As an entrepreneur, you need to learn about customers as much as possible if you want your business to succeed. But, do you really understand them in the way they need to be understood? What you can do to become closer to your most important customers?
Why your customers have already chosen your product instead of the competitor’s products? Why do they use your product in such a way how they use it? Why your customer will pay you that amount of money instead of another? Why do your customers talk to you? Why do your customers have exactly that problem or need?
Many questions will come to your mind from this simple one question from the title of this post: why do your customers do what they do?
Why You Need Answer on This Question Related to Your Customers?
Yes, why do you need to answer this question? Why do you need to know why they do what they do?
There are two important reasons. The first one is gaining intelligence for your customers, and the second is related to understanding your customer’s personas. With the first reason, you will learn more about them, and with the second reason, you will know what you need to do to satisfy your customers.
1. Intelligence for Customers
Your job as an entrepreneur is to get as much as you can intelligence about your current and potential customers if you want to clearly understand why they do what they do. Intelligence is the output of your intelligence or analytical process. Because of that market research is an important part of your business processes in your small business.
2. Understand Your Customer Personas
Using the intelligence we described previously, you can start describing your customers and create unique customer personas. If you succeed in deeply understanding your customer’s personas relying on their real needs, frustrations, emotions, drivers, beliefs, and capabilities that influence their decision-making process you will be much closer to success. This success will mean also success for your whole company.
How You Can Learn More About Your Customers?
But, how you can learn about other people – your current and potential customers? Is it easy and achievable actions for you as an entrepreneur?
One of the biggest problems you can find is that you don’t have enough knowledge to help you do this very difficult job. It is not a problem only for you but for all entrepreneurs.
The customers that you already have is much easier to be analyzed and predicted because you already can talk with them, you can also ask questions and analyze their different behavior based on your action steps.
But, again to succeed in today’s highly dynamic world you will need to collect more and more intelligence about the most important persons for your business – your customers. Because of that, you will need to use different tools which will help you to base your knowledge and your next action steps when it comes to your small business.
For example, social media can be a great starting point to start gaining additional knowledge. You will collect data that you don’t have inside your database. Analyzing your potential targeted customers what they are doing, why they are doing, and how they are doing something will bring you important insights for your potential customers.
5 Recommendation to Know Why Customers Do What They Do
Simply, if you want to know why customers do what they do follow these five recommendations.
1. Always talk to your current customers and record their answers.
You will need to communicate with your current customers and learn as much as possible more things about them.
2. Talk with all your employees about the customers
Always talk with all your employees about what they know about the customers. Use their knowledge and make it sharable inside other team members inside your small business. The idea is that you want all your employees to know what customers want and use this knowledge in their part of the job.
3. Use social media to analyse customers
Use social media to analyze and predict customers’ behavior. I have already mentioned that social media tools can be important tools to collect data for your current and potential customers. Design listening processes using tools like Hootsuite, or Agorapulse. You can add keywords you want to track and in such a way you will get different data from social media accounts that talk about the topic of interest for you.
4. Use other tools
Yes, you are allowed to use any other tools that will enable you to record and find different intelligence about your current and potential customers. For example, you can use some of the email marketing tools to ask questions or send surveys. These will give you additional information about your customers.
Also, you can use Google Keyword Planner Tool to analyze different search phrases that your current and potential customers use when they are searching for something on Google.
For example, if your business’ main product is food delivery, you can select the region where your company operates and analyze what people are searching for when it comes to food delivery. For example, you can see what type of food they are searching for like Italian food, Chinese food, Pizza, breakfast delivery, and so on. Play with this tool and you will find many different things that you can include inside your offer.
Listen to them and proactively change your offer according to their needs and wants.
Question: Do you have a process in place to understand your customers? What tools are you using to understand your customers?
