By Joe Benjamin
Customers can seem enigmatic at times. You try to predict their behavior, but a lack of data or analytic misdirection can cause you to veer off course and miss the mark, leaving you scratching your head and wondering how you got it so wrong.
Sound painfully familiar? Unpredictable, fickle, and sometimes hard to explain, customers remain the lifeblood of any business, so it’s worth taking the time to get to know them a little better. It’s impossible to always accurately predict every customer’s reaction and decision-making process, but taking steps to better understand your customer base can help you fulfill their needs and increase the chances of a sale. Here’s how:
1. Create a Customer Profile
What does your ideal customer look like? Creating an ideal customer profile helps you delve deeper into what your customer is thinking–and why she’s thinking that. When you start with product research and development, for example, you can begin with a fictional character and answer the following questions:
- What is the age and gender of the person most likely to buy your product?
- How will that person use the product?
- What are the characteristics of that person’s lifestyle?
- What are some of the objections or concerns she might have about the product?
- How much would she be willing to pay for the product?
A woman aged 29 to 35 will certainly answer these questions differently than a male aged 55 to 70, so creating customer profiles can make you aware of what different customers want from you, customers’ potential concerns, and how much they’d be willing to pay for a product or service.
Note: You might have one specific type of customer in mind, such as a young mother for a baby product. But you need to think outside the perfect purchasing situation and come up with a range of customer profiles for anyone who might be swayed to buy. A baby product, for example, might also be purchased by a grandparent or a friend attending a baby shower, so it’s not enough to only consider the new parent’s point of view.
2. Utilize Big and Small Data
Collecting customer data gives you hard evidence to support your predictions based on your customer profile. Both big data and small data should be leveraged to help you better predict customer behavior.
What’s the difference? Big data is generalized information mined from open, public sources. Think location data from a Facebook page or lifestyle analysis from geographic location. Small data, however, is the more concrete stuff: Actual transactions or personal financial information.
Typically, big data is used to create a general customer profile, while small data can be applied to individual, actual customer profiles to better predict behavior surrounding attitude and purchases.
3. Ask Them!
If you want to get to know your customers better, why not go straight to the source? One traditional method is with customer surveys: online, by phone, or even in-store.
Another method of asking customers for their unbridled opinions is via game play. Games can be a great substitute for customer surveys, as market research questions can actually be inserted into the natural flow of the game (think quiz-show style games), and because customers are in a comfortable environment, they might even answer more honestly than if they were sitting in a focus group.
Utilizing Market Research for Your Business
Whether you have a new service, product, or even preliminary idea, the key to success is exploring your potential customer base. Ask around, search for data, and try to get answers so that when you do release your product or service, you will be ahead of the game.
By getting to know your core customer base and predicting the way they’ll react to things like marketing, new products, and fresh features, you leverage what you know about customers with what you can offer them in the future.
The post 3 Steps to Better Understanding Your Customers appeared first on AllBusiness.com.
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