Happy Get to Know Your Customers Day! It is important for brands to take the time to get to know their customers as this often results in business growth, marketing opportunities, and brand loyalty. Ensuring customers feel valued is an integral tool in any marketing strategy and the more personalised their experience with a brand is the more easily this will be achieved. Whilst tools and resources might be limited for smaller companies, there are a number of different ways brands can get to know their customers with the tools at their disposal.

Track Trends

Social media gives brands the power to track what is popular with their customers in real-time. You can learn a lot about your customers’ interests by tracking trending hashtags. This can help you discover untapped avenues for your marketing strategies. For example, if a brand discovered the vast majority of its customers were also Love Island fans there would be potential to incorporate the show into advertising. This could be through something as simple as creating a parody video or something more complicated like partnering with one or more of the show’s contestants.

Study Your Customers’ Behaviour

Watching how customers behave online is a great way to get an understanding of their core values. Analyse social media exchanges about your brand; find out what it is about your product or service that your customers value and what it is that they are concerned about. Social media is often used by customers to communicate dissatisfaction with a brand so it will be easy to notice trends here. The beauty of social media is that it is built for engagement so there’s no shame in asking customers what they like/dislike. Brands might be apprehensive about asking questions that could open them up to public criticism but displaying a willingness to work on faults and improve the brand for the sake of customer satisfaction is a good display of brand integrity; something that customers value more and more these days.

Surveys & Polls

There are plenty of ways to collate feedback from customers. Polls provide a quick and easily engage-able platform for customers to let brands know what they think. Whether they’re formatted as yes/no questions or offer customers the chance to choose from a selection of answers, polls are valuable short-form data collation tools that double as engagement boosters for social media channels. We actually wrote a whole blog post on boosting social media engagement by using polls. Read it HERE.

Surveys offer customers the opportunity to give much more detailed feedback on a topic but they take much longer to complete and that can be a deterrent for some. With that in mind, it’s advisable to offer customers an incentive to complete them such as using survey completion as an entry mechanic for a social media competition.

Learn About Your Customers’ Influencers

Tracking trends and studying your customers’ behaviour should provide insight into who your customers’ influencers are. Influencers are individuals who have significant impact on certain audiences or markets. They can be celebrities but, more often than not, they are regular people who happen to command an audience that correlates with a brand’s target market. Learning about your customers’ influencers is a great way to find out what topics resonate with them, both politically and socially. The key word is in the name, influencers have influence over customers’ buying habits and their likes and dislikes. They provide a mirror to your audience. If your customers’ influencers are very socially conscious it stands to reason your customers are probably that way inclined too.

Tips and Tricks

• Have direction. Decide what you want kind of information you want to find out first or you risk collecting to broad a spectrum of data. Are you more interested in your customers’ political alignments or their family lives? Consider how you will incorporate this data into your marketing strategy and what you hope to achieve with it.
• Not all data is created equal. Decide what data is relevant to your business and hone in on small areas of improvement. Casting your net too wide can lead you to conflicting data/opinions which make it very hard to make conscious marketing decisions.
• Don’t forget your microaudiences. Your customers can be grouped into a number of macro categories. They can be grouped by gender, income, and education level. However you might find a subsection of these categories also fall under “mothers”, “vegetarians” or “members of the LGBT+” community. Catering for these smaller groups can have a wider impact on your marketing strategy and works to make individual customers feel valued.

Getting to know your customers can be time consuming, require a lot of man power, and has the potential to be a little expensive. It can be difficult for companies to outsource audience research as it can feel like such a personal task should be done in house. However, agencies like Jelly come equipped with teams of fully trained marketing professionals, heaps of time, and tonnes of tools and resources for measuring consumer data. We provide concise marketing reports – ensuring sure our clients are seeing the data about their customers that truly matters – and we use our 20+ years’ of industry knowledge offer our clients insights and recommendations for improvement.

Want to get to know your customers better? Contact us on hello@jellymedia.com.