Payman Taei

It doesn't matter what type of business you're running - success in terms of marketing is and will always be about getting the right message in front of the right person at exactly the right time. Therefore, it stands to reason that you need to know as much about that "right person" as possible - and there are a wide range of different analytical tools that marketers use daily to help accomplish precisely that. Thanks to modern day marketing platforms, it's now possible to target people with more precision than ever before. If you know your ideal potential customer lives in a certain area, has a certain level of education and is of a specific age range, you can laser focus your marketing efforts to make sure that you're always speaking to those people. While this can help with "the right person" and even "the right time," it does little to help with what may be the most important element of all: "the right message." That, in essence, is where feedback tools come into play. Modern day feedback tools are an invaluable part of the marketing process, particularly when it comes to the type of collateral you're spending so much time and effort to design. But if you truly want to make sure that you're focusing your attention on the right areas of your marketing message, there are a few key ways that you'll want to use these tools to your advantage. Getting Feedback From Your Colleagues There are many, many design feedback tools out there that all help accomplish a very important goal: they let you share and collect useful opinions from those around you, offering guidance at a time when it is desperately needed to make sure that you're creating the best collateral that you can, absolutely no exceptions. In an over-arching sense, these tools can help make sure that your content is never created in a vacuum. This is especially helpful if you're working with a large enterprise where a customer may interact with a few different departments over the course of the buyer's journey. The right design feedback tools don't just make it easier than ever for people on the same team to collaborate with one another and share helpful opinions (something that is even more relevant than ever during an era when more people are working remotely thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic), but it can also be a great way to break down data silos to make sure that information is able to move freely across your enterprise into the hands of the people who need it the most. By their very nature, the sales team in your business knows a great deal about your customers - they have to in order to do their jobs. But if that insight and those opinions are essentially trapped within the confines of that department - meaning that it can't be easily shared with people in the marketing department - it's not nearly as valuable as you'd hope it to be. Sure, sales might have all the information they need to close that deal. But if marketing can't get enough people far enough down the sales funnel to hand off to that team, what good is it really doing you? That's why a lot of these design feedback tools are so important. Many offer in-context feedback, for example, to let reviewers easily leave their comments on the design itself. This helps provide a much needed context to help guarantee not only that designers are focused on the right elements of your messaging, but that they're also always moving in the right direction. Another invaluable part of many of these design tools involves the ability for people to leave visual annotations on the content itself. These can be useful to once again give designers additional insight into what target they should be aiming at, so to speak. But more than anything, using these types of feedback tools is always recommended thanks to the review and approval functionality they bring with them. Obviously, every piece of collateral that you put out into the world will need to get approved by a number of people before it's "ready for prime time." Therefore, you'll always want to look for a design tool that makes it possible for key personnel to quickly and efficiently give their feedback in a way that improves both transparency and accountability in one fell swoop. Getting Feedback From Your Target Audience Another key way to use feedback tools to empower your marketing efforts ultimately involves your ability to pay attention to those people who matter most of all: your customers themselves. Gone are the days when marketing was a passive experience. You'd put collateral out into the world and people would either pay attention to it or they wouldn't. People don't have time to be strictly "sold to" these days - they're already being bombarded by marketing messages nearly every second of the day, they simply don't want to put up with it any longer. But that doesn't mean they don't want to interact with the brands they know and love - far from it, in fact. People are more than willing to engage with you and listen to what you have to say - provided that you've shown yourself willing to do so on THEIR terms, not yours. Therefore, these types of feedback tools become an invaluable opportunity to learn more about what types of content the people in your audience actually want to see, so that you can double your efforts and create as much of it as possible. This is true not only of the blog posts and white papers that you're creating, but also of other collateral that will live on social media as well. When you sit down with a bar graph maker like Visme (which I founded to help people better collaborate with one another), don't assume that you know what people want to see. You should already know based on the feedback that you've collected. When you head to a site like Respona to research topics, you shouldn't feel like you're "flying blind" or "starting from scratch." You should already have a foundation from which to build from, because you should already know what types of topics that people are at least passingly interested in. If you're able to accept feedback in this way, you'll do more than just empower your SEO efforts. You'll have the type of marketing campaign that people can't help but pay attention to, which is a very exciting position to be in. About the AuthorPayman Taei is the founder of Visme, an easy-to-use online tool to create engaging presentations, infographics, and other forms of visual content. He is also the founder of HindSite Interactive, an award-winning Maryland digital agency specializing in website design, user experience and web app development.