When it comes to promoting your business, you obviously adopt best marketing practices to grab the attention of your potential customers.
Following such practices, you can gain more followers on your social media accounts, increase website visitors, and even take your site to the top of the search results.
But is it enough to make your marketing campaign successful?
Surely not.
The ultimate goal of your business is to increase revenue. And it comes from your customers.
Thus, it doesn’t matter how potent your marketing campaign is. The key to success lies in how well you understand customers and their needs.
Why is it Eminent to Understand Customers?
Perhaps, you have the best product to offer your prospects. But, the question is what makes them buy such a product.
For this, you need to take on a customer-centric approach. Stepping your feet into a customer’s shoe will enable you to understand their pain points, needs, and expectations that persuade them to purchase a product or service.
Implementing this strategy also enables you to bestow an improved consumer experience.
Ultimately, consumer experience is the conclusive determinant of the future of your business. If you fail to meet their expectations, they won’t come back to you again.
And this is why you need to understand your customers as without thinking from their perspective, you won’t be able to give them a good experience.
Prioritizing clientele will help you to build a strong relationship with them. It ensures the long-term retention of loyal customers.
Loyal customers not only buy your products frequently but also refer to your brand on their networks. Undoubtedly, such referrals and mentions influence purchase decisions a lot.
In fact, 83% of buyers admit that they prefer to buy products that have recommendations.
Moreover, it takes less effort to sell a product or service to the existing customers than to convince new buyers to place an order. Hence, it increases ROI.
Now let’s take a look at the 6 ways to understand your customers better.
1. Leverage Survey
This primary research method is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal. It is the most eminent and inexpensive way to understand your target audience, enabling you to collect user data, such as their name, email address, etc.
Surveys let you talk directly to your customers, asking them questions that matter to your business.
This helps to portray the picture from the user’s perspective, rather than using your own preconceived notions about any subject.
However, it is quite challenging to attract visitors to take part in such surveys. As per market research, the average survey response rate is 30%. Thus, you need to be very careful while setting questions for such surveys.
Here are few tips to conduct a successful survey.
- Keep it as short as possible. To know the users’ opinion about your services, ask them to provide a rating. You may also ask them if they would like to recommend these services or not.
- Make it easy to answer. Don’t let your users type a long sentence to answer your survey. Use multiple choice question formats to enable participants to answer the questions with just a few clicks.
- Don’t ask too many personal questions. People often hesitate to share personal info such as contact number, date of birth, etc. It may turn away users from proceeding further.
- Ask for only one product or service at a time.
- Offer incentives or freebies to motivate users to take up the survey.
- Use simple language and conversational tone for your survey questions to engage users.
2. Get Insights from Social Media Platforms
Social media is the most viable platform to connect with potential buyers. In 2021, the number of active social media users is 3.96billion, which is approx, 48% of the world population. Out of them, 54% use these platforms to research products.
People often share their viewpoints about goods and services on these platforms. Thus, it becomes a powerful tool for marketers to collect customer feedback and understand their expectations from such products or services.
However, using only these platforms won’t provide you a good perspective about your prospects. You can only track how many people have tagged your brand name to share posts or comments, creating social media accounts.
But in reality, most of the audiences don’t care about tagging the brand while posting their comments.
Brand monitoring tools like Brand24, Talkwalker Alerts, Hootsuite, Awario can make your social listening task easier. These tools enable users to track each and every mention on the digital platform.
Using brand monitoring tools, you can track your brand or product name mentions with some common misspellings. It can keep you updated with all conversations happening online regarding your business.
Moreover, it lets you know how many mentions your competitors are getting and the number of searches for your types of products on social media platforms. This will help you to identify what your competitors are offering to attract leads. Thus, keeping eye on your competitors gets easier with these tools.
3. Define Your Ideal Customers
Customer profiling is a crucial step for regulating successful marketing campaigns.
Profiling the target audience isn’t limited to acquiring collective information, such as location, age, profession, etc. When it comes to interacting with them personally, these generic data won’t help you much in getting positive responses.
Analytics tools allow you to view who is visiting your website. It will also provide you insights like-
- Sources from where the audience is reaching your site
- at what time they are visiting your site
- what attracts them most
When you collect this data, you can target that source to reach them. For example, if most of your traffic is coming from social media sites, you can launch a marketing campaign there to grasp their heed.
4. Focus on Keyword Research
Keyword research is not just picking the search terms with higher monthly searches.
It requires close observation of users’ search behaviors for understanding customers’ needs.
Google Search Console can give you data like what search terms your audiences have used to find your site. This data gives you a deeper understanding of what users are really searching for in your products or services.
This will serve two purposes.
First, if you know what people really want, you can modify the quality of your product or service accordingly.
Second, you can use those search terms while targeting your audience. You can include those keywords in your website content, email outreach, social media posts to attract audiences more effectively.
5. Review Customers Feedback
While conducting surveys or social listening, you may need to face criticism about your products or services. There is a lot to learn from your unhappy customers. In fact, this is the greatest way to improve your product quality.
Feedback helps you understand what your users like or dislike about your product or service.
Be responsive to your clients. Try to interact with them personally to understand the exact reason behind such complaints. Help them to solve such issues as quickly as possible. Prompt responses from the service provider build the reputation of the brand.
6. Analyze Sales Funnel
There is no better way to understand your customers’ expectations rather than to analyze the sales funnel more precisely.
Sales funnel allows you to view at which stage website users are ceasing their buying journey.
Try to find out the difficult areas, preventing buyers from taking further action. To analyze it more precisely, you can use analytics tools that enable you to see customers’ journeys on your website in small videos.
If you don’t notice any changes in your conversion rate even after having good monthly traffic, then there is a serious hurdle on your site.
Having sufficient traffic implies your marketing strategy is foolproof. But if the conversion rate is low, that means you need to focus on on-page SEO tactics.
For this, you need to do A/B testing. Figure out the leaking points on your site and make changes there. Possibly you have not placed the call-to-action at the right position, or you may need to add more content relating to your product or service to clearly describe its features.
Again, you may see some of your regular customers stopped placing orders or uninstall your app. For those cases, you need to interact with them personally to find out the real problem. Another way to analyze such glitches is to go across the customers’ journey. It will be easier to identify what are the real pain points that are taking the customers away.
Final Thoughts,
Understanding customers’ needs and expectations help you to deliver specific solutions for an enhanced purchase experience. This works great to build brand reliability, long-term buyer retention, and even earn referrals. Excellent customer experience means more sales, revenues, and business growth.
In this competitive world, people have countless options from where they can procure services. If you don’t take on the customer-centric approach for your business, you may lose them even after having great products in your store.
Social listening can give you insights on what people are talking about you and your competitors. It also makes you aware of various trends. Thus, invest your time in social listening to have a clear perspective of the requirements of your prospects. Also, track user behavior using analytics tools. These simple tricks will help you making your business a customer-centric organization.
