When to stop marketing & start listening to your clients

While it can be tempting to continuously throw an increasingly large number of marketing messages toward those that you're trying to reach, you don't actually want to do this because you risk turning them off in droves. Instead, there comes a time when you finally need to open your ears rather than your mouth and see if potential customers are trying to share any of their own messages with you.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't work hard to get the word out about your brand. Individuals who focus on social media have reported that around 83 percent of Instagram users say that they turned to the service in order to find new products and services. This alone should help to illustrate that reaching out to people is important.

However, it's equally as important to listen sometimes.

Surveys and other marketing studies usually focus exclusively on those who've already dealt with a particular brand. Fewer studies are ever conducted on those who are in the considering phase of their customer journey. Those who may have filled out such a piece of market research in the past are likely to have done so on behalf of one of the larger organisations around.

Small business owners might want to consider using some kind of widget to ask people more about why they plan to leave their site when they do. Bounce rates for smaller sites have a tendency to be rather large, which means that people often click off of them faster than they could ever read them. Some smaller firms have used pop-up messages to offer people a coupon that might be good for a few pounds off if they stay and make a purchase.

Many individuals who try this method have experienced fairly good results, but they might also want to consider reaching out to consumers and asking them why it is that they feel it necessary to leave. Anyone who tries this sort of a campaign may be very surprised at the results.

Most importantly, it'll give them an opportunity to showcase their brand as one that truly cares about what their clients think. Once they've done so, they'll be in a great position to frame future marketing programmes with this same lens.

When you first start a campaign, you probably have a tendency to do a healthy amount of keyword research to see what other people are looking for. Even the most sophisticated keyword search algorithm can't account for everything that human customers may be interested in, however. That means you could be missing out on things and not even realize it.

Consider launching a full-scale email marketing survey plan that helps you reach out to your customers with a request for comment. Rather than presenting them with a form full of radio buttons that limit their choices, you might want to just ask people to write a short blurb about their concerns. Assuming that you reach out to enough people to get appropriate replies, you may even find that you've suddenly gotten access to fresh keywords whilst also learning what sorts of concerns your customers have about the way you do business.

The latter could be fixed merely by making some smart changes to your business. If your customers told you that they find some of your marketing tactics to be annoying, then you'll want to stop using these. Once you have these issues out of the way, you might want to look at the other tips your customers gave you.

Gone are the days of keyword stuffing and using bots to try and game the system. Search engines are too smart for that. However, you will want to use your existing suite of search engine market research tools to see whether or not anything your customers mentioned is something that you should be ranking for.

Chances are that the keywords thrown out by automated tools are only part of the story, so it makes sense to plug in portions of your clients' feedback into them and see what kind of results you'd get by incorporating them into your text. As soon as you've found some promising ones, make sure to put them into value-added text that makes sense for your brand. Blogs that don't have much in the way of genuinely useful material can't maintain their readership very long.

Shorter keywords are usually the most sought-after, so don't feel like you have to inject a huge amount of material into a page just to get bots to latch onto it. Eventually, you may find that your prospective buyers are the number one source of new information for your brand. When that happens, you'll be glad that you listened to them.

Keep up with the top stories from Reader’s Digest by subscribing to our weekly newsletter.