Knowing your Customers and Target Clients

Having decided who your target clients are you need to find out as much as possible about them. This will help with decisions about what products or services to offer; your pricing; where to make your products or services available as well as how, when and where to promote them.

Why bother?

Finding out what customers and target clients want is vital for running a successful business. You might be clear as to who your target clients are but how much do you really know about what they want? What do you really know about their buying behaviour? Can you really be sure you’re providing the solution to their problems and in the way that they want?

Maybe your products and/or services aren’t selling as well as you thought they would or as they used to do. There could be a mismatch between what your market wants and what you’re offering. Maybe you’re providing solutions based on what you THINK their problems are rather than what your target market is experiencing as a problem and wants to have resolved.

The only way to find out these things is by researching your market, your target clients and your current customers – and on a regular basis.

This applies whether you have an on-line or a ‘bricks and mortar’ business; whether you’re selling products or professional services; whether you’re just starting out or aiming to move your business to the next level. It’s really not a good idea to just guess, or to assume what your target audience wants rather than going out and researching their needs. Yes it takes time, but when done well it adds so much value to your business knowledge and ultimately it adds dollars to your bottom line.

Gathering Information

Since we live in a world where our customers and target clients are not only able to talk to us but about us, be it favourably or negatively let’s harness the power of this to discover as much as possible about them – not just their characteristics such as age, gender, maritla status, education level, income but also  information about their buying behaviours, problems, needs, desires and opinions.

We can listen to their comments and discussions on social media platforms.

We can engage in conversations with them on social media platforms.

With a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system in place we can find out when and what they buy and how much they spend. However it won’t tell you why they buy nor how they made the decision to buy.

If you know their key characteristics – age, gender, education level etc you can read reports about those age groups and see what their typical characteristics are.

If you have access to a business library you can read reports about your sector by Nielsen or Euromonitor or government trade departments all of which will give you insights into what the trends are in that sector including what people are buying.

We can also obtain valuable information by directly asking them questions using one question polls and questionnaires and this will be the topic of the next blog post.