Monitoring Your Business: From Social Media To Customer Service

One of the most important aspects of marketing your company is understanding why people like your products and how they are finding them so that you can make your products better and pursue the most lucrative channels of finding new customers. But how can you find out this information if you can’t understand your customers? Although you can’t sit down and have a cup of coffee with each customer to get their feedback, you can begin to understand your customers’ demographics, desires, preferences, and more by tracking your customers through different aspects of your marketing campaign.

Although tracking customers used to be the job of survey takers standing in malls, today there is more sophisticated technology that allows customers to be tracked from initial contact, through sales, and repeat interactions. Customers can even be understood through social networking sites. Here are some examples of some of the best tools you can use to better understand your customers.

Google Analytics

One of the first things you’ll need is a way to track your website traffic. Google may not be the absolute best analytics tool, but their service is free and they know more about page traffic and ranking than anyone else in the business – they practically invented it!

Facebook Analytics

If your company isn’t already on Facebook, it needs to be. If you do a good job of publishing your Facebook presence, your best customers will want to follow you. And when they do, you can get demographic information about them. Data like age, gender, location, and the amount of activity that each demographic group displays can all be useful information for you to learn from and integrate into your future product offerings, services, and marketing campaigns.

KISSinsights

Remember those survey takers that were mentioned earlier? Well KISSinsights offers online survey software that is built for the digital age. Instead of lengthy surveys that you need to bribe your customers to fill out, KISSinsights offers short 1 and 2 question surveys that are embedded right into a website experience. You can even control who gets a survey. If you want to know why a repeat customer is coming back to your site, you can create a question that recognizes a repeat visit and only offers a survey tailored to them. Talk about targeted marketing!

Google Alerts

Another good Google tool for tracking your business is through Google Alerts. These free alerts can be customized to inform you automatically when there is a new mention of your business, or any other keyword you choose, anywhere on the Internet. That way, you will be the first one to know when a blog has reviewed your product favorably or if you’ve been mentioned at Forbes.com.

Clearly, these are not all the customer tracking tools available to you. PURLs, LMS systems, and more can also be great tools to track your customers’ interaction with your company and get feedback from them so you can better serve their needs in the future. But these tools are a good way to start getting quality feedback from your customers quickly.