In the age of digital communication, you need to communicate with your customers in authentic ways, and to do that, you need to genuinely understand your customers. Beyond just their names and addresses, communicating personally means knowing who your clients are beyond basic statistics. But where do you begin, and how do you go about learning about your client base?
Why should I get to know my customers?
Trying to connect with your customers might seem unintuitive initially. To explain why it’s important to understand your client base, let’s reframe the conversation and look at some examples from sports. For any given sport, you might have a general demographic understanding, such as a fan’s age, gender, and place of residence.
However, these assumptions often overlook deeper trends in these communities. As an example, did you know that National Hockey League fans are the most affluent sports fans in the United States, with some fans earning over $100k per year? Alternatively, did you know that half of all Major League Baseball fans are retired, or that just under half of all NASCAR fans are women?
When you make assumptions about your customers, you might overlook trends that could expand your business. Perhaps there are ways to better serve your existing customers, or maybe there are entire demographics of your client base that you could serve more. The only way to find out is to learn more about your customers.
How do I learn more about my customers?
When learning about your clients, the starting point is always knowing who’s in your audience. There’s no singular approach to learning about your clients that’s better than another, but there are a variety of ways to get started. Here are some options for you when canvassing your client base.
Interviews
For in-depth data, few options are more direct or effective than gathering information from customers in one-on-one interviews. This approach allows you to cut to the heart of your customers’ needs, asking in-depth questions and then following up with conversation if the answers aren’t clear. Though it is possible to generalize results based on participants’ answers, the value of data obtained from interviews can’t be understated.
Surveys
When face-to-face interviews aren’t an option, consider using surveys to fill in gaps in your knowledge of customers. Surveys are a versatile tool in the sense that you can ship them out in a variety of ways, including directly through the mail or through email. Web-based surveys are also quick and easy for customers to fill. Questionnaires do have the drawback of not always allowing participants to fully articulate their views, but they make up for the lack of nuance by offering an immediate and detailed look at your current client base
Online Tracking
An additional way to gather information about your clients is through your website or application itself. Whenever someone visits your site, they automatically generate data that can tell you how many people visit your site, which of your pages see the most traffic, and what transactions visitors made if any. Tracking this data gives you insight into your customer’s preferences and can help you shape and refine your digital marketing.
Market Analysis
If push comes to shove, you always have the option of choosing one specific channel and conducting a marketing campaign. Though it might lack the insight of interviews or surveys, tracking how many clicks an ad received, when it generated the most traffic, and where the traffic originates from gives you a clear picture of the people who your campaign attracted and what ads caught their attention.
What information should I be looking for?
Any data that you gather about your customers is useful, but beyond just looking for demographic information, start looking for ways to practically apply that information. What characteristics define your standard customer, for example? Can you construct a set of customer profiles to guide your marketing efforts? Are there any commonalities between your clients? This could mean looking for your customers’ incomes or marital statuses, or in a business-to-business context, it might mean employee size or vertical market. Don’t neglect the minorities on the fringes of your business, too. Do they represent potential customers you can compel to return for future business?
The bottom line is that there’s no shortage of questions to ask or data to collect, but improving your marketing all begins with learning more about your customers. At PMI, we can help you focus your marketing and get to know your audience better. For more than two decades, we’ve helped companies with our creative marketing services, and we’re excited to see what we can do for you. Contact us today, and tell us what we can do to help!
