How to research your customers
If you already have an established business, then you will already have a pool of customers as a starting point for your research. If you have a business where you meet your customers face-to-face then even better. You will already have a good feel for the different types of people who buy your product or service. You will already have chatted with them and know which absolutely love it and are your loyalist long-term customers and fans.
If you run an online business then this can be harder. You are one step removed from your customers and you may only ever see a name and email address and have no ongoing relationship with them. If this is you, and the reason you’re taking this course is because you’re having trouble building up your customer base, then we’ve likely already found the source of your problem. How can you market your business if you have no idea who is buying your products?
Or perhaps you haven’t launched your business yet. You can still make customer profiles if this is the case (and in fact I would say it’s even more vital that you do) because it will allow you to test out if who you think your customers are is correct before you spend a lot of time, energy or money trying to find them.
So where do we start? We start by talking to your customers to work out who they are and find the commonalities between them. If you are not used to talking with your customers then I want to move you out of your comfort zone here, because being uncomfortable means you are doing something different to what you’ve done so far. And unless you are already a huge success, doing something different is a good thing.
The most successful businesses know their customers inside out. They can tell you how much their customers earn, what news sources they read and know if someone buys their product as a luxury or if it’s integral to their life. And this is what you are going to learn too. If you already have customers, generate a report of which have spent the most with you over the last 12 months. The ones who are right at the top, wouldn’t you like to find more people just like them? Well, this is what this exercise is all about.
If you are able to, then pick up the phone and give them a call. If you don’t know them well enough to do this yet (and if not, why not, they are your top customers!), instead drop them an email and see if they would be happy to talk to you about your product to give you some feedback. Make it clear that you’re not calling to sell. Be honest with them, tell them you are trying to grow your business and want to understand why they buy from you. Make it all about them, and the likelihood is that if they are indeed your best customers they will love your business and will be surprisingly happy to talk. Invite them for a Zoom online video session or a phone call at a time that works for them, on an evening or a weekend perhaps.
Before you talk to them, prepare a list of what you want to know before the call. You will probably already know some demographic information about the customer – where they live, the gender they identify as, their age, etc, but make it more into a conversation than a phone survey. Get to know them and give them some room just to talk about your product and their relationship with it: why they buy it, what they use it for, because their answers might surprise you. They might not be buying it for the reason you think they are.
If you are selling to other businesses, then you might think profiling individual people doesn’t apply. But it does, because businesses do not buy from you, a person WITHIN a business buys from you. You will see commonalities in the types of people within the companies that buy from you. Some will be stressed out, have no time, need answers immediately and the product delivered yesterday – and you need to understand how they operate so that you can tailor your marketing for them. Others may be the person who gathers information to pass onto someone higher in the organisation to make a decision – you need to know how to make them a champion for your business and what they need in order to convince the boss to buy from you.
When you do your research, the questions you ask depend on your product or service, but some examples of what you might want to come away from the call knowing are:
- How long they have been vegan?
- Why they turned vegan
- Their age (if you can ask politely!)
- Why they buy your product / why they are a customer?
- Do they use your product themselves?
- How they use your product
- If they share it with anyone else
- What they bought before they bought from you and why they now buy your product instead?
- How they first found out about you
- What research they did before they decided to buy from you
- Are they the decision maker, or were they researching and buying on someone else’s behalf?
- If they always use your product or service or if they also use competitors. If they do, which, why and when?
- What their pastimes are? Get them to tell you about themselves
- What social media channels are they active on?
- Which influencers and YouTubers do they follow?
- What websites do they use and really like?
- What job do they do?
- What actually annoys them about your product or service. Get them to tell you something that they really think but would never give as feedback to a company, but they can tell you because you’re friends now, right?!
Hopefully, reading through these questions you are already starting to see the value in knowing the answers. Imagine if you knew the answers to these questions from everyone who bought from you and how that might already change what you do. What if you knew the reason someone ALMOST didn’t buy your product? What if you knew what competitors they measured you against? Well, successful companies already do know all this, which is why you need to know it too.
