4 Ways To Get To Know Your Customer

Central to the duties of the marketer is understanding the customer. Without knowing your customer’s pain points, behaviors, and wants, there is little chance that your marketing efforts will be successful. For #GetToKnowYourCustomerDay, we want to outline four basic communication tactics that can help your business better understand its customers and yield data to make strategic marketing decisions.

Talking to Your Customers

The first tactic is to simply reach out to a set of customers and ask them questions. Selecting a handful of people with whom you have stronger connections will allow you the opportunity to better assess what your regular customers need and want from your company at this time.

This process of questioning can be accomplished through various means, including video calls, phone conversations, or even an online form. Regardless of how you ask your customers questions, everyone on your team should agree on the questions before reaching out. This will ensure that your whole team is all on the same page and minimize misinterpretation of incoming data.

The Importance of Surveys

Similar to the first tactic, conducting a broader survey will yield more data that gives you a better idea of your customers’ needs. The main difference between the two tactics is that surveying covers a broader spectrum that extends beyond the select number of people you would question in the first tactic.
While you’ll get a more encompassing view of the needs of your target audience, the difficulty with this process is getting a high response rate. To increase the number of responses you get, you can try incentivizing people to respond to your survey through methods like raffling off a gift card to respondents. Whatever incentive you use, remind your audience that you’re genuinely looking for their feedback and asking for their opinions.

LinkedIn’s Website Demographics

One of the most underutilized tools LinkedIn has to offer is hidden within its Campaign Monitor. With an insight tag in place on your website, LinkedIn is able to pull key demographic data to help businesses better understand who their potential customers are by analyzing who is visiting their website. LinkedIn provides high-level insights such as job function and location, along with more detailed insights such as company names, job titles, seniority, and more.

Adding an insight tag to your website is simple and can give you access to data not even Google Analytics can provide. Using this valuable data will allow your marketing and sales team to better understand your customers and create content tailored to their interests, resulting in better quality leads.

Email Engagement & Self-Segmentation

Email marketing can provide rich data with very little lift from the marketing team through self-segmentation. When creating an email sign-up form, this is your opportunity to learn as much about your customer as possible. This form should include a number of questions highlighting your business’s services allowing people to self-select which ones are of most interest to them.

Having people select their interests upfront allows marketers to send emails more effectively, because the content is relevant to them and will likely result in better engagement. Email marketing is one of the best tools to gain customer insights. As long as you are properly managing your lists, you will be able to track your audience’s engagement and continue to optimize to reach your business goals.