In certain cases, it can be difficult to interpret what your customers are thinking. Even though you can often predict their behavior, at times a misdirection can lead you to miss certain aspects due to a lack of data or analytics. You may find yourself thinking about what happened and how the opportunity slipped by. Regardless of how challenging it is to understand their thinking, customers are essential for any business, so it is always a good idea to continue working with them. Hence, it is valuable to incorporate a few steps that can help you understand them. Here are a few steps that you can take to get to know your customer base and fulfill their needs.
Creating a Customer Profile
Think about your ideal customer, and make a profile. This profile will help you gain a deeper understanding of what your customer is thinking and why. For instance, if you want to start research for a new product, you can begin with creating a fictional character and answering a few questions about them, such as age, gender, purchasing power, the lifestyle of the character, etc. You can assign behavioral patterns you experience from customers into types of profiles and determine which ones tend to gravitate towards making a purchase.
Make Use of Big and Small Data
Based on your customer profile, you can predict trends in customer behavior. You can leverage both big and small data to be able to recognize what customers want and how you can best serve them. Big data can be acquired from public sources. For example, you can perform a lifestyle analysis using geographic data from a Facebook page. Small data, on the other hand, is more concrete data. This type of data includes transactions and responses from customers to surveys or questionnaires.
Talk to Them
If you are interested in knowing your customers well, then going directly to them can be a great idea. One of the methods to do this are customer surveys. They can either be conducted via phone, online or in-store. You can utilize this data to create your customer profiles and build towards a better understanding of what interests and goals customers want to fulfill. A more interactive way to get customer opinions is through games. This puts the customers into a comfortable space where they answer more freely and honestly compared to being in focus groups. The more interactive and engaging you can make these games, the better your chances of capturing genuine responses from customers.
With sales and marketing continuing to be a big driver of business, it is important to gauge how well you understand your customers as well. The challenge of recognizing your customer mentality can be essential to how well your business performs in the long-term. By adapting these strategies into your action plan, you can improve your chances of success and convert more customers into consistent sources of growth.
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