8 Simple Ways to Listen to Customers and Improve Your Newsletter Content
If you’re guessing at topics, you’re working too hard. These eight listening habits make your next issue easier to write — and your business more trusted.
How powerful is it when someone “gets you”?
In marketing, to “get” our people, to make them feel understood, we need to listen.
Basically: Listen to your customers AND anyone in your company who talks to customers.
I’m going to share a few things I’ve learned over the years about who to listen to (and a little bit of how) to get to the heart of what your customers care about (hint: it’s not you).
Even before my career slip-slided away into marketing, I thought that there are more marketers who understand the form of marketing, but not its soul.
They spend time creating emails, promotions, discounts, share on social channels, blog, and do all of the “things” that make marketing work. But they’re allergic to talking to people. The result: they lose sight of why they’re doing all of those things.
There’s no heart to it.
In my opinion, they’re usually bad listeners. They are too focused on doing what they think is right or following the latest trend instead of actively hearing from their customers.
To do a good job at marketing (especially content marketing) you have to actually care (or at least do a great job of faking caring, but, egads, what a hollow way to live).
Of course, as I often emphasize, you also need to be helpful.
Here’s what I’ve learned about listening to people — magazine readers, community members, and inbound and ghostwriting clients (and their customers) — over 30 or so years:
You can’t create great content without listening.
1. Customer Surveys
A good way to get a large volume of responses. You can create long, intensive surveys using something like Surveymonkey. You can also create simple polls on different platforms like Substack or Twitter to ask a simple question. For example, “Is Drew Brees the greatest QB of all time?” Of course, the answer is yes.
I used these to guide my editorial calendar each year for both print and for webinars. I also used them for ego stroking by asking how well we were doing. Other than the one person who wrote, and I quote, “that Duhon guy is an ass,” feedback was 99% positive. If I had known about it at the time, I would’ve used feedback to create a kickass net promoter score to use in marketing.
2. Conferences and Events
If your company hosts or attends events (online events count!), talk to customers while you’re there. It’s a great spot to have random conversations that lead to marketing insights.
Events also provide great opportunities to grab a ton of customer testimonials.
Before the AIIM Conference in 2014, I set up dozens of appointments with folks who had taken the Certified Information Professional test to record video testimonials. I asked each of them, “Why are you an information professional?”
My favorite response remains Baron’s, “Because amateurs don’t get paid.” These videos are also an example of “go ahead and give it a try” because I didn’t know to turn my phone sideways to capture video full screen — we live and (hopefully) learn.
We then used these to help market the program.
Note: schedule interviews in advance, but leave gaps in your schedule to allow chance and serendipity to work their magic.
Bonus note: Scope out one or two relatively quiet meeting spots in advance. Have water handy for throats with a tickle and leave enough time between meetings so folks aren’t waiting for you, you have time for the occasional bio break, and so you have enough time to physically get from place to place (events can get hectic, plan well).
3. Social Media
Instead of simply blasting out your stuff on [insert your favorite social channel here], don’t miss the opportunity to have conversations with people. I used to host semi-regular tweetchats as community manager at AIIM. They were fun, rapid-fire ways for me to get ideas for blog posts (and summations of the tweetchats also became blog posts, and tweets).
More importantly, they helped to create a sense of community among the AIIM tribe. There are folks I met online that have become friends.
Social listening has gotten easier to do at scale. Tools now roll up mentions, themes, and sentiment across channels so you can spot patterns faster than manual scrolling.
4. Site Statistics
This isn’t listening exactly, but paying attention to your Web and marketing statistics can confirm what you hear. Statistics will tell the story of what folks are interested in. What blog topics are hitting? Where is the most action on your website? Where are they spending time? In numbers, your customers are telling you what they’re interested in with every click (or no clicks). You just have to know how to listen.
“Listening” can include watching behavior, not just reading words. Heatmaps and session recordings can show where people hesitate, rage-click, and bail — which often points to confusion, missing info, or a trust gap.
5. Comments
An obvious one. Scan your comments, wherever they are (Yelp, Google, blog posts, social media, etc.), like you’re a miner panning for gold nuggets. Respond to every comment. Mine for patterns in customer questions – then answer them!
6. The Sales Team
OK, yes, sales people can be . . . self-absorbed assholes who care more about their bonus than anything else.
Talk to them anyway (and, I suppose, they aren’t all like that).
The smart salespeople are the ones who understand their customers. They can feed you invaluable tidbits about customer points of pain, objections to buying, what language turns them on or off, etc.
Check in with them regularly to find out why customers are buying, as well as objections, and let that information guide your marketing.
If you record sales or discovery calls, you can also listen at scale. Run transcriptions through your favorite genAI tool, looking for repeated points of contention, objections, agreements, etc. across meetings.
7. Customer-Facing Staff (Service Reps, Help Desk, Etc.)
During the four years I helped copier dealers with their marketing, neck in neck in useful ideas with the sales team were the service reps — the guys (and they were all men) who service the machines.
They were a gold mine. While it was next-to-impossible to get them to write themselves, they could point out common customer questions that I could answer in blog posts.
These customer-facing employees can help you identify common topics that bug your customers. Then you can write a blog post, shoot a video, create a FAQ, etc. to show them how to fix the problem themselves (if that’s possible, you don’t want anyone but a skilled technician monkeying around inside a copy machine).
Another example came from the billing team at one copier dealer. They were asked every month to explain invoices by customers. We created a short blog series that they could point people to that cut down the number of times they had to answer this question.
I also learned two interesting tidbits:
People really did photocopy various body parts back in the day and broke the platen (that’s the glass sheet you put your paper on to be copied).
One guy found a dead rat inside an empty paper tray. He wasn’t happy about it.
8. Online Communities
If you have an online community (wherever it lives — Facebook page, LinkedIn group, actual community site) the marketing team should take time to drop in to hear first-hand from customers. Make friends with the community manager(s) too and regularly check in for thoughts, insights, and/or potential customer issues to use in marketing to delight customers (or defuse potential issues).
Reddit is also a gold mind for listening-inclined marketers.
Putting It All Together
My experiences have been with smaller organizations, so my approach to collecting this information has been . . . hodgepodge. That said, I DO have a system that works for me.
Since this isn’t a post on how to create an editorial calendar (another day) or filter ideas (also another day), I’ll share a few quick thoughts on what’s worked for me.
Create a single spot to store the ideas. Truth in advertising, I’ve never managed to 100% do this. I have a paper-to-brain connection and take notes pen to paper. I get around this by having a single notebook per client/topic/product line.
When you see the same thought/idea in multiple spots, create content about it.
Contemplate your navel. Take time to think and doodle. Write down headlines. Brain dump topics and random ideas and thoughts inspired by all of the above. Whatever process you use that gives your brain the space to make the random connections that lead to insights — and great content.
Get going. At some point, from the jumble of conversations, ideas, your own experiences and knowledge, research, and brainstorming concrete ideas will emerge. Based on your goals, prioritize what seems most likely to carry you to those goals and start writing.
If you want a newsletter that actually sounds like your customers — and gives you a simple, repeatable system for what to write next — that’s exactly what Newsletter-in-a-Box (NIB) is for.
I’ll help you set up the structure, the cadence, and the “listening pipeline” that turns real questions into publishable issues — so you’re not staring at a blank page every month.
If you want, reply (or email me bryant@simplyusefulmarketing.co) and I’ll tell you what the lightest, lowest-lift version looks like for your business.
Musical Interlude
Edited while listening to The Curious George Soundtrack; one of my favorite movie soundtracks. Jack Johnson has the perfect vibe to go along with George; Broken and We’re Going to Be Friends are particular favorites.
Great tips - thanks Bryant.