Don’t skip customer research

As we established in chapter the first chapter, you need to understand the different people that you are trying to make into your customers so that you can tailor your marketing messages (and sometimes even your products) to better align with their motivations.  Now it’s time to actually give those people a name and create a profile sheet for your different types of customer so that you can better visualise who they are.

You might be tempted to skip this step – don’t.  Not only is it a lot of fun but I will be constantly referring you back to your customer profile sheets throughout this course.  A lot of the decisions you make about what marketing activity you need to do must be made based on what you found out whilst researching and creating these customer profiles.  You might think that you already understand your customers inside out and there’s nothing more to learn – there always is.  You might think that you just sell to everyone so you can’t categorise who your customers are – and if this is you, then you’re the person who really needs to do this the most.  Customer research is what makes the difference between an amateur and professional business, and it’s time to go pro.

It might be that you’ve been introduced to the idea of customer profiling before (perhaps on a marketing course) and have already mapped your customers out.  But did you do it specifically for vegan customers or did you use a generic customer-profiling template you found online?  Did you create them knowing everything you now know about the vegan journey and understanding that people’s motivations change the longer they follow a vegan lifestyle?  And if you do already have your different types of customers mapped out as profiles, are they a core part of your marketing strategy – could you tell me which of them your last social media post was written for? 

So, just in case I’ve been too subtle for some thus far, I’ll spell it out again.  Don’t skip this step.  At best, you will come away with a new understanding of the people you are selling to and a clear route map of what they want and how to talk to them.  At worst, you’ll identify all the things you don’t know about your customers but a plan of action in place to go and find out!