In today’s customer-centric business environment, understanding your customers, their needs, expectations, desires, creating meaningful long-term relationships with customers has become critical to establishing a sustainable competitive edge. And the best way to achieve that is by collecting your customer insights, engaging customers. That you can do with customer insight tool.
Customer Insight Tool
Contrary to what most of us may think, not many companies have a Customer Strategy in place; nevertheless, a Customer Insights Strategy could be fulfilled with a customer insight tool. This is an unfortunate missed opportunity to move from data to insights, knowledge, and strategies that produce measurable results. And only smart CEOs and successful companies acknowledge that and take action, first choosing a customer insight platform. Also, sometimes forgotten in this package is the importance of empowering your loyal customers to become leaders and potential brand advocates and evangelists.
The most important question we’d like immediate answers to is, ‘How do we leverage our resources and customer insight tool to generate consumer insights and strategies that will create measurable results?’. This is not an easy question to answer as it is closely related to your industry, business model, and goals, but I will try to pass on some of my knowledge.
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Identify Your Buyer Personas
“Buyer personas are research-based archetypal (modeled) representations of who your buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, why they make buying decisions, where they buy as well as when they decide to buy.”
Identifying your buyer personas is key for you to be able to collect insights from your target audience. If you are unsure of your audience, then my suggestion is that you take the appropriate time to identify your key customers and loyal customers. Segment them as much as you need, as long as at the end of this exercise you have a clear understanding of the audience you are speaking to.
A good example of the importance of knowing your buyer personas is the many ads with Star Wars themes that have suddenly populated TV commercials and social media. Companies such as Duracell, that know their audience will be buying lightsabers and Star Wars toys and gadgets are investing heavily on ads with the theme as they know their audience will sure need their batteries to keep their gadgets lit on and the world a safe place.
Define Your Customer Insights Strategy Objective
Now that you know your buyer’s persona well, let’s take a step back and reflect on the following questions:
How your customer insights gathered with customer insight tool can help you achieve your business goals? Is your marketing strategy aligned with your CI Strategy? What does your business need to understand to better deliver the marketing strategy that aligns with your goals? How to create a strategy that will maximize the value of your insights so it can generate both commercial value and improved customer experience?
Once you get these answers, choose a CI Best Practices Model to follow, or simply compare with other similar, and successful, businesses strategies for guidance. There are a few models out there that you can use as an example. The goal is that you have a clear understanding of your initiatives objectives and target.
Dive Into the Business of Your Customers
“Develop a deep understanding of your customers, using a disciplined approach, that will be leveraged across the organization and will create competitive advantage for the Company and its customers.”
More than ever, knowing your customers is key to the success of your business. And it is time to move beyond the PEST, SWOT, and profile analysis tools to gather real customer insights. You will be far better off with a customer insight tool.
A good start is by performing immersive qualitative buyer research and ethnography, and you can do that by using internal or external resources. The goal is that you understand your buyers by walking in their shoes.
Segmentation is also a strategy to understanding your customers. Seeing how behaviors differ between your buyer’s segments play a vital role, especially when you are trying to understand their buying behaviors. This can also be key as you develop new products or find market opportunities that were unidentified before.
Create online communities for customer insights. Market research online community or community for insights can be created with customer insights too. It is becoming more popular, as companies and organizations are aiming to collect insights directly from their loyal consumers and target audience. Another benefit of online communities is that by identifying your key loyal customers, you can leverage them, and empower them to become your own brand advocates.
Know how your customers think and see the world. With all the digital development we now have at our fingertips, our world has become a very dynamic place. With that, new thinking and new worldviews are constantly reshaping our buyers and consumers’ behavior. And staying in check with the changes are key. What your customers perceived as an essential need six months ago, may not hold true anymore. So stay in constant check and contact with your customers.
Awakening the Force of Your Customer Insights
You now have the key elements to unleash the force of your customer’s insights on your hands. The next step is to apply the knowledge you have gathered to create effective marketing campaigns that will target your core audience. The audience that is not only ready to buy your products and services, but also ready to advocate for you.
And to give you, even more, power, you now also have a deep understanding of your customers narrative, and the voice that they speak. It is the time you use the same voice to reach your goals, to create an effective communication and campaigns that will truly speak to your target audience and allow you to have tangible results.
Finally, use the knowledge you now have gathered to create useful and essential products to your customers. Products that speak to their wants and needs. Don’t try to sell a Star Wars fan a King Arthur sword… It is very likely you won’t be successful!
Once your customers realize your products are targeted to their needs, they will want to return, and beyond that, they will want to share their experience. Take advantage of those elements, and create the value to your customers by deeply understanding them and their buying behaviors.
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