3 Ways To Deal With Negative Feedback
In many of our posts concerning branding, online marketing, and sales, we often recommend taking to social media platforms and asking your customers about what they would like to see from your company. While this is a great way to find out about many aspects of your company like customer service, media presence and product satisfaction, you should always be prepared for some backlash. Below, we’ll give you a list of some negative things to expect and how to deal with them:
[success]1. Commentary[/success]
If you’re going to ask your audience for feedback and suddenly the majority is trashing you, the worst thing to do is shut down commentary. It hurts to hear that your company may be failing in one way or another but consider this an opportunity to fix things! Read every comment if you can, find three or four themes that seems to be the most recurring and then figure out a way to work on it. For example, if you’ve got a restaurant and you ask for customer feedback, one of the major complaints may be customer service. That means you need to talk to your service staff and perhaps even implement new training modules to be completed. The worst thing to do is ignore problems, instead, try to find a solution.
[success]2. Social Media[/success]
Starting a social media campaign is a huge decision to make and one of the things you must anticipate is the fact that it may not work out the way you want it to. This doesn’t just happen to small businesses, its something big brands have to deal with all the time as well. So how do you fix a social media campaign that has gone off the rails? Simple, diffuse it by taking responsibility and go back to the drawing board. What we mean by this is that you need to publicly acknowledge that the campaign was unsuccessful, apologize to your customers and followers, then take into account what went wrong and start from scratch on a new campaign. Sometimes you just have to accept failure and move on.
[success]3. Likeability[/success]
Here’s the thing, the Internet is a great place to launch all sorts of marketing strategies, but no matter what, you need to be aware that for every person that likes what you’re doing there’s a person that doesn’t. So what can you do? Usually our advice is to ignore people that blindly hate your company or product. If a large group of people have a specific reason for hating your company or product, that’s when you need to figure out what to do. What it comes down to is what your company’s morals and standards are. Once you’re comfortable with what you stand for, people that agree with you will follow and people that don’t will continue to openly hate you. The solution here is to ignore it and focus on the people that support you.
[notice]What are some marketing failures that you’ve had to deal with? Have you had generally good or bad public feedback? Let us know in the comments section![/notice]
