There’s a range of benefits of asking your customers questions.
For example, you can use feedback to further improve your customer experience and product development. But you can also ask your customers questions online and monitor their feedback, to improve your lead generation.
Google launched a Questions & Answers feature that integrates with Google My Business. If you haven’t noticed it before, try it out on your mobile phone. Do a normal search for your own business. You should see the usual business listing including a map, business address, trading hours and any reviews that have been submitted. You should also see a box labelled “Questions & Answers”.
This provides the searcher with the chance to ask a question of your business and community. It’s crowd-sourcing for answers if your community is engaged but it’s worthwhile getting ahead of the crowd. As the business owner, you want to control the answers in your own words at least to some degree. Former customer answers are a great signpost of trust (if they are of a positive nature) but they do take time to filter back. You can post answers to frequently asked questions upfront so searchers get answers immediately. Maybe you already have FAQs on your website so why not re-use the most relevant ones for Google Questions & Answers.
Need customer questions?
If you have a physical shop, you are probably having customer conversations every day. These are extremely valuable to gain insight into what they are asking.
Although a lot less personal, online insights can be found on social media platforms. You can monitor conversations and ask questions yourself. If you have been capturing customer email addresses you could create a survey and send it out asking for responses. Here are 4 benefits of asking your customers questions.
1. Get content for blog ideas and FAQs section.
If your customers are frequently asking you questions, whether face-to-face or via social media, then you can guarantee that they’re searching for these very answers both on your website and through Google. So, if you don’t already have one, create an FAQ page on your site and continue to build its list of questions by monitoring what you’re often being asked. That will make your site experience better for your customers and it should also help you to attract more visits from search engines.
Finding relevant content is a big pain-point for small businesses. You could write a blog post that covers the best questions you’ve received in detail.
2. Web development considerations.
For small businesses, the traditional web development process involves a business owner preparing a briefing document for a web developer. The developer then builds the site and after tweaking and testing, it goes live. Hopefully, the designer asks relevant questions about your goals and provides good advice. The website visitors don’t have any influence on the site’s user experience (UX) it delivers. You could engage a UX professional and conduct testing, but why not ask your customers what they want to achieve from visiting your site?
3. Website copy generation.
Writing good online copy is an art form and it’s critical to achieving your website goals. Excellent copy can demonstrate trust, improve the customer experience and generate more leads. Take what you learn from your customers to help guide your copywriter if you don’t believe you can do it yourself. Writing for the web is different from print as people tend to scan online text rather than read everything. This makes it critical that the copy is crafted well for online consumption.
4. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Understanding what your customers are looking for when visiting your business site will help you write your SEO copy as well. You should review existing content and fine tune your page and post meta titles and descriptions. When potential customers are searching for your product or service, this content dictates their choice to follow through with you or look elsewhere. This relates to what searchers see in Google results. The blue heading, the green URL and grey meta description are all under your control so use them wisely based on the questions your potential clients are looking to have answered.
Need help getting feedback from your customers? Contact us to schedule a quick consultation.
