Eight Tips to Getting To Know Your Customers Better
Did you know that July 16 is the next Get to Know Your Customers Day of 2020?
The day is observed four times a year, on the third Thursday of every quarter (in January, April, July, October). This global celebration offers marketers a swift reminder about reaching out to their patrons and getting to know them better. This is integral to the ongoing success of any business, no matter what the size or type. The better you know your customers, the easier it becomes to predict their behaviour, to communicate effectively with them, and to anticipate their needs.
Remember when almost every business was locally owned and operated? The owners knew you by name and knew your shopping habits. Additionally, they typically knew what you wanted to buy. Not surprisingly, if they did not have it, they were willing to get it in for you. With the advent of globalization and digitization, unfortunately, much of the personal attention has gone by the wayside.
However, customers have not changed! If you do not make the effort to know them on a personal level, your online marketing efforts are likely to go in vain. Further, if you fail to reach out to your customers with personalized messaging and tailored experiences, your brand credibility will quickly diminish, as will your audience.
The Importance of Knowing Your Customer
Consumers are the lifeblood of your business and getting under their skin is the only way to engage, inspire, and connect in a way that is both meaningful and valuable in equal measures. Here is why:
96% of consumers state that customer service is an integral factor in their loyalty choices towards brands and businesses.
Businesses that lead in their customer experience efforts outperform laggards by almost 80%.
90% of leading CEOs feel that the customer has the most significant impact on their business.
91% of today's consumers, particularly digital natives, are more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant offers and recommendations.
Hence, understanding your audience is the key to giving them good service, which in turn results in strong customer relationships and new sales through positive word-of-mouth recommendation. Remember: Only they can help you get more leads and more business.
Tips to Getting To Know Your Customers Better
However, understanding the customers’ psyche is not easy and most often requires a thoughtful analysis to identify their preferences or purchase patterns so that you can anticipate their needs and exceed their expectations.
What holds further is a list of eight easy ways to understand your customers better. Read, comprehend, and imbibe them in your digital marketing approach to engage with the customers better and ultimately sell them more.
1. Track Customers’ Real-Time Behaviour
In today’s world, customers demand nothing less than a seamless experience across both traditional and digital touchpoints. To do this, a business needs to be prompt and proactive in its approach. It needs to anticipate the customers’ needs to serve them on all platforms even before the requirement arises. This can only happen when you have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool that gives you a peep into the real-time behavior of your customers.
It can help to track the performance of your marketing campaigns, provide a better understanding of your target audience by jotting down a list of their likes and dislikes, and present their preferences with highly visual, context-rich diagrams, graphs, and charts for quick analytics.
2. Identify the different categories of your Customers
Tagging them together in the same group only leads to generic cross-selling campaigns that do not generate any fruitful results. It is important to understand the different parameters on which you can segregate your customers. For instance, the type of products/ services they purchase, the frequency of their purchase, their geographic location, and so on. Once the categories have been formed and the customers have been segregated, it becomes easier to frame precise marketing and cross-selling campaigns with targeted messaging. This drives more value for both your business and your customers.
You can also create a perfect profile of your customer who would avail of the product or service that is being provided. A customer profile is a great way for a company to gauge the needs of the customer. The profile must include a customer’s likes, dislikes, family background, and other important aspects.
3. Invest in Social Media Management
Social media plays an indispensable role in shaping and influencing the opinions of the consumers. A recent survey has found that only 38% of marketers rely on data from social media that could help them in better targeting. Hence, every business needs to invest exhaustively on social media engagement and frame strategies to engage with your target audience and customers on all social media channels.
Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter provide insights on customer’s likings, habits, purchase patterns, and much more. Customers usually have various complaints regarding a product or service and by resolving them through social media, businesses can learn a great deal about their customers. Most of the posts on Facebook or Twitter garner additional comments from old customers as well as prospective customers that can also be used to knowing the customers better.
4. Leverage Customer Service Interactions
This is one of the best times to get a peep into the customers' psyche. So frame a questionnaire and hand it over to your customer service representatives. On every occasion when your customers contact your service representatives, they can ask queries about the customers’ likes/dislikes about the product or service usage.
Practicing this experience regularly will help you accumulate a database of valuable customer insights that can be used to frame targeted messaging.
5. Focus on Customers’ Tastes and Preferences
Nurturing your customers with informative content about your product or service is good, but it can often get monotonous. Instead, you can facilitate the generic interests of your customers. This gives the impression of how attentive you are towards your customers and brings your buyers inches closer to you. It also allows you to spark conversations around other universal topics, which generates multiple opportunities to create a conversation thread with the customers.
For instance, the sharing of articles around the newest trends that is happening in some other industries not necessarily related to the company’s own product/service.
6. Hold an Event
If a business has a physical location in a community, it is advisable to host a suitable event in the target market area. This will provide an opportunity to interact with the customers, as they may encounter customers who are happy or dissatisfied with the product or service and even interact with prospective customers.
For web-based businesses, webinars can help to better understand their customers. The attendees must be given a chance to introduce themselves and questions must be put forth to understanding their mind-sets. Want to host a webinar? We can help you! Contact us today to know more about our webinar hosting services!
7. Conduct Keyword Research
Customers conduct vigorous online research for the items they want to purchase and most importantly, from whom they want to purchase. Keyword research allows business enterprises to understand the interests of their target markets and the terms that customers use to find the product or service that they need. The main goal of keyword research is to find keyword phrases that are suitable for the business but it also helps to gain an understanding of how the customers are finding what they need.
8. Get Customer Reviews
Businesses can get reviews from their customers through various channels such as the comment box on social media platforms, testimonials on the company’s website, or from reviews by customers on business review websites such as Yelp. Honest reviews on the above-mentioned platforms can be instrumental for the companies to get to know their customers better. The customer reviews that are received must be categorized, tabulated, and prioritized so that you can understand your customers better and provide the best possible customer experience.
You can also encourage reviews from customers by providing incentives. For example, a restaurant chain offers customers a small discount on their next order for writing online reviews.
Wrapping Up
Understanding customers is a long process. However, at Turiya Communications LLP, we can help you! Our team of skillful analysts can help your business by performing the following activities:
Acquire Your Customers: Using effective data analysis, our team finds out what kind of marketing strategy will turn your potential customers into customers, and how to improve your leads and sales.
Know Your Costs: We are here to save your hard-earned money. We will help you to realize the costs that you will incur to make your product, service, or business known to the market by using data analysis. Such vital information will help you to save a lot of time and money.
Recognize your Consumers: Before you launch a business, a product, or a service, you must have enough data to understand your potential customers. Our team of experts will provide you with data related to your product performance in the market, the suitability of your product, potential areas where the consumption rate will be high, market trends and challenges, and others, to execute the perfect launch.
Be Ready for Futuristic Innovation: We will tell you about new market trends, innovations, and challenges that will help you to drive changes in your business and come up with ideas for top-notch products and services.
Get Organized With Your Budget: As we keep performing data analysis for you, we are also going to create potential side data that will help you to understand the current situation of your business and the areas in which you need to modify your budget.
Solve Problems with Us: Our team of data analysts will also help you to detect and neutralize any malfunction within the operations of your business.
Contact us today for a demonstration of the process we have used to help dozens of companies (many in your industry) or visit our website www.turiyacommunications.com to know more!