Implementing User-Guided Content Strategy: How to Collect Content Feedback with Savio

Photo by Nicholas Green on Unsplash

The fundamental challenge in content marketing — in any content creation role, really — is deciding what content to make next.

Content marketers use a number of approaches to make that decision.

• Make what’s popular. Look at what your audience is searching for most.
• Make what’s trending. Try to ride the wave of a topic that’s becoming increasingly popular.
• Make what’s strategic. Create content that fulfills a business need, like explaining how to use your product or why it’s better than your competitors.
• Make what’s working. Look at your most popular content and double down on making more things like it.

Here’s an alternative and powerful strategy — the user-guided content marketing strategy:

• Make what your audience is asking for. Use the feedback they give you to help you decide what to make.

The strategy is effective because you’re giving your audience exactly what they’re asking for. But here’s the challenge:

How do you keep track of your audience feedback on a large scale and use it to inform your content strategy?

In this article, I’ll explain how you can build a user-guided content strategy with our tool, Savio:

• Step 1: Collect customer feedback on your content from wherever you get it
• Step 2: Structure your feedback data so you can understand different segments
• Step 3: Prioritize your content “roadmap”
• Step 4: Close the feedback loop
• Power-user tip: Separate content feedback from product feedback

Let’s dive in!

Step 1: Collect and centralize customer content feedback

You might get customer feedback on your content from any number of places. You need to make sure that all your content feedback goes into a single database, regardless of where it comes from.

Social media

You can use social media to brainstorm content ideas. For example, you might ask your Twitter followers what they think of your newsletter.

This is an example tweet asking for feedback on what your newsletter could do better.

You’ll then get responses — feedback and content ideas — in that channel.

Here’s an example idea for a content topic from Twitter.

When you get your responses, simply submit them to Savio using the Chrome Extension.

Here, we’ve added the content ideas to the Savio Chrome extension to send it to our feedback vault.

They’ll get sent directly to your Savio feedback vault.

Email

Lots of user feedback about content comes in via email (ask me how I know). You might be

Savio makes it easy to receive feedback via email: simply forward it to your Savio email address.

You can forward feedback you receive in emails directly to your Savio vault using a unique and private Savio email address.

It lands in your Savio vault, with information about the sender automatically populated.

How to: For instructions on how to send email to Savio, check out the knowledgebase article.

Support tool

Does your company use Intercom, Help Scout, or another customer support team tool? Messages received in those channels can be sent directly to Savio using one of our native integrations.

Just set up the integration of your choice in a few clicks. Then, you can tag the conversation with the tag you choose (ours is “feedback”) and it’ll be sent automatically to Savio.

You can send messages from your support tool to Savio by simply adding a “feedback” tag.

We’ve built Savio to connect easily to a number of different support and customer success tools. Here are some of the most common ones.

• Tracking feature requests from Help Scout
• Tracking feature requests from Intercom
• Tracking feature requests from Zendesk
• Tracking feature requests from Crisp
• Tracking feature requests from Freshdesk
• Tracking feature requests from Front

Don’t see your tool on the list? Check out all Savio’s integrations here.

Slack

If you work in a team, your colleagues are probably a massive source of content ideas.

For example, your customer success team might suggest writing a blog that helps your current customers use one of the features in your product. Or, your sales team might suggest a solutions brief that can be used to improve conversion rates.

If your company uses Slack as its primary communication tool, those suggestions could come through private messages or in a feedback channel. Centralize them in your Savio vault using the Slack integration.

After you set up the Slack integration, you’ll be able to push any message to your Savio feedback vault with a message action.

Voting board

Feature voting boards let your customers leave content requests publicly on your site or vote on requests from others. There are some drawbacks to using voting boards, but they can be a super valuable way to collect content feedback.

Savio’s voting board feature is easy to set up and use.

You can give the link to your audience, and they can leave their ideas for content.

Voting boards let your audience leave public content feedback and requests or vote on requests from others.

They can also upvote the other ideas that they see on the board.

The “vote” feature makes it easy for your readers or listeners to upvote a content request.

Your users and audience members can upvote content ideas that are already on your board.

Feedback forms

Another option for collecting content feedback is to set up a feedback form. Create a feedback form in Savio, and configure it to solicit the information you need. Then, embed it in your site or send it to your audience via email, social media, SMS, etc.

Set up a customer feedback form so your audience can quickly send ideas or feedback on your content privately.

Your customers can then send their feedback to you directly — it will land in your Savio feedback vault where you can categorize and analyze it.

Surveys

Surveys are another way to quickly collect valuable feedback on your marketing content.

For example, you could send out a net promoter score (NPS) poll, customer satisfaction survey (CSATs), or customer experience survey to gather feedback on how satisfied your audience is with your content.

You could use surveys to gauge your audience’s overall impression of your content.

Or, you could use a customer feedback survey to solicit topic ideas for future content.

Surveys can also help you generate ideas for content topics or guest partnerships.

It’s easy to connect surveys to Savio. For example, here are instructions to hook up your Typeform survey to Savio to collect feedback.

Step 2: Structure your feedback data

Now you’ve centralized your feedback from all your channels in Savio. The next step is to add attributes to each piece of feedback so you can organize and analyze it. Adding attributes to your feedback lets you filter, sort, slice, and dice so that you can prioritize the content that will have the biggest impact.

In Savio, you can do this during the triage process when you link feedback with a feature request.

For example, imagine an active customer — Bob Parr — posts a comment on your YouTube channel asking for a video running through an example of how to do cash forecasting in your software. You submit the feedback through the Chrome extension.

In this example, you’ve collected feedback from a YouTube comment from Bob Parr and submitted it to Savio using the Chrome extension.

Now, you can link it to a “feature request”. (If you’re using Savio to collect content feedback, a “feature request” is really a “content request”.) Here, the feature request would be a Video of a cash forecasting example.

When you triage your content feedback in Savio, you would link it to a feature request and add other useful information.

You would also add other useful information:

• Product and product area: In our example scenario, this feedback is relevant to the “Marketing” product.
• Feedback From: In our example, Bob Parr is an active customer.
• Importance to customer: In our example, the video is a “nice to have” piece of content.
• Tags: In our example, we’ve added a “video” tag because the request is for a piece of video content.

This information will help you prioritize your content when you’re looking to build your editorial calendar.

Step 3: Prioritize your content

In this step, you’ll make some decisions about what content to prioritize and create first.

That’s easy to do in Savio. You can go to your feature request list (for content marketers, this is really a “content request” list). Then you can look to see which pieces of content are the most popular.

Here, we can see that the blog post on cash forecasting tips is the most requested piece of content in our database with 4 requests.

You can also filter and sort in a bunch of ways to find the content that might have the highest impact. For example, you could filter and sort to find the content that:

• Is associated with the highest monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
• Has the highest opportunity revenue
• Is most popular among your enterprise customers
• Is most popular among your prospects
• Is most popular in the last 30 days
• Is the most popular video content requested

In this way, you can quickly find the most popular or highest-impact pieces of content to put earlier in your content calendar.

Here, we’ve sorted the content requests by MRR. The blog on cash forecasting tips has the highest MRR associated with it, so we might choose to write it first.

Step 4: Close the feedback loop

Finally, you create the content your audience asked for. Now, follow up with them to tell them that you made it.

Closing the feedback loop is a quick and powerful way to build audience loyalty. Your audience members will be impressed that you not only listened to their idea, but you actually executed it. And then you remembered to let them know.

Closing the loop is easy to do in Savio. Just click into a feature request, and select the audience members you’d like to contact.

Savio lets you choose who to close the feedback loop with.

Then you can compose a template email and personalize it with your customer’s name and contact information. When you hit send, they’ll get a personalized email letting them know that the content they asked for is ready.

Savio sends personalized emails using the contact information from your customer database.

Not only does closing the feedback loop help you build loyalty and credibility among your audience, but it also helps you increase views on your content. After all, the people most likely to consume the content you make are the people that specifically asked for it.

Power-user tip: Separate content feedback from product feedback

Savio was built to help product managers, customer success teams, and other customer-facing teams build product roadmaps using evidence. It excels at collecting and centralizing product feedback so that SaaS can build better products based on what users are asking for.

But content marketers can use it to collect content feedback, too. As I described above, it can be a powerful tool to help content managers find and prioritize the content that their audiences specifically ask for.

Here’s the problem: if both the Product team and the Content team are using Savio, how do you keep product feedback separate from content feedback?

There are two ways: using the product and product areas feature and using tags.

Using products and product areas

The best way is to use the product and product areas feature. Very simply, you can set up a separate product or product area for your marketing content.

Here, we’ve set up “Marketing” as a separate product with three product areas: Video content, Blog content, and Newsletters.

When you get new feedback or feature requests, you can assign them to the marketing product or product area.

Here, we’re assigning a feature request (content request) to the “Marketing” product and the “Video content” product area.

When your marketing team is looking to prioritize content, they can filter to see only the requests that are relevant to the marketing product or product area.

Here, we’ve filtered to see only the requests relevant to the video team: those assigned to the Marketing product and the Video content product area.

How to: For step-by-step instructions using the products and product areas feature, check out the knowledgebase article.

Using tags

If you don’t have access to multiple products or product areas on your plan, you can also use tags instead.

Just assign a request for a piece of feedback with a tag like “marketing” or “video content”.

Here, we’ve assigned a request for content with the “Video content” tag.

Then, when your marketing team wants to find the requests that are relevant to them, they can filter for requests with their tags.

Here, we’ve filtered our feature request list to see only features with the “Video content” tag.

Power up your marketing by collecting content ideas from your audience

Your audience is a rich source of free content ideas. They are probably already telling you what they want to read, watch, or listen to.

But there haven’t been any great ways for content marketing teams to systematically collect, organize, and prioritize content ideas and audience feedback.

Until now.

Savio is a customer feedback tool that we designed to help product leaders decide what features to build next.

But it can just as easily be used by marketing leaders and content creators to decide what content to create next.

Savio lets you:

• Crowdsource and collect ideas
• Centralize ideas from all your channels in one place
• Enrich ideas with audience data so you can see what different segments want
• Prioritize content ideas based on customer attributes
• Close the feedback loop to boost loyalty and content views

If you’re a digital marketer looking to power up your content strategy, try out an option like Savio.

This post was originally published on the Savio blog. Savio helps you collect product feedback and use it to inform your product roadmap. Check it out or try it for free.