Marketing Tips | February

TIP 2 Listen to your customers

Marketing is all about the customer. Listen to your customers regularly and act on their feedback - this goes beyond issuing annual customer surveys. Gaining actionable insight to improve your marketing results involves regular conversations with customers.

Why tuning into your customers will improve your marketing performance

Customers are the lifeblood of your business. You need to ensure your customers are happy with the service or experience you give them. Customers vote with their feet. If you fall short of their expectations, you’ll lose them to your competitors.

So how do you stop this from happening?

The answer won’t surprise you. You do it by delighting your customers. To do that, you need to listen to them and gain a real understanding of what they want. And this goes beyond issuing customer satisfaction surveys; it’s about actively listening to customers and using insight to improve your offering for your customer base.

Here are a few practical ways to gain insights on your customer base:

Monitor your existing customers

There are many sources of information available to gain insight into your customer base:

• Preferred customer channels – how are customers finding you, what content spurs them to contact you? What channels are working well – is there a particular social media channel, Primary Times magazine, Google searches or word of mouth recommendation? Identify the channels that are performing well and take action to improve your messaging / offers and improve performance further.
• Website analytics – how are customers using your website, do they find the information they want, are they downloading special offer codes? Use this information to improve your marketing, for example, if you get most of your special offer downloads on a Friday, increase your Facebook spend for the end of the week and reduce it at the start of the week.
• Sales data – how much are customers spending with you? What does the data tell you – for example – which type of customer, seasonality, spikes in spend at certain times, split of spend on products and services. Use this information to inform and adapt your marketing plan.

Paint a picture of your customers

You have a wealth of internal data to hand that shows you how your customers buy from you, why and when and what they spend with you. You can overlay this information with external and qualitative data to get a better picture of your ideal customer. For example, where do they live, what are their incomes, what challenges do they face? You can use this information to create a customer persona which will help you to target your customers with more relevant messaging that addresses their pain points.

Document all you know about them – what are their concerns? Is it trying to keep kids entertained during the school holidays with a modest budget? Whatever it is, you can tap into these pain points with relevant messaging.

Social Monitoring and Social Listening 

Many view social media as an opportunity to broadcast brand messages, but it’s also an incredibly powerful listening tool, allowing you to glean insights that you can use across your print and digital marketing.

Social monitoring and social listening are different though. Social monitoring is where you track mentions of your brand (or a competitor brand). Social listening is about tapping into conversations about specific topics, keywords and phrases relevant to your target audience; for example, parenting, family, school holidays, children’s parties.

You can track conversations around key areas relevant to your brand and gain insights into what your target audience is talking about, what language they use and what trends are coming out. You can use this information to apply to your marketing; from creating content on relevant topics in language your target customers use, to developing new products or services that answer a market need.

There is a wide range of social listening tools on the market, from enterprise level systems aimed at large brands to more affordable options like Hootsuite and Sprout Social. Most offer a free trial. Set aside time when you can devote time to this and take out a free trial to see how useful it could be for your brand. There are also PR monitoring tools which monitor any brand mentions in print media.

Market research with your customers

There are several methods of seeking your customer’s views. A survey is the most commonly used. This is a useful method of giving a snapshot of a customer’s level of satisfaction on a scale, but if you want more in-depth feedback, you should conduct depth interviews with customers. If you are going to do this, it’s vital that you set research objectives.

What do you want to find out? Write your questions according to the research objectives. Remember, you need to remain completely objective when conducting depth interviews. It’s easy to hear what you want to hear about your brand. You must listen to what your customers are saying without applying any bias.

Don’t just talk to satisfied customers, speak to those who perhaps have left you to use a competitor or those who don’t use your product or service as frequently as others. You’ll get much more insight into why they’ve chosen someone else over you.

Apply the insights

Researching is easy, but using the information can be a little more tricky. The important thing is to understand what you are doing this for, if it’s to identify gaps in your service, then you must be prepared to use the insight to address those gaps.

By listening to your customers, you can:

- Improve service gaps

- Develop new products and services that your customers will love

- Identify emerging trends before your competitors do

- Respond to any negative brand mentions

- Ensure your marketing communications resonate with your customers.

Listening to your customers makes sense. But, taking this insight and applying it will move your business forward.

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