And… what we learned through the process:

Knowing how users interact with your brand and how they feel about your business, in general, is critical to implementing changes to increase your customer lifetime value. Is there a specific feature they need, want, or hate? Does your logo throw them off? Is your customer service subpar? It’s easy to guesstimate how your users feel, but getting raw data from multiple sources is infinitely better.

Typically, business owners rely on surveys through email or chat and online reviews to gather the majority of their feedback. But by relying on one method alone, you miss out on reviews from other channels.

In our upcoming series, we are going to outline unique ways of gaining customer feedback and reviews – including thorough and detailed step-by-step processes. Find out what we learned along the way, hear from influencers, and find niche-specific tactics to help you gather feedback from multiple data channels.

So without further ado here is our first tactic in the series…

Customer Feedback Tactic #1 – Source It:

Sourcing content is the idea of using a content aggregator to create content. We opted with sourcing our data via a sourcing aggregator called HARO, however, there are a plethora of other options available on the internet as well.

Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a website for journalists looking to gain sources for their content. So if you plan to use your customer feedback in a case study, blog, or other content variation – (which we recommend that you do) HARO is a great resource!

Process Breakdown:

Step One:

We submitted a query using HARO asking for people who have used CanIRank before and what they thought about our SEO software.

Step Two:

We waited for HARO to send the query out to their journalist database. *Side note: for urgent content pieces you can have this process expedited.

Step Three:

We sorted through the emails from sources, categorized them by their feedback type, and organized the results.

And voila! Just like that, we now have some feedback to work with!

Bonus note: stay tuned to find out how you can take these informal responses and turn them into reviews on G2Crowd, Capterra, Yelp, Facebook or GMB!

So what did we learn from our users?

We received 10 different reviews from a wide range of sources. Here’s what they had to say:

“We’ve used CanIRank for our clients and also started using the tool for our own business web3solution.com. As a digital marketing company since 2008, we’ve used several tools like Moz, SEranking, rank tracker, aHrefs, Serpstat, marketing miner and many other tools. We can safely say CanIRank is an amazing tool.

The new approach to see SEO promotion by CanIRank is interesting. The Marketing Performance, Opportunities, Grow by content, Improve my Ranking, Promote my Content and Build My Authority options make the SEO approach much easier for users to understand and to take action.

We [are] already recommending [it to] our clients and will recommend in the future as well”

“We’ve used CanIRank on a few occasions, mostly because we were doing other work for businesses that had already started using CanIRank, and asked us to check out the work and verify that it’s “worth it” (I have a great SEO team to cover the SEO branch of our digital marketing agency, DevBev Co.)

I’d note that it’s especially good for beginners and those who don’t have the budget for full-fledged agency work. We don’t get offended when businesses ask about it or tell us they use it. We’re about providing complete solutions – sometimes those solutions involve us, sometimes they’re all us, and sometimes they don’t involve us at all.

We turn SEO clients down all the time because it’s very common to underestimate what it will take to rank for hot keywords. Whenever we turn anyone down for anything, though, we always try to send them in the right direction – CanIRank is one of those directions. :)”

“We recently started using CanIRank. We have and still use other similar software. But none that we have found do as good a job at doing the analysis for you. This software has allowed us to really pinpoint what is holding a client website from ranking on page 1. Just this week, I used some of the data in a sales meeting to show a client why we needed to create more content pages. I highly recommend this software.”

“I used CanIRank because I’ve tried everything to rank higher for keywords in the “Get Ordained Online” industry. I’ve been successful with many long-tail search queries and getting my rankings in the top 3-5. But I can’t crack the first page for the main search term. I’ve used BuzzSumo, Ahrefs, and others and tried every avenue I could think of. But I never moved past the 2nd page. So I tried CanIRank and the feedback was extremely useful. I liked the way they prioritized their suggestions based on the value of completing a task. And the reasoning behind their recommendations was valuable. I liked how they prioritized and ranked tasks. A great tool to add to my tool belt.”

“There are so many SEO tools that offer SEO insights, but very few that make suggestions combined with those specific insights. The tool takes a bit of time to gather information about your site, but once it does several of the features are free to try – and can be used in conjunction with your other SEO tools, or on it’s own. My favorite part of the tool is the clarity around ‘Easy Wins’ and the prioritization of these action items. One thing that would make it more awesome, is if there were ‘A la carte’ elements of the ‘do it for me’ feature, rather than just the option for end-to-end full-service SEO.”

– Tim from HookAgency

Of course, not all the results were positive – and that’s why this type of feedback is so valuable.

For Instance, we received a solid 7/10 from David at Onrentme, and Johnny at HacktheEntrepreneur wasn’t a huge fan. Here’s what they had to say:

“We gave CanIRank a try at our startup (www.onrentme.com – free cloud property management software), and our initial impression was that it does provide useful data in an easy to digest format, but not everything provided is actionable or useful so you do have to manually filter through their suggestions to find the gems.

For example, we got a lot of value out of the competition comparison features where you can compare your website to that of your competitors for specific keywords and see which aspects of your website are low hanging fruit to increase your SERP rankings.  Additionally, we were able to identify easy wins from their content promotion section, which are public listings and articles that you can attempt to submit your website to for consideration.

However, the “grow my content” section of their website provided many opportunities to dead/obsolete websites or in my opinion very difficult longshots (namely answers.com which doesn’t allow editing / adding new content as they shut down and are in read-only archive mode).

I’m sure the recommendations vary pretty greatly between websites and keywords, and as your experience may be better or worse – I’d say check out their free trial and see how useful their AI recommendations seem and from there make the call for whether or not to subscribe.  Overall, I’d rank them a 7/10 and would definitely recommend checking out their free trial to see if you can get value out of them”

“When I first heard CanIRank’s USP, I jumped on it for myself and several client sites. After running it through some tests in several different markets, I found it to be not nearly as robust as SEMrush or Ahrefs. It feels like there is a lot of potential for their product in the future, but at this point, it is too far behind their competition.”

While it may be strange for me to be telling you why someone doesn’t like CanIRank, this is the real world: we know our tool isn’t the right fit for all users, and we understand that. As we continue to improve our product-features and differentiate ourselves from SEO tools derived for a different product-market, this information is highly valuable for us.

But wait, we didn’t stop here – and you shouldn’t either.

Here’s why:

We’ve just identified a power-house of positive feedback, and in the manner of not wanting to duplicate efforts or “reinvent” the wheel – we took it a step further.

Process Breakdown: Turn your positive feedback into reviews via offers/bonuses:

Step One:

When following up with reviewee’s and asking for an additional review, identify an offer you can include with your request. It could be:

  • Discounted services or products
  • Cross promotion
  • A free gift
  • A feature on your website
  • Guest posts
  • & so much more….

Step Two:

Reply to positive users that reviewed your product/service with an additional bonus for copy/pasting their review onto a review channel (Yelp, GMB, Capterra, G2Croud, Facebook, etc.).

Here’s an example of what we sent (with our offers included):

Step Three:

Wait until your reviews come in.

Step Four:

Stay in touch! Now that you’ve built a relationship, keep in touch and keep each other in mind for the future.

And there you have it: how to source product feedback using a content aggregator, and then simultaneously turn positive feedback into reviews and gain high quality backlinks!

Stay tuned for the second installment in our “Unique Ways to Get Brand Feedback” series, as we dive into the top influencer’s unique tips and tricks to gathering brand feedback.

As a preview for our next series, take a look at 6 ways to gather feedback via Instagram!