When you publish content on your website, how do you know if your readers leave the page feeling informed, or whether they leave thinking that something was missing?
At React & Share, we believe that website feedback tools are the key to driving long-term communications success, and that centring customer needs is the only way to foster trust and engagement.
It’s pretty simple – website feedback tools are the perfect vehicle to let your readers talk to you. Keep reading to dig deeper into the value website feedback tools can bring to your external communications team this year.
What are website feedback tools?
Website feedback tools come in all shapes and sizes but ultimately fulfil the same goal – to help you to collect feedback from readers and instigate change to reflect their insights.
Some examples of website feedback tools include pop-up surveys, on-page surveys, external feedback forms, feedback widgets. Alternatively, feedback can be sourced from specific feedback pages, community spaces and forums or via reviews if you have a substantial audience.
At React & Share, we help communications teams shape their online content to better serve customer needs by embedding reader activation widgets into websites, processing the relevant data into an accessible and intuitive dashboard and providing regular reports on what matters most – your content.
Why does website feedback matter?
Without feedback from readers, communications teams have no idea whether the content that they publish is useful or not. Gathering feedback takes the guesswork out of content improvement, allowing you to optimise information to meet your customers’ needs.
Spotting gaps and errors through website feedback tools and widgets enables communications teams to ensure that:
- Content development resources are allocated wisely
- Happy customers have no need to contact customer service
- Communications teams meet the needs of customers who rely on their content the most
Website feedback provides direct insight from your audiences, letting them tell you the questions that they need answering. In short, direct feedback accesses the experience of reading your article, from your readers point of view.
Are there any differences between feedback tools and analytics tools?
Comms teams essentially have two key tools to gain insights and improve their external communications: feedback tools and analytics tools.
Analytics tools, including Google Analytics, are often built around difficult dashboards, complex queries and buzzwords that deliver quantitative data and ask you to dig deeper. With metrics like the hollow 'view count' and 'bounce rate', the quality of the reader's experience is impossible to determine. Knowing what customers actually want, from analytics tools alone, is impossible.
Website feedback tools are anchored firmly in the qualitative, in the why as well as the what. Feedback tools, such as React & Share, Hotjar and online surveys allow communications teams to get under the skin of their audience’s needs – however, the efficiency of each tool varies.
How can I use feedback to improve external communications?
Collating feedback and implementing feedback are two different ballgames. Getting the most out of the feedback you have and using it to evoke positive change is the other side of the website feedback coin. Website feedback tools like React & Share enable external communications teams to:
- Collect a high volume of quick, anonymous feedback straight from readers.
- Ensure that your external comms and content are accessible to all audiences.
- Interpret data to prioritise content work, identifying easily what’s working and what’s not.
- Understand and meet their readers' needs and expectations
Integrating website feedback tools into wider external communications strategies is guaranteed to boost company image, improve content and forge strong relationships with a diverse range of readers. Through integrating feedback into your communications and content strategy, you can ensure that your external comms and content is useful, informative and exactly what your reader is searching for.
Will collecting website feedback create more work?
It’s completely natural to be concerned that adding another layer to your content creation, or another arm to your communications strategy will take up more time and resources. However, reliable, accessible and informative content has never been more crucial than in 2021. The question that you should be asking is – what are the consequences of not collecting website feedback?
Many customer feedback tools are free, although may incur a more sinister cost, for example ownership of reader data. React & Share don’t store any reader data – aside from the bare minimum needed to analyse behaviour — and that doesn’t include any personal data.
Outside of fees, the labour required to implement feedback may be perceived as an additional hassle to already overloaded external communications teams. But by ignoring customer feedback, comms teams take the risk that the time and resources ploughed into content creation may be all for nothing, if the information provided is useless.
Once feedback tools have done the hard work of identifying your key problem areas, implementing solutions is seamless and well worth the time invested in collecting the feedback in the first place.
Ultimately, website feedback tools help external communications teams to meet and excel beyond audience needs, improve content and enhance the effectiveness of external communications efforts. Using website feedback tools to shift the focus from quantitative to qualitative is the number one hack for improving external communications in 2021.
Katie Cousins, Director of Digital Marketing at Saebo, found that website feedback tools enabled the team to gain “insight into what blogs are performing well, especially the newer ones that we produce, what the potential ROI of that content might be or the longevity of the piece itself”. Website feedback tools balance the need to reflect on previous work, whilst providing the insights needed to propel content and external communications teams into the future.
Click below to see how React & Share can collect the feedback needed to overhaul your external communications strategy this year. We can’t wait to get stuck in.
