I like the phrase “feedback is the breakfast of champions”. Feedback can really help power your progress in any field.

But it can also mess you up if you interpret it wrongly.

My first tip on feedback is to sit back and assimilate it rather than reacting.

Normally when we react quickly to feedback it's either because we feel affronted by criticism or pleased with praise. But you need to pull back from your emotional reaction and think about how you can use the feedback to improve; not how you can prove it's wrong or affirm it's right.

My second tip is to pay the most attention to feedback from two types of people.

The first is your paying clients or those with high potential to become one. How they react to what you do is clearly important if they're typical of your ideal clients.

The second is experts with the maturity to give you feedback based on their experience of your ideal clients NOT their own personal reactions.

Far too often even experts will base their feedback to you based on their own reactions to your marketing. But since they're usually not typical of your clients their reactions aren't really valid indicators for you.

You need feedback from people mature enough to detach from their own reactions and to be able to judge how your clients will react and/or what is likely to work for those clients.  

My third tip is to always take feedback in context.

In particular, watch out for two things:

Firstly that you're not just acting on noise from a vocal minority. 

Some things in marketing natually lead to biased feedback. Take email frequency for example. Some people complain when they feel they're getting too many emails from you. No one complains when they get too few. Instead they just begin to lose touch with you and you cease to be top of mind.

Similarly, when you ask your best clients for feedback you'll get affirmation of the things you're already good at. It's those strengths which drew those clients to you in the first place. But unless you get feedback from people who didn't hire you, or who hired you and left, you'll never know what you could have done to win them over.

Seondly, think through what the downside of any change you might make based on the feedback could be compared with the downside highlighted in the feedback itself.

If someone thinks you're emailing them too often the downside is relatively minor. Worst case is that one person stops reading your emails or unsubscribes. Chances are if they feel you're emailing too often then they're not your biggest fan anyway.

If you decrease your email frequency to accommodate that one person then the downside could be that you drop from top of mind for a whole bunch of people for whom the frequency was perfect and who really do get value from what you send.

That's not good at all.

There are always unintended consequences of any change. Try to pre-empt what they might be when you're reacting to feedback.

And finally, try to “triangulate” any feedback. It's rearely wise to act on any feedback until you've heard it from at least three different sources.