Having a clear understanding of your customers will help you increase sales and achieve a better growth rate. By understanding who your customers are and what they want, you can provide them with a better experience and keep them coming back. Learn how to gain consumer insights for your business and how to leverage the information you uncover to your strategic advantage.
Research Industry Trends
Stay on top of industry trends to find out what consumers needs are. You can read blog updates, industry magazines, or even research papers to stay updated on what’s buzzing in your industry. This research is of a more general nature as opposed to some of the following methods.
Analyze Your Data
Collecting customer data is one of the most important things you should do. Using tools such as Google Analytics or a CRM such as Salesforce, you can learn everything there is to know about your customers, including their demographics, countries, interests, and much more. You should also dive deeper into your data to discover information about customers’ search histories, purchases, likes, dislikes, and so on.
An important thing to remember is to track your customers over their entire lifecycle. Customer tracking will help you discover trends and fix issues that are causing declining sales rates.
Ask for Feedback
What better way to know what your customers want than to ask them? Surveys are a great way to get a feel for what’s on your customers’ minds, and many online tools make this easy for you. You can conduct general surveys, surveys after purchases, exit surveys, or ask customers to give you feedback via email or social media at any time.
Conduct Focus Groups
Focus groups are a great way to conduct market research. Using a sample of your customer base, you can figure out what your customers are looking for you to provide them with regarding product quality, product features, customer service, and user experience.
Split Testing
A/B or split testing is another good way to figure out what consumers want. Split testing refers to setting up two campaigns that are similar but have several significant differences. It can also be two products or services. You can then see which one performs better.
Track Your Competitors
Your competitors can serve as a wealth of information to help you figure out what your competitors want and how you can improve your business. If you see that some of your competitors are getting better results than you are, see what they are doing that you are not. If you notice that some of your competitors are suddenly experiencing either increasing or declining sales rates, see what they recently changed.
How Can You Use This Information?
There is a lot that you can do with the information that you discover using the methods as mentioned above. Let’s explore some of them.
- Use it for marketing purposes: If you know what your customers are looking for, you can create better marketing and advertising campaigns. There are two aspects to this. First, you can start targeting the right people to get higher conversion rates. Second, you can craft ads that mention the right things and are more convincing.
- Create better products: You can create better products that provide consumers with what they want.
- Provide a better user experience: You can offer a better user experience by providing services that keep your customers satisfied. Make sure your customer service representatives know what your customers care about as well. This will help them be more empathetic and increase customer satisfaction.
At New Perspectives, we help customers gain consumer insights and tap into those insights. Contact marketing research consultants today to learn more about gaining consumer insights.