Are you really putting yourself in your customer’s shoes! How well do you know your customers?

Click here to get this post in PDF

How much do you know your customers? Do you know them well as they know your business? In today’s fierce business environment, it is extremely challenging to pull in sales easily, since we are dealing with a much more computer-savvy and intellectual population.

Sometimes, a trivial trick can pull in a sale or make your customer happy or worst, might cause the customer to repel. Thus the question, ‘how well do you know your customers’?

For instance, in a brick-and-mortar setting, it certainly is difficult to record and monitor every customer walking in. On the other hand, the scenario is altogether different from an e-commerce site. The beauty of the web is that you get to extract significant amounts of important customer data such as age, gender, zip code, time zone, language, browsing patterns/behaviours, buying history, etc.

Ask yourself, who is your ideal customer? If you don’t have an answer to that or you are preparing a list of different folks or are targeting everyone right from kids to teens and elderly, then there is some really bad news for you. Yes, because this is incorrect targeting.

Targeting Right – Pathway to Understanding your Customers

Targeting everyone out there is one of the gravest blunders committed by businesses worldwide.

Having a clear picture of your target audience helps you to drive your marketing strategies around them, whereas a lack of targeting will lead to a significant loss of revenue, time and resources.

The first step for targeting the right way is asking yourself what problem or issue your product/service addresses. Simply put, the USP of your service/product.

Also, understand the fact that customers are looking for solutions and buy from a business for addressing their problems.

Avoid aggressive pitching. In fact, focus more on convincing the prospects as to how your service/product will actually help them address their problems or concerns. Mastering this will get customers queued up for your offerings.

Don’t shoot in the Dark

Having sound knowledge about your target market plays a pivotal role in manoeuvring your marketing stratagems and optimizing other critical marketing processes as well. Therefore, it is imperative to understand and decide who you intend to sell or market your product/service to. Any uncertainties here is a lot like shooting in the dark.

So how do you shoot in the right direction? Actually, it’s quite simple. Read on to know what the requisites of a typical prospect profile are.

• Age
• Gender
• Profession
• Family details
• Geographic/location details (rural, regional, suburban etc.)
• Interests

Moving onto the next stage:

• What are the questions or queries of the prospect regarding your business/industry
• What problems they are facing
• What are the solutions they are looking out for resolving their issues
• For B2C businesses, it is imperative to determine lifestyles, social behaviours and interests of their prospects
• Whereas for B2B businesses, it is advisable to determine what benefits the client aspires from your service/solution, the rate of usage, aftersales customer support, handholding, etc.

Identify where your customers are!

Now that you are aware of what a typical customer profile entails, it is time to find out where your customer exactly is. For this, you ought to skim over the geographic details of all the prospects, who befit your bill. After ascertaining the geographic areas/demographics that have the highest concentration of prospects for your business, it is time to plan and devise your marketing strategies for reaching out to these prospects.

End of the Line

Once you know where you need to hunt, you then zoom into a win-win situation when it comes to devising and running your marketing campaigns around them.

Knowing your customers helps a long way in drawing in the right customers towards your business. Gone are the days of targeting everyone in your list with just a single message, as it’s time to be more customer-centric and right audience targeting.

You may also like: 5 Tips for Building a Strong Online Brand

This article is written on behalf of Sage Software Solutions, who provide integrated ERP, payroll and CRM software. It helps SME to manage their business and customer. You can find out more about them on Twitter and LinkedIn.