Using social media to cut research costs.
Traditionally, one of the most costly expenses of marketing was finding out what your customers and potential customers think. Market research was historically one of the few tools employed to get this done. Surveys, polls, focus groups. While market research provides valuable data to marketing and management departments, it is slow, often costly, and often times biased.
Along came social media.
Social media have removed many of the barriers that would have previously stopped all but the most passionate customers from contacting you about their experience – either good or bad.
Those social media that use text as the main form of communication (think Twitter and Facebook) allow people to easily talk about their experiences to their friends, and to you.
Getting a product or experience right can be profitable. Getting it wrong can be costly in terms of customer retention and also customer acquisitions. Social media provides a cost efficient way to fix it when you do get it wrong, particularly in consumer products.
Give your brand or product a place for people to engage in. Facebook and Twitter are the most common social media for companies to utilise and it is where customers expect to find you.
Social media also gives you the platform to ask what you’re doing right or wrong. Customers appreciate being asked for feedback and can reduce the unfavourable feelings even if the customer does feel a sense that they have not had the best experience. Simply by asking directly you will find that customers are willing to reply, particularly if they are incentivised however many customers are happy to share their thoughts with you.
Listen and respond.
Your customers are talking, but are you listening? It is alarming the number of company or product Pages on Facebook on which people are posting comments and questions yet no one is responding. With no response to a negative comment, people tend to feel increasingly unfavourably, and even those with positive feedback or suggestions when ignored feel less favourable about a product or brand.
Companies and brands are increasingly turning to social media to engage with their customers and are rewarding themselves with a strong presence and customer interactions. It isn’t simply enough to create a Page or a handle and walk away. It is the online equivalent of paying for a market research firm to conduct a survey then not reading the report.