By
Jen Harwood
Head Trainer and Founder at Great 8 Enterprises
Do you really have a good understanding of customers’ needs and expectations, attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviours?
Acquisition, service and retention are important for customer growth, but success in these areas depends on really knowing your ideal customer well.
The importance of understanding customers’ needs and wants
Employing telemarketers and buying leads when you are trying to grow your customer base are reasonable strategies, but alone they are not enough. Understanding who your customers are and exactly what drives them is critical for increasing your conversion rate.
Having clear insights about your current customers will also give you a reasonable picture about others who should be your customers.
Your customers can’t be lumped together as one homogeneous group. What motivates people and businesses can vary depending on the places where they operate, live or work.
Your ideal customers may be of different nationalities, sex, race, age and education levels, and have had differing experiences. The attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviours that exist in your good customers are what you should look for in new customers.
Understanding your customers’ behaviours, what’s important to them, when or why they are likely to leave, or why they might reduce their spending, will help you develop strategies to keep them.
If you don’t make an effort to really understand what makes your customers ‘tick’, your competitors certainly will.
Stand in your customer’s shoes
Train yourself to see the world through their eyes, ask their opinions and listen to what they say. This should tell you much of what you need to know.
What are the common issues and emotions that motivate your customers? Who is buying products from you? Work with your accountant to identify what type of customer is most profitable.
Creating customer profiles will help clarify the characteristics of your ideal customer, including their lifestyle, ambitions and frustrations. Keep these profiles updated.
Do you really have a good understanding of customers’ needs and expectations, attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviours?
Visit the social media forums they hang out in and read their posts and reviews. Monitor what people are saying in your product or service area, the questions they have or the problems they share. Keep track of where they’re going on your website with Google Analytics.
You can learn a lot about what your customers want from the search terms they use to get to your site and how they move around the site.
Talk to your customers in their language about how your business can help them solve problems or meet their needs. Get their feedback through surveys, emails, or by even by picking up the phone.
Make it all about the customer
Taking the time and effort to really get to know your customers well impacts a wide range of areas in your business. It starts with you being able to offer high level, highly targeted, customer segmented, and personalised customer service that ‘hits the spot’.
Customer segmentation is important because each customer type will have different expectations, experience and needs of your products, services and staff delivery.
Knowing who your ideal customer is means your marketing efforts can be focused, deliberate and direct. Churn is a big problem for many businesses, but if you understand your customers from the outset and know what their expectations are, you will lessen the chances of them leaving.
Conversions of leads are also easier once you understand your customers’ needs and expectations.
Customers who are understood become long-term loyal customers who buy more, recruit their friends for you, and take less of your company’s time, effort and money.
Jen Harwood
Head Trainer and Founder at Great 8 Enterprises
Jen is an award winning inspirational and motivational speaker on the topics of business networking, leadership, standing your ground in tough times and building great teams
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