Earlier this week I discussed some general issues about how important it is to get into the “head” of our probable customers. See Part One. There are number of strategies that we can utilize. They include:
- Document Existing Knowledge
- Interview Current Customers
- Interview Your Employees
- Intelligence from Existing Websites
- Use Others’ Research
- Conduct Your Own Research
- Utilize Focus Groups
- Test, Test, Test with Targeted Customers
Document existing knowledge: You should have learned a lot over the years about your customers. That information just needs to be documented and classified so it can be more meaningful and useful to you. This is the best place to begin. You might end up by being surprised by how much you know or by how little you know about your customer base. If you aren’t already, you should be capturing geographic, demographic and psychographic information. The latter can be extrapolated from occupation, user experience data, campaign data, etc.
Interview Current Customers: Hopefully you have a number of customers that you know well enough that they will gladly give you some time so that you can ask them some fundamental questions. What problem or need did your product or service address? Why did they choose your company? What benefit was the most persuasive in convincing them to take action. Why did they buy when they did? How could you have made the product or sales process better? You get the point. There is a lot to be learned from you current customers. The more of them you ask, the greater the confidence you can have in the results. Talking to enough customers may enable you to see if there are themes that come through in the interview process.
Interview Your Employees: There is a lot of information about your customers in the minds of the employees who interact with them. Talk to your sales people if you have them. Customer service personnel are critical to this process as well in that they have an important perspective on the issues of customers after they have purchased the product or service. Anyone who interacts routinely with the customer should be considered for interviews. Find out why customers buy and what issues they have with your product or service.
Intelligence from Existing Websites: Websites provide a good source of intelligence. If you already have a website and have enough traffic, there are tools you can use to gain insight into the people who visit it and those of your competitors. Yes, take the time to learn from your competitors. One caveat though….only target successful competitors for this intelligence. The third party applications, e.g., Quantcast and others like them provide inference data on visitor profiles. The better ones use large panels made up of millions of Internet users who previously provided their profile information to the service and allowed them to passively view their online behavior. This information is supplemented with direct visits to tagged websites and plugged into an algorithm that makes inferences about the profile of people visiting a website, or what websites a certain profile visits. The latter is important to Media Publishers and the creation of effective affiliate advertising campaigns. Most sites have too little traffic to be profiled without adding tags from one of these services to the website.
Visiting successful competitor websites can also provide insight into the customer. What value proposition are they marketing? What emotional gratification mode and purchase preference modes dominate the site? If they are very successful, they probably know the customer and how to position their product in the mind of the customer.
Obviously, your own web analytics application can provide a lot of information about the source of your traffic. If you have website goals, it can also help you identify from where the most qualified traffic is coming. Customer insight can also be gleaned from the search keywords that resulted in visitors to your site. Once there, what were they looking for….what visitors searched for (site search) or what content they interacted with while on the website. All can provide valuable insight about our customers so that you can become your customer.
Use Others’ Research: Don’t reinvent the wheel. If there are resources that already provide insight into your target market, use them. This is known as a Secondary Research Resource. There are many organizations that provide both demographic and psychographic information about a particular target market profile. These reports can be purchased and may cost several thousand dollars. Many times a brief synopsis of the paid report is available and that in itself may be valuable. There are also a myriad of free resources. One that should be always addressed for demographic information is the Census data from the federal government.
Conduct You Own Research: You can create your own survey of current customers. If you have a large enough sample and have surveyed all of them or a random sample of them in an unbiased way, you can gain confidence in the data discovered in the survey. This process is termed “primary research” because you are doing your own research. The difference from interviewing your customers is that you are surveying a much larger sample and are using research protocols that can provide you objective and subjective data with confidence limits attached to it. You can do the same with a random sample of people from your target market.
Conduct Focus Groups: Focus groups are a tried and true way of interacting with probable customers to glean information that will help us define our product, price, marketing message, marketing strategies, etc. Focus Groups are both an interviewing and brainstorming process involving group dynamics that you don’t get in a one to one interview. Results are better if whoever conducts the session is trained in leading focus groups. This will help assure a better outcome of the experience.
Testing With Targeted Customers as Part of the Development Process: Whether it is a website or some other Internet marketing campaign, soliciting feedback from existing or probable customers as you develop the website or campaign will result in a better website or campaign. It reminds me of that old adage of never having the time to do it right, but always having the time do do it over. Doing it right requires that you involve your targeted market profile in the development of a website or campaign by “running it by them” in a structured (testing) way.
If you do the above, you are well on your way of Becoming Your Customer!
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Tags: Brand + Technology, Internet Marketing, Non Linear Internet Marketing, Online Marketing