Getting to know your customers is the biggest part of running a successful business. Sure, you’ve got a good team to rely on and the market conditions are favorable, but it’s your customers who will bring your profit line to you. And that means you really need to get to know them.
Thankfully, it’s easier than ever to do that! Indeed, in the digital age there are far more tools at your disposal, and that’s something you should use to your full advantage. After all, you’re looking to see over the competition here, and that means getting to know the core of your customer base. So here are the best ways to manage that.
Get Direct Feedback
Direct feedback is the best way to get to know your customers, because all the answers come straight from the horse’s mouth! The more you can hear from them about them, the better your marketing is going to be in the long run.
Send out feedback forms. Get them to tell you about recent shopping experiences with you through standardized surveys. If you present questions you really need answering, they’ll be more than happy to fill in the blanks!
Get to Know Their Online Spaces
Your customers are going to have their own favorite platforms to visit, and you’ve got to be there to meet them. That sometimes means investing in Programmatic Display Advertising, but most of all it means understanding what your customers do outside of the time they shop with you.
Social media is vast these days, and it can be hard to quickly scan through. So ask three questions above all else here: What do your customers want to see online? Where are the majority of their close connections? And how can you find out more about them using this information? You don’t have to do a deep dive here, but you can use this kind of research to start building customer profiles.
Start Building Profiles
Speaking of customer profiles, this is your chance to create a representative of your customer base at large. Or if you’ve got a wide pool to pick from, you can create two or three different profiles here. The more you know about the people who shop with you, the better your chances are of targeting them with the right email campaigns and targeted adverts on social media.
So take all your common demographics into account here – age, gender, shopping habits, etc. These are all great tidbits of information to have, but use them wisely; creating a customer profile can go wrong if you don’t know what kind of big picture it adds up to.
Your customers are going to have a variety of likes and dislikes, but they all have you in common. Lean on this connection to get to know them better; who are they, where do they come from, and what problems could you potentially solve, etc. It’ll make you a lot of money in the long run!
