How Knowing Your Customer Is Key To Success In Business

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Few business owners will deny that the most important part of running their business is keeping the customers loyal and happy to spread the word about the business. However, until you get to know your customers, it’s impossible to get that kind of relationship with them. Here, we’re going to look at not only the benefits of knowing your customers but the different methods you can take to get to know them as well.

Set the right tone

When you’re talking to customers, whether directly or through your marketing campaign, you want as organic a connection as possible. However, it’s tough to build that when you’re imagining an amorphous blob of a customer. For that reason, you should look at creating an ideal customer profile. These profiles use the data that you have on your customers to help you create an idea of your average customer or the average person within a market that you want to target. As such, when you’re writing content, emails, or other marketing materials, it’s easier to imagine what to say when you can imagine the kind of person that you’re talking to. For instance, you’re not likely to talk to a young mother the same way you talk to a childless professional.

It’s better to target your marketing

Simply put, when your marketing isn’t targeted as a specific kind of customer, then it’s likely to be so vague that it’s going to miss just about everyone. Even if some members of your audience don’t entirely fit the target you’ve set, you’re more likely to hit the pain points and circumstances of their life that make your product or service a good fit for them. Make sure that you’re making use of the market targeting features when you’re allocating things like your advertising budget and you will be more likely to see successful conversions as a result.

Use all that data

How do you learn enough about your customers to accurately get to know who your market really is? There are a lot of ways your business may already have access to data that can help you get to know that. For instance, if you have social media, then you can look at your analytics to see the different demographic data of your followers, where that is available. Some platforms, like Facebook, tend to have more data on age, location, occupation, and interests, than others. You can also use an email signup system for your website or for a newsletter that asks customers to share some details about themselves, as well.

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Know them on an individual level

We’ve looked at how you can get to know the overall demographics that make up your customer base, but no one customer is made up purely of demographic data. They are individuals that, most importantly, have their own individual journeys with your business that you should be cognizant of. You don’t want to talk to a customer who has been with you for three years the same way you would help a customer who is brand new to it. Your sales and support team should get a CRM for that reason. Customer relationship management software helps you store records of your customers so that you can quickly look up any info you need about them, including past purchases and service queries. This way, you can treat them like you know them.

Get to know their shopping habits

If you’re running a business that grows based on recurring revenue, like an e-commerce shop, then getting to know the person is all well and good. However, by getting to know their shopping and spending habits, you can better incentivize the kind of behaviour that’s more likely to lead to increased revenue. For instance, with a loyalty system, you can look at the data behind your customer’s shopping history as well as items they have looked at before to offer discounts on items that are more likely to fall within their interests. This way, you can give them just the slightest nudge that they might need to convert on a purchase they were considered before but didn’t go through with.

Know how they search

Aside from getting to know about their shopping habits and the kind of people that they are, you can also get a better idea of how you can better reach them through certain marketing methods. Keyword research is all about doing precisely that. By learning the kind of language your potential customers are likely to use and what questions they will ask during search engine queries, you can create content that reuses that specific language. That way, your pages are more likely to end up in the top results, more likely to be found by members of your market and, providing you can offer content with the right value, more likely to convert them into a sale.

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Don’t forget to ask them

Lastly, you shouldn’t forget to simply ask customers about themselves and their experience with your company. A lot of them are more likely to share than you might think since people like to be heard. Implementing a customer feedback system is always a good idea. If you get a lot of feedback on a certain issue, you can also win their respect and loyalty by taking the time to publicly address it. For instance, you can put together a case study that takes a closer look at an issue that several customers might have had with the store or customer service experience and how you’re going to fix it. Your customers will feel heard as a result.

Any business that loses touch with its customers is at risk of losing touch with its profits, as well. Hopefully, the tips above give you a good reason to look over how you handle your customer interactions, how you can get the data you need from them, and how you can use that to improve their lifetime value and the likelihood of further supporting the business.

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