When you first launch a business, you might have lofty aspirations for your goal. You might believe that your ultimate goal is to introduce more people to a certain hobby, or maybe your aim is to spread the word about a certain kind of product. Whatever your goals are, it’s great to have an idea of what you want to achieve before you start investing your time and money into something like a business.
But as we grow our businesses, we start to become more reliant on our customers. Our companies develop a deep relationship with our customers and we become reliant on their business, much like how they become reliant on our services and products. As such, we need to learn more about our customers in order to provide them with a high level of service that can really help our products sell. But where do you start with this? What does it take to really learn more about our customers?
In this post, we’ll be sharing a couple of fantastic strategies that can help you get to know your audience a little better.
Start making better use of your analytics and data to help you learn more about your customers
Instead of just listening to what you think your customers might want, it’s important to actually listen to them and learn more about what they’re really looking for. To do this, you can’t just rely on what they have to say; you need to actually look at analytics and data to learn a little more about how they see your business. Analytics are fantastic for everything from learning more about your customers to seeing what your most popular products are.
You can arrive at many different actionable conclusions when you start using analytics, but how exactly do you start collecting data on your customers? This is where it helps to look at the services and apps you’ve been using to see how much data you’ve actually been generating. It’s also a good idea to look at sources of data that might come from your customer relationships management solution. We generate more data than you could ever imagine, but it takes a bit of work to truly be able to harness all of that data and turn it into something useful. As such, we should be aiming to analyze the services and software we use to create reports using the built-in tools that they offer.
Engage directly with your audience and speak to them about the products and services that you offer
Another good way to learn more about your audience is to simply get to know them better. For example, you might have a fairly active social media account that can be used to ask them questions or even answer things that your customers have asked. You might also find success in using public events where you can speak to customers that use your products and services. In some cases, you could even harness the power of surveys to help you learn more about what your customers are thinking and how you can improve on your products.
You might find it helpful to use tools like Disciple to help you manage the communities that have been built around your business. Community software can help you grow, engage, and even monetise your community when used correctly. You might also want to hire a dedicated member of staff to help nurture your community. These community roles are extremely important when you have a large audience because it helps you filter our the good feedback from the bad. This allows you to quickly act on important information and you’ll find it easier to take good suggestions on board.
Consider creating buyer personas if you haven’t already made them when you started your company
When opening a business, one of the very first tasks that you might consider- doing is creating a buyer persona. The idea behind this is to try and understand what your ideal buyer might be thinking and how their lifestyle might be. You’re essentially creating the perfect customer so that you have an idea of the person that you’re trying to appeal to. If you want to get a better understanding of your customers, then this is a good approach to use when you first start out.
However, the mistake that many businesses make is that they forget to update this buyer persona as time goes on. In other words, they forget that their ideal customer changes over time. As a result, you might be trying to appeal to a customer that either no longer exists, or simply doesn’t care about your products anymore. So if you want to remain relevant, you have to update your buyer persona roughly every year to coincide with changing trends and customers needs. Only then will you be able to learn more about your audience so you can create a better customer experience and more appealing products.
Start looking at the plethora of indirect audience feedback related to your business and compile it into actionable information
If your business is on the internet then there’s a very good chance that there are people both complaining about and praising you on various websites and communities. A lot of this indirect feedback usually comes from discussions among your audience. For example, you might find that there’s a discussion about you and your competitors. Users might be talking about the best budget option or the best quality option, and this can reveal a lot about how the public sees your brand and the services or products that you offer.
We refer to this as indirect feedback because rarely is this information actually directed at us. Instead, it’s just off comments that people have about your business, but they can still affect others because of the locations that you might find them. As such, you’ll want to try and listen to this feedback, collect it, and organise it into spreadsheets and categories so you have actionable information to improve your brand.
