Understanding Consumer Needs

Understanding consumer needs. The right thing at the right time, in the right place

In the pre-digital era, customers relied on a friendly salesperson like the proprietor of their neighborhood store to assist them in finding exactly what they wanted. Optimizing the customer experience is a great way to get new customers. It’s also one of the best ways of fostering customer loyalty. Some businesses base their selling efforts on guesswork and intuition. With a limited marketing budget, customer acquisition becomes particularly challenging. Understanding consumer needs is part of understanding the market you are about to enter. 

The great thing is that the digital space holds many opportunities to understanding consumer needs. SEO and content are a vital part of inbound marketing. Advancements in information technology, data gathering, and analytics have made it possible to produce relatable content that may be similar or reasonably better than the salesperson’s advice. With the evolutions of technologies and strategies for crafting the best offers for the consumers, business organizations who are waiting to exploit them have a possibility of their customers defecting to competitors that take the lead.

 

Understanding consumer needs

Asking customers the right questions and listening carefully to their answers is one of the most efficient ways to eliminate the guesswork in marketing. As per a study conducted by Teradata, a mere 41% of marketing executives use customer engagement data to formulate their marketing strategy. Giving buyers clearly articulated information in the language they understand, when and where they need it, is the role of a good salesperson. 

Customer acquisition goes way beyond having a great product or service that you are sure customers will need. Customers do not come looking for a store or website or a Facebook page, just because you start a business.

If you’re a startup or an existing business that’s looking for more ways to grow your customer base, let’s look into the how’s:

 

Intelligent customer engagement

Engaging with your customers in real-time has become more easily accessible, thanks to new tools. Messengers are evolving as a more popular channel for customer service. Messenger channels can also function as the means to collect customer insight. Messengers also allow you to build a two-way relationship with your customers as you continue to keep your customers engaged during the preliminary stages of the customer journey. Encourage customers to share their thoughts and opinions by including a customer satisfaction survey in your email drip.

 

Robust buyer personas

The Acquisitions tab on Google Analytics is a great way to understand customer preferences better. The analytics tab helps you get profound insights into the source(social media outlets, industry blogs, and professional forums) of incoming traffic to your websites. Further, acquiring keyword data is a convenient way to determine the terms and descriptions that customers use to describe your services. 

 

Customer analytics

To determine how customers interact with your website, you can try a user behavior tracking tool like Google Analytics and Inspectlet. Behavioral data you collected, leads you to derive conclusions regarding the aspects that your target audience does not understand – what they do and do not like, assisting you in creating a stronger website experience.

 

Forecast and plan for the future

Creating a plan for future customer engagement is just as important as creating a plan for the present. Understanding your most popular and most visited pages can also inform your content strategy, focusing on topics and formats that will best solve the challenges of your audience. Continuous market research throughout the product roadmap naturally leads to more sales.

 

Experience your customer’s path

With the use of techniques such as customer journey mapping, organizations get the opportunity to create a detailed, graphical representation of the customer journey and act upon the critical touchpoints of interactions between a customer and your brand before, during, or after purchase.

 

Analyze and execute

The evolution of analytical tools answers most questions related to customer preferences. SEO isn’t rocket science. With advanced analytics and artificial intelligence-based tools like NANOS AI, nothing is impossible. Understanding customer behavior and consumer needs have gotten more manageable than ever before with advanced analytics, behavioral recording tools, and stronger customer touchpoints.

Companies can develop rules of thumb from their performance to guide the creation of future offers until new data require a modification of the rules. These rules will differ from one company to the next. 

Once you have gotten the hang of consumer needs, you can create a marketing strategy to reach those customers.

 

Want to know more on how you can successfully market your strategies and grow your customer base? At Nanos, we are happy to help you with your campaign. Contact us or book a free consultation today!