Are you leveraging the true value of customer questions?

We look at ways questions can benefit a digital brand, far beyond a static FAQs page

In shops and showrooms, the situation is simple: people ask questions about products, and staff are trained to answer them. Feedback returns to managers and product teams. Chatbots and customer service links fulfil the same function online. FAQ pages speed up the process. So far so good, but this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to thinking about the role of questions for a modern brand.

Questions from awareness to conversion

Questions about delivery times and returns policies, the most typical content of FAQs for retailers, are focused on the final stage of the funnel. But people also have questions earlier on, when entering the market, considering brands, and then when exploring a product offering from one or two chosen businesses.

These earlier questions may never come through to customer services or sales staff, or may seem too specific and bespoke when they do, that there’s no aggregation or feedback on them.

This is where digital data and in particular Google’s query reports from paid and organic results data provide ongoing insight.

‘People Also Ask’ results

The search results page will often surface a panel of ‘related searches’ and ‘People Also Ask’ questions, each one linking to a page where Google believes the answer lies. On a search for your own brand , if your website doesn’t have a page answering a frequent question, a competitor’s website might surface if they have a relevant page about the same genre of products you sell.

For example, left is the People Also Ask box for ‘Tesco’. The highlighted question is an opportunity for Tesco to surface information, and for competitors to surface competing stock checkers (which Google would consider generic).

Right now, the answer goes to a canny affiliate who has built a page explaining what happens inside the Tesco app.

Brands need to close this door and protect their brand results by being on top of questions surfacing on Google and dedicating content on site to answer them. Dedicated SEO tools can aggregate People Also Ask queries and highlight what you need to do to dominate them. This will make it more likely that you get multiple links on the results page for brand searches, maximising the paths to your site and preventing cannibalisation from your competitors.

Questions as keywords

Questions such as ‘What’s the cheapest 4K TV?’ or ‘Is Lidl really good value?’ are different in kind. But if they surface in search query data, there’s an opportunity for a keyword, or a dedicated campaign, depending on the scale. For the former, an electronics retailer could surface their cheapest product. For the latter, a Lidl competitor might surface a link to their own price-matched products, for example, via paid, organic or ‘People Also Ask’ routes.

In the move from literal keywords to semantic meaning in search, Smart Bidding and other machine learning algorithms are able to more clearly discern what a question is, and where the best answer lies. However, it still needs the right content (answering a question on your site) and product data (i.e. is a chair product made of oak, if the question is ‘Where can I buy oak chairs?’) to be available, based on a marketing team’s review of common question queries. This will ensure that the AI has the right options to direct traffic to.

In a wider sense, every search result page is the answer to a question as every search string is a request for information. AI can follow changes to how people use the search box as ways of asking questions mutate. For example, from ‘where can I buy a car in Wolverhampton?’ to ‘car near me’ or from ‘How big can my mortgage be compared to income?’ to ‘mortgage calculator online’ and so on.

Reviews and social trust

Sometimes people are looking for social validation that a brand or shop is legitimate, responsive to customers, and that it provides good service relative to competitors. Their subsequent questions might then be best answered by third parties – review aggregators, for example – or by comparison engines, where service points and prices can be directly validated.

Brands need to combine a strategy of third party review services, which will prompt customers to write reviews and display these to potential new customers, with monitoring and intelligent reaction to other brand comments arising online. Customer services responding to issues promptly by offering to investigate or resolve them can limit damage to a brand’s reputation, however if these are proactively addressed directly on site, it can head off or dispel negative moods and prevent bad feedback in the first place. For example, if stock issues are causing delivery times to rise, a quick post or banner explaining why – i.e. temporary supply chain issues – will show that this is acknowledged, temporary, and not a result of slack customer service. In this example the message is: It’s a supply chain problem not a brand problem.

Questions in creatives

A question mark can be a hook. Addressing a pain point, or quickly shortcutting an inner familiarity if someone has the same question as you: ‘Tired of being tired?’ Well, yes, I am actually. Your target audience is already engaged and internalising your message. ‘OK, here are some vitamin pills which are just the thing.’

A question is also good to test in headlines or copy in creatives, as it demands an answer – and therefore prompts engagement with your ad that a statement doesn’t. Have you thought about testing questions in your brand awareness?

Questions as the future

Finally, questions can also illuminate where a brand should develop or evolve, or where there’s a gap that competitors may be pushing ahead. If people keep asking ‘Why can’t I spread my payment over four months’, or ‘Why aren’t there enough cookery shows on Disney+’, for example, then these are ideas which potentially highlight a gap or opportunity.

We need to ask better questions as business grapples with changing tech and markets – but we also need to find better ways of truly picking up on the questions of customers.

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