If you don’t know who your customers are – their wants and needs and their reasons for using your product or service – it will be challenging to provide the kind of customer experience that converts into brand loyalty and client satisfaction. There are many ways to understand your customers better, and in today’s technology-driven marketplace even the smallest businesses have access to a range of market research tools to ensure profitable product development and deployment.
Using Analytics
Google, Facebook and Twitter all provide analytics services that can help you gain some valuable insights about your target market.
The Demographics and Interests sections of Google Analytics, for instance, allow you to figure out what the people who buy from you have in common and to use that information to begin to develop Buyer Personas. A good website design agency will ensure that your website has been set up for Google Analytics.
Facebook’s Audience Insights Tool, available with a Facebook business page, helps you to understand the purchasing habits, likes, lifestyles and locations of the more than one billion users who log in daily. You can also take a more targeted look at the people who have liked your page and use the information from your existing email lists to find out more about the people who bought from you in the past or converted in some other way, such as subscribing to your newsletter or signing up for a webinar.
You can use a Twitter ad campaign to generate an unbiased demographic analysis of a wide range of customer dimensions, including political affiliation, occupation and interests, which you or your digital marketing agency can use to flesh out your fictional ideal customer.
Less well known is another form of analytics called Heatmaps from a company called Crazy Egg. Heatmaps allow you to optimise your marketing efforts by defining which users give the most attention to on your website and even how far down they scroll.
Buyer Personas
Pinning down the exact demographics, behaviours and interests of your customers can help you create a fictional ideal customer persona so that you can find more people just like them who are likely to want to purchase your product or service. The most robust buyer personas will be based on market research gained from tools like analytics and from information gained directly from customers in the form of surveys, user testing and personal interviews.
Traditional Market Research Tools That Have Gone Digital
The internet has made it simpler to get feedback from customers using traditional market research tools like surveys and customer feedback forms. Sites such as SurveyMonkey make it easy to set up online surveys and send the link to your Twitter followers or targeted email lists. You can also host very short surveys on your website, asking a maximum of two relevant questions related to the page your visitor is on.
Ask your website design agency to build in feedback boxes on web pages that allow customers to report minor issues and offer suggestions for improved services. Your website’s design can also include forms that capture key pieces of persona information, such as the size of the companies your leads work for.
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To find out more about Atelier and how we can help you get to know your customers better, get in touch today.