The best way to get to know your customers is through customer research. If you know your customers well enough, you can effectively market to them using the right marketing channels, and the type of content and products they want. By doing this effectively, you can generate interest in your products/services and boost conversions as a result. Information from customer research helps small business owners to do better customer targeting through the use of the right ads, right channels and more effective optimization strategies. Doing all these helps small business owners to improve on their branding, create the right content, and use the right marketing language and tone, and the right SEO keywords to enhance their marketing and to grow their business.
So, if as a small business owner you want to do some research to get the right data to grow your small business, here are simple ways you can do customer research.
Use Simple Surveys
The best way to gauge customer satisfaction is through surveys. You can directly ask questions and get information from your customers. Through this customer feedback, you can identify potential problems that need solving. Customer survey strategy can help you to identify how well a new product into the marketing is accepted and how the products you are already marketing are faring in the market. You can even directly find out from your customers what they want that you are not even selling yet. Simple survey questions to get the basic customer information you want can be delivered through your website landing page offers, email list subscriptions, pop-ups, and social media posts. You can entice customers to take surveys by offering them token gifts and rewards, making sure the time needed to take the surveys is not really too long.
Checkout Demographic Data
For vital marketing information, you can diligently checkout the average customer characteristics as they relate to the demographics of your target customers. You can find out what products people in certain age brackets want, same for educational backgrounds, hobbies, gender, income level, employment status, home ownership and so on. Once you identify your target demographic, you can do some research on them to identify what they want and what their common needs are even without collecting elaborate data. You can simply get the information you want by checking out articles, research statistics, studies, and trend reports which are widely available online.
Check Sales Data
It is not possible to run a business successfully without keeping concise records. Such records particularly as they involve sales can help you with customer research at a later date. You can always compare your current sales figures with previous sales figures over same period of time to get valuable information. Through these figures, you can determine which products your customers really prefer. If you are selling many products, such comparative sales figures can help you to determine which products to rest and which to sell more of. If however you’re only selling only one product, you can still take previous sales data and use it to identify trends. You can easily determine what made sales of the product to go up and what made sales drop and over what period of time. This information will help you to determine if and when to run ads for your product or not and what type of ads and through what channels. You can even cross-reference sales data with customer support data, reviews, surveys, and demographic studies if you want to get a much better picture.
Review Customer Feedback
In reacting to a product in the market, customers usually have questions, concerns, and complaints. Even without a customer care team serving your business, you can on your own handle most of the inquiries and gather vital data from this feedback. Through such data, you’ll be able to clearly identify common service problems, questions, and product complaints. When it comes to finding solutions, you can address common inquiries with FAQ, rectify product and marketing defects, improve production, handling, delivery shortcomings an so on. More importantly, feedback data helps you to identify how customers accept your product, what they feel about it, and what they want improved about it. Even though everyone can complain or give suggestions about your products/services, it is your customers’ opinions and experiences that are the most crucial for the growth and development of your business.
Last line
Through customer research, you can get to know your customers well enough. That knowledge is vital if you want to optimize your marketing strategies. If you research well and get to know your customers well, you can write better marketing content for them, market to them with the right ads and through the right channels. This way, you can better plan more effective marketing campaigns, create better products and increase sales.
