Photo by CC user geralt on pixabay

In order for your business to achieve customer satisfaction and solid revenue stream year after year, you truly have to know what your customers want.

While there are different ways to go about discovering such details, too many brands don’t make for the needed time and effort to learn the necessary data. As a result, they can end up missing out on growing their brands, leaving the competition to pick up the pieces.

That said your business can and should regularly review its data capturing methods, seeing what has been effective and what needs retooling.

With that being the case, does your business truly know its customers?

Gathering the Vital Data

So that your brand can truly decipher the mix of data vs. information vs. insight, remember these tips:

• Demographics – First and foremost, knowing who you are trying to market to (and ultimately sell to) means having as much data as possible on people. When you understand factors such as gender, age, income, you have a much better feel as how best to undertake marketing campaigns, campaigns you hope lead to sales. You can use a number of tactics to better gather the demographics, notably through surveys, polls etc. If some customers are hesitant to respond and/or give you their time, provide them with an incentive or two to fill out an online survey or answer a few questions in-person or over the phone;
• Priorities – In marketing to customers, you sometimes have to set priorities, especially if you’re a smaller business on a budget. While the larger brands typically have more money and manpower for marketing and advertising needs, the smaller guys are oftentimes limited. That said set priorities in which products/services you offer get the top marketing. Some companies pull out all the stops especially during the holiday season, others will look to ring-up big-time sales during the summer months;
• Mobility – If you’ve been asleep at the wheel when it comes to mobile marketing, change that moving forward as soon as possible. With more and more consumers all but demanding mobile marketing, your brand can’t just pass on these opportunities to connect with consumers on their various mobile devices. If you’re a startup business, mobile marketing should be one of the first tasks you undertake. If you’ve been around for a number of years, you’ve hopefully been able to see in recent years how mobile marketing has blossomed;
• Competition – Even though you should never duplicate your competitor’s efforts, watching (even analyzing) what they are doing is important. Seeing how they communicate with consumers, what they offer consumers, and their success or failure results, should all be of interest to you and your brand. One of the ways to monitor the competition is via social media (see more below). You can look at their actions on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more. The feedback they receive from consumers can actually benefit you, especially as to how you do your marketing campaigns moving forward;
• Socializing – When it comes to your social media efforts, they should be one of your company’s top priorities. As mentioned earlier, engaging with customers (the ones you have now and the ones you hope to have soon) is an important part of analyzing your success and failure ratios, especially as they pertain to your marketing and advertising campaigns. No matter which of the popular social networking sites you are active on, regularly monitor and analyze them, looking for the latest trends. You can truly learn a great amount of details about consumers by listening to what they say on social media. Remember, consumers in the past (before the Internet’s arrival) would typically comment to business owners via in-person visits, phone, regular mail etc. With millions of consumers on social media, they can post comments in seconds or minutes, giving business owners lots to think about. Lastly, any engagement you have with consumers on social networking venues always needs to be positive. Even if a consumer or more than one rips your brand, avoid firing back a nasty response. It makes both you and your brand look silly. Finally, as a great tool as social media can be, never let it replace the one-on-one contact you have with consumers in person.

So, can you say that your business truly knows its customers?