Understanding your customers and your target audience is essential for your business growth strategy. You can save significant amounts of time, money and resources by making sure that only your ideal audience see your ads, content and interact with you.
Gathering customer data and feedback is a really simple way to build this information out – but how can you improve your understanding of your customers? In this article, we look at six ways to better understand your customers.
The chances are that you already have a lot of the data you need to better understand your customers. Starting with your website analytics or CRM, you can start to create trends based on historical customer data.
Google Analytics, for example, has a range of customer demographic reports such as:
It also offers insights into interests and Affinity categories, helping you to better understand the other interests of your prospects and customer base. Your CRM will have information such as job titles, company sizes and industries, and this should give you an idea of customer trends.
Another great source of data that you may have overlooked are your social channels. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are great sources of information for a broad range of demographic and interest-based insights. This not only applies to the people who engage with your posts, but often to the people who visit your business profiles, too.
One of the most effective ways of gaining customer insights and a better understanding of your customers is by speaking to them! A simple method of approaching this is by using customer satisfaction surveys to ask a few questions. You can make these really easy by asking for marks out of 10 or simple star ratings, and incentivise them to complete the surveys with discounts or free gifts!
By collating your answers in one place, you can easily identify trends in your customer feedback, giving you the areas to prioritise in your business, as well as understanding what you do well, and what your customers would like to see moving forward.
If you haven’t already, now is the time to create a buyer persona. Generally, these are created when you’re creating your brand in the initial stages, but it’s never too late to start. A buyer persona allows you to get to grips with the type of person that your target audience is, and helps you to tailor your sales copy, marketing collateral and communications with this fictional person in mind.
Some key things to think about when building a buyer persona include:
If you’re drawing a blank, there are plenty of tools and blogs online to help such as this buyer persona breakdown and Hubspot’s buyer persona tool.
If you’re new to market or don’t have historical data, try looking at your competitor activity using the SWOT technique. It’s likely that you and your competitors will share or swap customers, so take a look at their products and services and strategies – how does their offering address their customer’s needs?
This particularly applies if you’re looking at the most successful of your competitors; what do they do well that keeps customers happy? A SWOT analysis will help you identify their Strengths and Weaknesses, as well as Opportunities for your own business to exploit, and Threats from their business to yours.
It’s important to create two-way conversations with your audience regularly, not only to engage them with your brand, but also to get their feedback. Make sure that you’re available for discussions on your social media platforms, community pages and third-party websites and try using social listening tools to listen to and jump in on conversations about your brand that are taking place online.
Use your customer data to segment your audiences. This means splitting your customers into groups based on data such as purchase history, lifetime value or frequency of purchase. By segmenting your data and using different forms of communication for each of these groups, you can better understand your customer’s wants and needs, enhancing your understanding of them.
Getting to know your customers and audience better is a big step in the right direction to improving your customer experience, engagement and business growth strategy. Once you have a full understanding of your customer demographics, interests and data, you can deliver a much better customer experience, and drive brand loyalty, ultimately impacting your bottom line.
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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