Knowing your customer is an essential part of effectively selling your products or services. You have to understand the consumer behavior for you to reach your customers and keep them connected to your brand. A customers opinion shared on digital media can literally make or break a small business and it’s for this reason that understanding exactly what the customer wants is vital nowadays. Creating an effective marketing strategy requires having a strong understanding of your target customers. You need to understand the platforms they use, the messages that will resonate with them, and how they feel about your business. To increase your understanding, here are some tips for you to consider:
- Connect with your customers: Whether face-to-face, on the phone or in a follow up email thank your customer for their purchase and ask them why they chose you. This is a simple market research analysis and the information you receive will be useful for future marketing purposes.
- Improve your customer data: Identify gender, age, income, marital status and occupation. If you are a B-to-B, then understand the kind of business and size. This will allow you to improve or adapt your offering to suit your customer needs. It also allows market segmentation. Using internet analytics is a great source of customer information. When you collect customer data, you can then analyze it and study buying patterns.
- Empathize with your customers: When a customer offers you feedback, positive or negative, listen to their story and acknowledge that you understand their position.
Getting this step right will help to avoid bad reviews online. - Take customer feedback seriously: Beyond a surface level, customer feedbacks provide valuable insight when you ask specific questions like ‘’How can we improve our services in store’?
- Build Personas From Data: Beyond employing empathy to understand your clients, deepen your connection by building personas from the data you collect. You need enough data to resonate emotionally, so look at the terms that clients are utilizing to reach out to you.
- Keep researching: This is as much a business philosophy as a marketing tactic. Don’t assume that methods and practices that have worked well for the past year will work in the future. Consistently reframe your existing data and insights to make sure you have (and, more importantly, are acting on) the best available data.
- Customer Sentiment Analysis: The term refers to mining the opinions of your customers. If done properly, sentiment analysis can reveal gold mines inside the thoughts and opinions of your customers. There are many ways and tool to conductor track customer sentiment.
- Practice Active Social Listening on social media platforms to gain further insight and engagement. Look at reviews, and engage beyond cut and paste false empathy scripts. Set up alerts to know when others talk about your brand online.