How to Get to Really Know Your Customer: Understand Them
By Ann Connor
Know your Customer
As a business owner, we all know how important it is to know your customer. It’s a phrase that’s used in countless marketing books and across many advice columns. So okay, great, you’ve figured out how old your customer, is where they live, what their incomes are—all that good stuff. But do you really understand them? Can you predict what they need, what moves them, what inspires them? These are the types of questions that really matter when it comes to success, so we’ve gathered five ways to better understand your customer.
5 Ways to Better Understand your Customer
1) Identify Your Customer: Assuming you haven’t already done this, before you can understand your customer you must identify your customer. You’re not selling to just anyone so who are you selling to? What’s the demographic, etc. Get the basics together.
2) Get Customer Feedback: Once you’ve identified who your customer is, start getting some quality customer feedback in order to familiarize yourself with their reactions to your current understanding of them. Carefully consider their responses so that you know how best to alter your approach to catering to what they need.
3) Contact Inactive/Past Customers: Lost some customers in the past? See if you can get in touch with them to pick their brains and find out why they stopped using your product. This way, you can not only have an opportunity to win back old customers but help prevent losing more in the future.
4) Encourage Promotion: In engaging your customers with different promotion styles, you can learn which ones appeal most to them—which can be a big tell as far as how they act as consumers and respond to your company’s content.
5) Ask Yourself: Put yourself in your customer’s shoes—what would you like the companies you support to know about you? Generate a list of these “in your shoes” questions (or visit here or here for some important asks!) that you should be able to ask about your customer. This way you can provide true, cater-to-the-customer service.
See the Marketing Course page for some more great tools and resources!
SOURCES:
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/245266
http://www.infoentrepreneurs.org/en/guides/know-your-customers–needs/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alanhall/2012/06/14/to-succeed-as-an-entrepreneur-know-your-customer/
http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1708910/knowing-vs-understanding-your-customer
Tags: customer, customer service, marketing, target