The Most Important Piece To Building a Successful Brand Online

I cannot emphasize this enough. If your brand does nothing else in strategizing its growth or market execution, I promise that if you do this one thing, your brand will grow its online presence further and faster than other brands:

Practice active listening.

Regularly.

Ongoing.

Without stopping.

Listen to your customers. What are they saying about your product?

Having a brand that customers fall in love with includes helping your customers feel heard in your relationship with them. Make sure you're actively asking for feedback on a regular basis from customers, and make it public how you plan to respond to that feedback.

ASK YOUR CUSTOMERS FOR FEEDBACK

With my own brands, if we notice a lot of chatter about our brand around a specific topic, we launch an open-ended question survey, asking the customer to tell us in their exact words what they think.

I want to be clear before moving on from this survey idea that the survey MUST be open-ended questions. If you do multiple-choice or drop down options for anything other than asking for their demographic information, you're missing the point.

You don't want to guide them in how they answer, because you're potentially missing out on a lot of information. By creating drop downs or multiple choice responses, you're guessing at what their answers might be, and you could be completely missing out on the real answer, something you haven't even thought of before. By creating the multiple choice, you end up perpetuating your internal brand ideas instead of truly listening to the customer.

And we've had clients tell us they don't want to make the customer work too hard on the survey, but again, this misses the point. Customers want the opportunity to feel heard. Don't "require" answers to all the questions, but leave them open-ended, so if a customer has a thought they want to share, they can share as much as they want.

We'll typically follow up after the survey via an email campaign and/or on social media with our response to that feedback. This is important, because ultimately, you need this to make sure your customer feels truly heard.

ASK THE EXPERTS

Are you tired of me talking about this yet? Because I'm not done.

What do the experts have to say about your wine or spirits products? I am not talking about the spirits competitions. I'm not talking about Fred Minnick, your "Head Mixologist" you hired and pay a salary, your distiller.

I'm talking about bartenders. They know your customers better than you ever will, because they're putting in the nightly hours learning about their preferences and wants. They're doing the hard work so you don't have to. So ask them.

Some questions to ask:

How would you use our product in a cocktail?

How does it stand up in cocktails for you?

Would you recommend it primarily neat or in a cocktail?

What flavor profile do you get from our product?

Who would you recommend our product to?

YOUR BRAND IS IN THE HANDS OF YOUR CUSTOMER

Our take on our brand is that we created its core values, but the rest is up to our customers, so we listen actively to what they have to say about it.

Because ultimately, that's it. I can't get in their heads and control their perception of our brand. So I have to listen, and see what they think, what they like, what resonates most for them, and act accordingly.

Over the 10 years I've been growing my oldest brand, I continue to be surprised by customer's feedback about our brand and product, and I love it. It's like raising a kid and getting to learn about all of their unique talents and interests outside of just what I exposed them to.

IF YOU'RE NOT LISTENING TO YOUR CUSTOMERS, YOU'RE MISSING OUT

Whether you care to listen or not, customers are having conversations about your product and brand right now. You can continue down your path with a deaf ear to their conversations, or you can decide to actively listen and participate in the conversations.

Of both paths, which do you guess will help lead you to more success?