6 Ways To Better Get To Know Your Customers

Knowing your customers is important for the success of your business. This is no understatement because a business won’t survive without loyal customers. But, how do you effectively determine what your customers like and need? It can be a challenging task to get concrete insights into your customers’ minds and also involve costs. But, it shouldn’t stop you from finding ways to align your business goals with customer care because it is all worth it. 

In this article, you’ll learn some of the best ways to better get to know your customers so that you can develop better sales and marketing strategies. 

1. Create Customer Persona 

Companies like Easy Agile highlight the importance of delivering better solutions to your customers with empathy. It’s crucial for the management to align business goals with customer archetypes by capturing buyer personas.

What is a customer persona? Customer persona is also referred to as buyer persona or your ideal customer. With customer persona in mind, here are the questions to consider: 

• What are the demographics of majority of your customers?
• What are the common complaints you get from your customer support hotline?
• What do customers say about your products and services in reviews and testimonials?
• What are your most in-demand products?

Gathering answers surrounding these questions will help you create your ideal customer. A quick way to do that is to utilize Demographics APIs, for example, IP location API, that provides access to geographical location information. It will make you better understand them, which will be a basis of strategizing your next marketing efforts. 

2. Monitor Customer Behavior In Every Stage Of the Sales Funnel

Only 4% of web visitors make a purchase, while 96% never buy. Leads must be encouraged and nurtured to ensure that they convert into paying customers. So, it’s important to monitor the behavior of your customers in every stage of the sales funnel to better understand them.

What is a sales funnel? This marketing term refers to a visual representation of a customer’s journey from the first contact with your brand until the purchase is complete. A sales funnel has a wide top and narrow bottom, and in every stage, qualified prospects are pushed into the next stage and those that aren’t fit for your offer are dropped. 

The following are the important things you need to know about monitoring customer behavior in every stage of your sales funnel:

• Define Your Sales Funnel: A well-defined sales funnel affects the way your prospects see your brand and reflects the health of your organization. You can define your sales funnel by implementing a structured approach and fixing sales funnel leaks. 
• Build Your Sales Funnel: Brainstorm with your team as to what sales funnel you’re going to build based on customer behavior and sales reports. 
• Monitor Customer Behavior: Amplify your sales funnel’s value by using customer relationship management (CRM) or similar software. This software program helps you in forecasting your sales for the next month or quarter, keeping track of prospect’s activities, and closing deals faster. 

3. Engage With Prospects Through Social Media

Social media tremendously help with better targeting. So, using social media is an excellent way to engage with your prospects and drive good results.

Here’s how you can use social media to better get to know your customers:

• Monitor: You can easily monitor how your brand is performing based on the number of followers, likes, shares, and comments that people leave on your social media page.
• Interact: Directly interact with your prospects through the messaging app of social media platforms like Facebook to know their insights and opinions about your brand.
• Create A Group: Create a group that tackles information related to your business and to answer all queries and complaints. Also, you can hold a survey or contest to find out how receptive your prospects are to your offers. 
• Check Your Competitors: If you’re reluctant to directly involve your business in any social media platform, you can check other companies selling the same product or offering the same services as yours. Look at the most common complaints and feedback that their customers leave. 

4. Hold An Event

A business in a physical location can host an event, such as charity work or a tradeshow. It provides you a good opportunity to interact with your potential and existing customers. In an event, you’ll encounter happy and dissatisfied customers, and you can instantly ask their reasons for feeling such. 

For a web-based business, holding a webinar is a good idea. It can help you better understand your customers. Give your attendees a chance to introduce themselves. Ask them to raise any questions to better understand their mindset.

5. Conduct Keyword Research

Using a keyword tool can help you determine the most commonly used words and phrases that your target audience input into search engines. In this way, you can understand the mindset of your target audience based on their searches. 

You can utilize the keywords in creating your content so that more people will see your web pages as they type the same or similar keywords into search boxes. This is also what you’ll incorporate in your search engines optimization (SEO) strategy which aims to increase your website rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).

6. Ask Your Customers

It’s not good to make assumptions, most especially when it comes to getting to know your customers. While it’s easy to get influenced by what you personally experience as a consumer, you have to understand that not all customers are like you. Each customer is unique in every way, so asking what a customer really wants and needs is crucial to a successful sale. You can get solid feedback when you directly ask your customers, so why miss it?

However, people are so busy nowadays that safety and health protocols require social distancing, making direct interaction difficult to do. So, how do you effectively ask about your customer’s needs and preferences? 

Check these excellent ways to ask for your customers’ opinions about your product or service:

• Conduct a website survey
• Send email 
• Phone call interview 
• Chat interview

Conclusion 

You have just learned the better ways to get to know your target audience. Creating your customer profile or buyer persona is a good start, and then make sure to monitor customer behavior in various stages of your sales funnel. Also, you can engage with your prospects through social media, hold an event, or conduct keyword research to understand their mindset. Of course, one of the best ways to get to know your customers is to ask them directly face-to-face or through a survey, phone call, email, and other communication channels.