How Understanding Your Customers Can Improve Your Marketing Strategy
How much you understand your target market and how you translate this into your marketing methods can make or break your business.
It can impact the effectiveness of your email newsletters, product descriptions, marketing posts, and more.
Moreover, how your prospects perceive your brand and what you can offer them dramatically influences the effectiveness of your overall business strategies.
This makes it all the more important to thoroughly understand the perspective and behavior of your potential clients.
Take the first few steps to a better marketing plan and start learning more about the people you deal with using these tips:
Check Your Analytics
Google Analytics records your audience’s demographics (ranging from the basics such as age and location to more specific data such as the type of device used and searches related to your business). It also helps you answer the following questions:
- Which platforms do your site visitors come from?
- What products do they view?
- What are their past purchases?
Similarly, Google My Business makes it easier for you to identify trends in your potential client’s behaviors over time. For example, by viewing the analytics, you can identify whether they more commonly visit your site through searching for it by your brand name or product. It also keeps track of how many users called, browsed your images, viewed your location, and more. Additionally, you can also take advantage of an analytics dashboard solution that enables you (or any of your clients) to upload data & create a custom dashboard—helping you make use of the data important to your organization.
Observe the engagement rates of your posts on social media. These can be in the form of impressions, views, number of followers for a specific post, and more. Then, select a category and pick out a few posts that show the most participation from your audience based on your chosen metric. What do they have in common?
Perhaps simple posts with cute images capture their attention more than long, in-depth infographics. Maybe they prefer viewing community outreach statements over your brand anniversary video. Listen to your data and craft your next posts to fit within their taste.
Read and Respond to Positive and Negative Reviews
Taking the time to go through your feedback gives you an idea of their personality, preferences, and standards. This also allows you to gather invaluable insights on how they actually use your products and gauge their satisfaction with their quality.
A major aspect of customer service involves listening to your customers that are unsatisfied with your goods or services. Suggesting compromises and alternative solutions in a timely manner shows them that you are willing to assist them with their needs beyond the initial transaction. Throughout this process, you may identify any pain points you can address in the future.
For smaller businesses, you may find it beneficial to acknowledge positive comments as well. While you’re at it, take note of the words they used to describe the products as this may be how they searched for it online.
Target these keywords the next time you run your campaigns. Lastly, their testimonies regarding your services can be a strong selling point.
Conduct Surveys and Exclusive Offers
Include a short questionnaire to get first-hand feedback from your site visitors regarding their reasons for choosing to purchase from you, their preferred payment and delivery methods, and even their overall shopping experience.
Ask them why they chose certain products over their alternatives. Let them rank your customer service or support team based on a few metrics and leave a response on how you can improve their experience.
If you don’t get enough feedback, offer them incentives to participate, such as a free trial of your subscription services or discounted prices. Keep in mind that customers with different profiles may lean towards different offers.
One subgroup from your target audience may respond more positively to free shipping offers than membership deals. Others may react more favorably to limited edition merchandise over flash sales. Having a thorough understanding of your prospects’ behaviors in response to your promotions enables you to implement more in the future.
Engage with Your Community
Create more opportunities to get to know your target audience by hosting events or simply starting conversations on social media pages.
Identify any external factors that may influence your prospects. This may include any other brands or popular influencers.
With this extra piece of information, you can reach out to the ones who may have the same target audience and offer to collaborate on a project.
Boost Your Digital Marketing
Knowing who your customers are will allow you to market your products and services to them more effectively.
This in-depth understanding of their profiles and interests consequently gets your business more leads to continue the cycle. Through continuously dedicating resources to understanding your target market, any website for a small business can grow and succeed.
