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Posts Tagged ‘customer intelligence’

Customer-First Marketing: The customer is always right … but not always right for your company

October 19th, 2017

You’ve heard the saying a million times, I’m sure. “The customer is always right.” It is so ingrained in Stew Leonard’s that the supermarket chain has engraved it in stone and put it right in front of its stores.

And yet, while customers can offer valuable insights, if you’ve spent any time at all monitoring customer feedback, you know that customers can have some interesting opinions. Controversial perhaps. Wacky even. Impossible to bring to market in a profitable way. And occasionally downright bizarre.

So how do you square this circle? Customer feedback is extremely valuable, but customers don’t always know what they’re talking about.

Exhibit A: One Homer J. Simpson. In an episode of “The Simpsons,” Homer find his long-lost half brother, who happens to be rich and owns a car company. His brother offers to give him a free car but soon realizes that none of his company’s cars are what Homer really wants.

Sensing an opportunity, he sees Homer as the proxy for the “average man” and unleashes him with totally authority to design a car. The result — a monstrosity. (“You know that little ball on the antenna that helps you find your car in the parking lot? That should be on every car!”) And a monstrosity that costs $82,000, to boot.


The customer isn’t always right, your customer is always right

Here’s the problem. Homer is not the ideal customer to purchase a new car. If you’ve watched the show, you know he drives an old, beat-up, used car. So while he had lots of ideas, he never would have actually been able to buy the car he was designing.

How do you use customer feedback as valuable business intelligence without ending up having to market an $82,000 automobile with three car horns that play “La Cucaracha”? Here are a few tips to help set you down the right path:

Read more…

B2B Social Media: 4 steps to get your listening dashboard started

September 18th, 2012

The Internet has a wealth of free, public information that could help you uncover sales leads, get closer access to industry influencers, monitor your competition, and curate news for content marketing.

One way to tap into this wealth of data is with a listening dashboard. At one of the roundtables recently held during the B2B Summit 2012 in Orlando, Nancy Chou, Senior Director of Customer Success, LeadFormix, shared a presentation on how B2B marketers could use social media to generate leads by creating a “listening dashboard.”

 

What is a “listening dashboard”?

A listening dashboard is ultimately a customer intelligence gathering strategy that consists of collecting and combining together smaller pieces of information to produce a larger and more insightful picture of a given topic, brand or prospect.

Here are some of the benefits Nancy listed that a listening dashboard can offer:

  • Hear what people are saying, and uncover sales leads whenever people discuss relevant keywords
  • Gain closer access to the industry influencers through the article and blog posts they write
  • Monitor your competition, gather sales intelligence and beat your competition by following discussions in real time
  • Share fresh news and content from industry thought leaders with prospects and customers

 

How to set up a listening dashboard

If you’re interested in building your own listening dashboard, Nancy provided four steps for building a listening dashboard for free:

  1. Create a list of the RSS feeds you typically read
  2. Gather additional newsfeeds on specific keywords using sites like alltop for newsfeeds and technorati or Google blog search to gather blogs written by industry thought leaders or topics of interest
  3. Start following influential people on Twitter using search engines like listorious and wefollow that categorize Twitter users by keyword
  4. Set up a Google Alerts account to be notified whenever a keyword, industry topic, competitor or thought leader releases new content

The steps above will get you started; however, if you need more sophisticated social media monitoring and tracking services, fee-based tracking tools are available.

 

Related Resources:

How IntraLinks Used Social Media to Generate Twice as Many Sales-ready Leads as Any Other Channel

B2B Lead Generation: 6 social media tactics from 7 experts

Social Media Marketing: 9 tactics for B2B social channel advertising

B2B Social Marketing: 4 ways to build one-to-one relationships with social influencers