You know that it's important to get feedback from your customers when you offer a service, or just to check in to see how your brand is performing. So you figured a set and forget automated survey after they hang up, place an order online, or having your customer rep ask if they could fill it out would do the trick, right? Wrong. 

Not sure about you, but I get absolutely pounded with these surveys. I'm busy. I barely had time to interact with your business, but now you assume I'm going to take extra minutes to fill out a questionnaire for YOU? 

Surveys are a great tool. But as a tactic, businesses need to be both realistic about expectations around them, and strategic when implementing them. Here are some things to consider if you want to start a survey, or you aren't getting the incredibly high volume of survey results that you have been dreaming of: 

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1) What's in it for THEM? For the reasons of limited time explained above, your customers are not going to take additional time to fill out one of your surveys out of the goodness of their hearts. (The exception to this is usually that the customer was unsatisfied and needs a place to vent about it)

So, what can you do to incentivize your customers to help you out a little bit? Usually finding out what motivates them can be something minor, like a promo code on their next order for a certain % off, or a complimentary services of some kind. If you are serious about investing in understanding your customer's point of view, you should be willing to set aside some budget to find out. Your ROI will be measured by valued insights to how you can improve, and can ultimately lead to time or overall cost savings in the future. 

2) Timing. Time your survey request appropriately - typically as soon after you've provided a service as possible. I can't tell you how many times I've hung up with a rep, then three days letter get a survey request on the performance of the company. I can barely remember what I ate for lunch today, you really expect me to recall details of a phone conversation and, again, take my time to answer your questions on it? 

If you are asking about eCommerce service, perhaps automate your survey on the product to correspond with their package receipt day. There's lots of ways you can optimize your requests around your customer's schedule to help you get optimal results. And if going along with an offer on point #1, give a deadline (i.e., fill out this survey in the next 24 hours to get free shipping on your next order) 

3) Length of survey. We've discussed my time. I'm just not going to sit through a ridiculous amount of detailed questions, scour through a million options in your dropdown menu to complete your survey - especially if there's nothing in it for me. 

Consider making a single goal of each survey, so you can be concise with the information you are trying to collect. This would make your survey very basic - so possibly with demographic information (see if you can automate their location by their IP address) and a question or two about what you want to know.. Then, consider tiered surveys for a different after each transaction. Develop a survey communications strategy where you collect different information each time a customer interacts with you to get a full picture of what you are looking to improve upon. Fast, easy, the customer gets a little something - everybody wins. 

4) Sophisticated technology. Lastly, nothing kills a survey like bad tech. There are plenty to terrible survey platforms out there. Don't be the company that employs one of them.. All it takes during a customer filling out a survey is a glitch with a form or a button and consider your precious data abandoned. Make sure you are making this experience as seamless as possible for your customer to up your chances for a completed survey. 

Your surveys are just another form of customer experience. Like your marketing, every interaction you have with your customer is an interaction with your brand - so make sure you are taking the time to make sure your feedback request initiatives are reflecting that to your customer. By making the process worth it, easy, timely, fast, and seamless to execute, you will see a dramatic increase in your customer feedback loop. 

If you need help developing a plan around gathering company feedback, or would like an objective look with some strategic tips on how you can improve, I can help - ask me how. 

We're all there - if I hear the word "millenial" one more time, I think I'm going to scream. Businesses are all about millenials and how to target millenials and what millenials want and how to get millenials to buy. What's interesting is who comes after the millenial - Generation Z (or more fondly to me, my little sister's generation). 

After some first hand experience and some reading up on them, I think it's time to start with the lumping of these Z'ers together. By the time companies finally nail down the millenial, a whole new generation is getting through college and just about to enter the workforce.

​So who are they? 



Technology-Focused
Roughly born between the years of 1996-2010, this generation has never known a world without the internet or social media. Think about that. Not being the guinea pig generation has left little to their imagination when it comes to adopting new technologies. They engage multiple screens and apps at once, and their first gadget was the smartphone.

Growing up in a world of technological capabilities leaves them little patience for clunky systems or non-intuitive processes. Marketing to this generation means having your act together - whether it's a seamless app or website UX - or you will lose out to a competitor who is putting the customer experience ahead of product features and price. 

Micro-Attention Span
Gen Z'ers absolutely love Snapchat. While texting and Twitter are still on their horizons, faster is better for this crowd. They want to get a message across, quickly. And they will come to expect the same from the brands they interact with. Don't bother with fluff when it comes to targeted advertising with them - get right to the point on what you have and why it benefits them.

They also want as much transparency as possible, so hiding pricing behind a phone call won't do much good - they are the research generation who has self-educated themselves on YouTube and will just not bother to consider you if it means forced interaction with another human that they don;t want to - most of their relationships are online, anyway. This sounds demanding, but I really think it's the direction marketing & advertising are heading towards.  

Wary of the World
They saw the mistakes the millenials made with putting all of their bad choices on Facebook (drunken college photos surfacing during job interviews, anyone?) so they are particularly careful about what they share with whom online. This is where the appeal of Snapchat and Whisper apps come in: they can share whatever they want knowing that it will just disappear.

This is also the post-9/11, 2008-crash, crippling student loan debt generation, who has grown up in a world of terrorism and experienced first-hand the crash of the housing market of their parents and burdens of student loans on their older siblings. They are extremely careful, pragmatic about their futures (less about their dreams and more about education & jobs that will make them money), and are constantly "stressed out" about their uncertain futures. They are also extremely compassionate about their fellow man, the environment, and animal welfare. 

The Bottom Line: Marketing to Gen Z
While these are just some observations and generations can hardly be generalized (but I tried, anyway), I think marketing to this crew boils down to some basic principles. For example, really focus on a flawless website user experience and upgrade the look and feel of your website - this means getting off of antiquated web platforms that don't look good on mobile, and getting to the point in your communications without fluffy marketing speak.

​Next, focus on being as transparent as possible and putting all your focus on demonstrating trust with this generation: stop hiding behind forms and spamming them with emails - try to reach them on the platforms where they live, but with helpful messaging instead of interruptive. Yes, building relationships takes time, but a loyal Gen Z is a great customer to have. 

While it's easy to whip up a "basics of lead gen" post, the fact is that there isn't anything basic about lead generation. It's typically job #1 of marketers: to provide leads - qualified leads - to the sales team to be able to sell. What I hope to outline here are the basics of approaching a lead gen task - particularly if you are a one-(wo)man show or if you know nothing about marketing.

Here are some tips to get you started on the right track: 

1. Understand Your Ideal Customer with Buyer Personas. While this is something that may change over time as your business and products evolve, you should have a good idea of who your customer is before you go about trying to find them. Do the research, starting with existing customers to build a profile of who you are looking for. Start with basic demographics like age, company size / type, job title. Then advance to more sophisticated understanding of their role in the business, their needs, and make sure that your company and products help solve their challenges. I could write a whole post on this process, but it helps to have a rough outline for you to get started. 
2. Start with a Goal. This can be tough for businesses - especially startups - to pin down, but try and determine the amount of leads you will need to meet your revenue goals. There's a bit of math involved with this one, and history of close rates definitely helps: essentially, you are trying to determine the number of Identify goals: looking at your typical sales funnel, what is the ideal # of leads will result in the $ amount of revenue you need to generate for the quarter? 
3. Please don't buy leads. Okay, so less of a personal opinion and more of a desperation to get rid of this terrible practice. Focus your cash and energies into creating the most value possible to attract prospects, instead of buying a list of people who don't know who you are and don't want to hear from you. This practice just needs to go away. Plus I'm sick of "Hi Ashley, How would you feel about getting access to thousands of executive email address lists..." emails. They irritate me and need to go away. . 
4. Run Campaigns. Again, could write a whole other post on this, but using your buyer personas as a guide, identify some channels where your ideal audience will be. Maybe they are on Twitter and you can reach them with paid ads. Or maybe investing in a sponsored content campaign with a leading publication makes sense. Align your goals, budget, and channels to determine the best place to invest. Hint: not everyone is "on social media". Let's make some educated guesses, shall we? 
5. Have a Communications Plan in Place. So you have leads coming in - awesome! Chances are, they may not buy right away. Or, as with B2C, they bought but you want to retain them as a customer. Make sure you have a coherent communications plan to keep these leads engaged, help them down the funnel, and keep them coming back.  
6. Closing the Loop: Analyze Your Results. With your original lead goal number in hand, after you have run your campaigns, revisit at the end of your quarter. In terms of volume, were you ambitious in your lead gen projections, or less so? How many of those leads were in fact qualified? What source did the most qualified leads come from? What was the Cost Per Lead (CPL) of each lead by source? Asking questions like this will help you start the process over again when you draft campaigns for the next quarter. I have to encourage you to also close the loop and speak with reps who received your leads: were they any good? Why or why not?
   
   

Hopefully this gave you a good premise to base your lead gen programs around. It's definitely a lot, and not something to be taken lightly. I'm secretly hoping that after reading this, you actually consider the above strategies and your customer before jumping on that too-good-to-be-true lead list up for sale. You're better than that. 

Overwhelmed? Contact me to help you with your lead generation initiatives. I've done all of the above and much more - and can work with you and your budget to just help you come up with a plan, or we can execute and analyze results together.