Learning who your customers are is an ongoing process of collecting consumer data to develop customer insights that will help you get through to your target customer. After making an effort to determine your target persona and consumer journey, you need to continue learning more information to keep up to date on ever-changing customer trends. No one person or group of people will stay the same forever — a lot can happen in a few months to a year.
People constantly grow and change, and you must keep up with these changes to ensure you continue resonating with this same audience. Here's how to find out who your customers are again to ensure you're not missing out on some significant changes.
Keep Up to Date with Customer Analytics
Analytics is passively collected data to give you insight into customer behavior by telling you how they interact with your website, product, or content. It allows you to identify and target the right consumers with the right message, making you more efficient at your job and reducing the amount of marketing spent on uninterested consumers and ineffective marketing methods.
Tracking analytics and implementing things like A/B testing show how users perform with certain content over others, giving you insight into how your marketing materials perform and helps you to make informed decisions moving forward. Only 37.7% of U.S. marketers report that they use marketing analytics when making decisions — and that number is likely to grow from here on out.
An excellent example of analytics, and in this case A/B testing, is to change only one variant and see how it affects results — whether positive or negative. For instance, when making a promotional social media post. If you're unsure what kinds of call-to-action (CTA) your audience is more likely to respond to, you may post the same content but only change out the CTA. Seeing how they compare can give you the insight to better evaluate which one works best for your brand and target consumers compared to those typically successful among the masses.
Automatically Ask Customers for Feedback
You must ask your customers for feedback while their experience with your brand is still fresh in their minds. In fact, you’re more likely to get a response the sooner you ask them. The feedback they give should provide you with most (if not everything) they have to suggest and offer. Even incorporating something as simple as an internal pop-up survey can increase your chances of getting a response by 2 to 4 times.
Likewise, setting up customer surveys that automatically trigger when taking specific actions gives your most loyal customers an opportunity to provide feedback or make suggestions. Some examples of this would be to include a survey invite on a purchase receipt or a recording to take a brief survey after finishing a call with someone who represents the company. Having this level of efficiency is critical for marketers looking to increase their consumer response rates and gain more insight into how they're performing in the eyes of their audience.
Automatic systems can also make the biggest difference in your timely survey delivery, allowing you to collect feedback that you can sort through at your convenience. Automation ensures that your survey is given to your audience at a reasonable time, every time, and your feedback is received in real-time when you need it the most. After all, real-time data is the key to making the most informed decisions on your present and future campaigns.
Ask Your Customer-Facing Team
Regardless of how good your system to acquire customer data is, you should always talk to your customer-facing team for their input because they meet with customers and know a lot about them through consistent interaction. It provides you with the opportunity to share your data with them for additional input, noting that you can adjust your marketing or analytics systems accordingly.
When it comes down to it, you need to use information from both to balance your understanding of all customers since people calling you for example, may have had a bad experience and aren't representative of all your customers. Relying on too small a focus group won't make for successful research because it doesn't eliminate unique situations or highlight many noteworthy similarities.
Finally, not keeping up with or implementing your consumer data findings is one of the most consistent mistakes marketers often make. Fortunately, working with an experienced media partner can help you implement and track this data more efficiently as well as provide you with resources on how to put this data to good use.
