support team to the people in charge of marketing. If this doesn’t happen, you’ll never be able to produce content that meets expectations.
Again you will need to have a good tracking system. In this case, the recurring frequency of a specific topic should be taken into account.
If one user has a particular interest in some obscure setting feature that’s one thing, but if many ask about the same topic it means they need content to explain it.
This is also useful for your audience. There are many that might face the same problems but rather than sending you an email on support, they will just not use your product anymore.
Answer the Public and Digital Alerts
What I’ve said until now is all fine for brands that already have an engaged audience. But what about new brands? What if you just launched and there is radio silence on your support and social media profiles?
Well, then you’ll just have to search the web. One great way to find questions people are asking is Answer the Public. Here you can search for a specific topic and they will give you a list of questions based on Google’s and Bing’s auto-suggestions.
So you have access to the topmost searched questions on the web. You can focus your initial content pieces on these topics in order to answer as many problems your audience is already facing in their industry.
This is a great plan on how to meet customer expectations from day one.
We’ve used this for our clients in our Analysis phase to come up with preliminary keyword and topics for them. We can help you as well to set up your Expectation Marketing Strategy.
The second option you have is to set up alerts. First of all, for your brand name and a few variations of writing. You should get this information from social media networks and even search engines.
Then add a few topics that you might find interesting. You’ll get alerted each time there is a post containing that topic. That way you can get a head start each time a new question or discussion is coming up.
Reviews and User Generated Content
Now consider all those review and rating platforms. Even the dedicated areas from your Facebook Page. There are numerous places people can talk about your brand and you might not be aware of them.
These platforms can be a gold mine on how to meet customer expectations. You’ll find out where your audience is having problems and what questions they ask regarding your brand.
Besides the review that they give there is also the user-generated content. Granted, it will take a while until users will start creating videos on Youtube about your brand but that might happen. When it does you should find it and learn from it.
As users themselves, they have a good idea what your audience is searching for. You should acknowledge and thank them for the content. Try and understand their point of view. Check out all the differences between how YOU talk about your products and how THEY talk about your products.
You’ll begin having customer language which you can later on integrate in your marketing materials.
It can also be an inspiration for your own content. You can either respond to it or integrate it in your own content pieces.
This is an important aspect on how to meet customer expectations; use their own language to present and explain your features, to present the problem your company solves.
Survey a Part of Your Audience
Now, this method is not for everyone. It requires that you already have:
- Subscribed audience on your mailing list,
- Followers to your social media profiles or
- Constant visitors on the site.
But it’s definitely one of the most accurate ways of finding out how to meet customer expectations.
The great advantage is that you get to ask the exact people that will read your content. It’s also organized information without you having to sweat for it.
If you’re just searching for topics for your content you can add a one-question survey on your site. You can do that with Hotjar or even Survey Monkey.
For longer surveys, I recommend Typeform or SurveyAnyplace. They are easy to use and have great design that will make the responder of the questionnaire more eager to give you their answers.
Conclusions on How to Meet Customer Expectations
Now you know a few systems and areas where you can get clear questions and content topic ideas from your audience. Any of these systems will help you understand how to meet customer expectations.
You’ll have clear problems that people are facing either in your field or specifically with your brand. You won’t have to worry anymore if people actually need the content you have created.
The main tips to keep in mind are:
- You might already be receiving your customers’ questions, but the people creating the content might not have access to them.
- People are talking about your brand online. You need to make a conscious effort to find that information out
- There are many tools that can help you get closer to understanding and responding to your clients’ expectations
- Keep your customers in mind when creating content. Answering their needs above pushing your ideas will always help you in implementing this strategy.
If you want to take this further and apply the whole Expectation Marketing Strategy make sure to contact us.
This our last lesson of the course. Hope you’ve enjoyed it. Make sure to leave your own question and remarks in the comment section below.
