Qualitative feedback: the missing measure
It’s often hard to assess the value of communications tactics designed to build brand strength and awareness. Sure, you can track, say, downloads of thought leadership pieces, but how do you know if the content is boosting credibility, opening minds or inspiring action? Other top-of-the-funnel tactics—including speaking engagements, sponsorships, most media coverage and impact stories—present similar dilemmas: You can quantify reach, but it’s hard to pin down effectiveness. The solution is qualitative feedback.
While companies often seek qualitative feedback as part of messaging and branding initiatives, it’s underused as a measure of communications campaigns. Numbers can’t tell you what the eyes you’ve captured really see in your thought leadership. Qualitative feedback helps you move beyond guesswork and get out of internal echo chambers.
Collecting it can be an expensive proposition, but it doesn’t have to be. Small sets of comments, gathered with relative ease and combined with other data sources, can help you double-down on your strengths, fix potentially damaging weaknesses, and deepen understanding of the people you want to reach.
Making the most of small-scale focus groups, interviews and surveys
Focus groups or one-on-one interviews with people in your target audience are the optimal way to gather qualitative feedback—and conversations with even 5 to 10 people can produce valuable insights. You can combine these methods, but if you’re choosing one or the other, note that focus groups can produce groupthink or skew to dominant voices, while interviews may require more time overall from the researcher.
Surveys don’t allow you to clarify answers, but they are easy to set up and allow you to reach more people—which is why we all receive an endless flood of them. That inundation has depressed response rates, so keep surveys short and plan on offering a reward to participants. You may need to compensate focus group and interview participants as well.
Whichever format you work with, invest time and thought in constructing questions that get at not just what people think, but also why they think that. Combine limited-response questions (“Did the projects we featured help you understand what we do?”) with open-ended questions (“What did you take away from the article?”). And make sure you’re not subtly leading people to positive responses.
Capturing anecdotal feedback
Anecdotal feedback—solicited or unsolicited comments your team receives in the course of business—is the most underused qualitative measure. Vanishingly few enterprises capture and review it systematically, which leaves this potentially rich drip-drip-drip of audience intelligence drifting in the backwater of half-remembered conversations.
Harvesting quantitative feedback droplets is largely an organizational challenge. Everyone who interacts with target audiences—sales and marketing teams, relationship managers, executives—needs to see the value of collecting one-off comments and have access to an easy way to store them. These three steps are crucial:
- Ask everyone to note unsolicited “I love that piece you guys wrote on [topic]” comments, along with the answer to a key follow-up question, like “What did you like about it?” or “What would you like to know more about?”
- Help people who regularly interact with target audiences develop the habit of soliciting feedback in ways that don’t put people in an uncomfortable spot (“Thanks for attending our session; what did you take away from it?” not “How did you like our session?”).
- Create a simple tool for capturing all these comments in a widely accessible company database.
Anecdotal feedback on its own is easy to misread—any one comment, positive or negative, could be just an idiosyncratic response—but collecting it can reveal patterns, point to potential improvements, and help explain puzzling quantitative measures.
Undoubtedly, collecting qualitative feedback takes more effort than harvesting data from an automatically populating dashboard. But by revealing the “why” behind the numbers, it can help you avoid wasted efforts, head off brand damage and lead with strength.
