You’ve probably heard it all over the place — content is king. Getting content feedback is key to the success of your content marketing strategy.
While it may sound like a cliché, it’s been proven time and time again: content can make your company grow and attract new users, increase your traffic and convert those visitors into paid customers.
There’s only one problem — maintaining a blog and keeping your visitors interested isn’t all that easy. You may be thinking that you’re doing everything the right way, but visitors just aren’t engaging.
The best way to find out what they think — simply ask them, using a feedback survey.
Why Is It Important To Collect Content Feebdack?
The only way to truly know whether your blog is really working is by asking your readers directly what they think. Sure, you can get metrics such as the number of page visits, session length, organic traffic or click-through/conversion rates, but those are cold numbers, not the opinion of your visitors.
Perhaps your content is great but it’s not hitting the mark with your target audience. On the other hand, your content could be mediocre, but your solid SEO and link building strategy could be getting you visits and reach.
The only way to find out what you’re doing right and what needs improvement is by running a feedback poll.
A set of a few simple questions will let you know exactly what your readers think of your blog so you can refine and improve it.
Here’s how you can do it.
Choose Your Goals
Collecting content feedback just for the sake of getting feedback is good, but it won’t get the results you want. Before you do anything, find out the goals you want to accomplish with a feedback poll so you know the direction where you want to go.
For example, you may have just redesigned your blog layout and you want feedback on the user experience. Perhaps you want to know which type of content your readers like the most so you can do more of it or you want to increase your overall credibility.
If you already have a substantial readership, this is a great way to single out topics that interest your target audience. If you’re just starting out a blog and don’t have that many visitors, it’s useful to do some market research first before collecting any content feedback.
Choose a Feedback Tool
Once you have your goals in place, it’s time to pick a feedback tool to get the job done. Depending on your website, budget and goal, there’s a tool out there that covers all of your needs.
First, if you want to go the cheapest route, you can use Google Forms. It’s fairly easy to set up and there’s no limitation on the number of questions or participants. It’s not the best-looking tool to collect content feedback, but it’s by far the easiest and it’s free.
SurveyMonkey is a tool specifically built for surveys and polls and it’s one of the best choices to get the job done. The free basic plan lets you create unlimited surveys, but puts a cap on 10 questions and 100 responses per survey.
Typeform is a popular solution that makes data collection pretty and easy. While it’s easier on the eye than SurveyMonkey, it’s also capped at 10 questions and 100 responses for free users.
SurveyAnyplace is like a mix of SurveyMonkey and Typeform, allowing for a great-looking, function survey experience. Unfortunately, the free version only supports 20 responses per month.
EmailMeForm is a form builder and survey platform that comes with a range of pre-built surveys you can use, such as satisfaction survey, customer feedback survey and evaluation survey. There are no free plans but the basic Plus plan comes with a ton of functionality.
Finally, Feedier allows you incredible flexibility when it comes to creating the questions, implementing them into your site and overviewing your analytics. Besides offering a great feedback experience, you can integrate a reward program and give back to your visitors for providing feedback.
Choose Your Questions
Perhaps the most important part of a feedback poll on your blog are the questions you should ask your audience.
First off, the survey should be as short as possible — under 10 questions is the general rule, but the fewer, the better. The more questions there are the lower the chances of visitors completing the survey.
In the next step, formulate your questions so that they’re short, easy to understand and they don’t guide the user.
For example, a question such as “Do we have too many posts on product marketing?“ may seem like it’s good, but it’s leading the respondents into giving an answer such as yes or no. Instead, ask a more neutral question such as this:
The amount of posts we do on product marketing is…
- Too many
- Too few
- Just right
In this way, you’ll get a more objective result.
Moreover, when formulating the questions of your feedback survey, keep them as short as possible as well.
Thank The Visitors For Participating
A short thank-you message should be enough to do the job, but you can also set up a reward system with a tool such as Feedier.
You can reward your users with a discount, access to a beta version of your product, a lead magnet such as an eBook or a cheat sheet or whatever suits your business best.
Prepare For Negative Feedback
Not everything you hear from your visitors will be nice.
There may be negative feedback, criticism, rudeness, trolling…
Understand that not everyone will be happy and that it’s only natural to get answers such as these.
If it’s constructive criticism, accept it and learn from it. If it’s negativity for the sake of negativity, ignore and move on.
Get Ready For Promotion
If you are collecting content feedback on your blog, only those visitors who happen to be there at the moment will be able to see it.
In order to get to those users who visit the site every once in a while, it’s time to promote your feedback poll.
First, select the people you want to target — it’s best if you have an active newsletter/subscriber list. If they’re used to seeing your content in their inboxes, they’ll appreciate the chance to make it even better.
Second, create an email to send to that list. Just like the poll, keep it as short and sweet. Our attention spans are getting shorter and you have to fight hundreds of other emails in your visitors’ inboxes. Create a compelling subject line where you tell the visitors what they will get from opening the email. It’s also a good idea to let them know how long the poll will take, so they’re informed about the time commitment. In essence, this is what the subject should look like:
Want better content? Take our 2-minute survey!
In the body of the email, briefly state what you’re emailing about and provide a link to the feedback poll. Once you’ve done the copy for the email, creating social media updates should be a breeze.
Analyze The Data: Validate The Marketing Campaigns
Once you’ve created a great feedback poll and promoted it in the right channels, you should have countless survey results to look into.
Take a look at the data, analyze it and draw conclusions that will lead to your blog’s improvement.
Remember, the results will only be meaningful if you have a clearly set goal and well-defined questions.
And you’re done!
Side note: the Chanty team has experienced this first hand on its blog. We were able to grow our list of beta users simply by focusing on content, organic traffic, and SEO.
Once you’ve collected useful feedback from your users, you’re well on your way to improve your blog’s design, quality and skyrocket your visits and time spent on the site.
About the author
Mile Živković is a content writer and work-life balance expert at Chanty — a simple and AI-powered Slack alternative. When Mile isn’t busy writing epic posts on productivity, work-life balance and time management for Chanty blog, he’s probably driving somewhere. His hobbies include cars (huge fan of Alfa Romeo), photography and collecting pocket knives. You can catch him on LinkedIn.
Originally published at Inside Feedier.
