Making smart marketing decisions can be tough for home services contractors who are always on the move in the field. When you don’t have the benefit of a full marketing team, you can end up feeling uncertain about how your customers feel about you and how you can apply those important customer insights to your own marketing program.
Thankfully, you can uncover customer insights with just a few simple steps that don’t take too much time and effort. Once you have your customer insights in hand, you can go ahead and move forward with your marketing decisions. Customer insights will help you understand where your efforts should be focused, what customers think about your services as a home service contractor, and can even be used to generate new business for your company.
In this article, we’ll take a look at what customer insights really are and why they matter to your business. We’ll also discuss some different ways you can go about uncovering these insights and use them to boost your marketing efforts with the help of a platform like Surefire Local.
What are Customer Insights?
Customer insights are the interpretation of data from your customers across different touchpoints and areas of your business. Whether you are obtaining customer information and feedback directly through a survey or form, or if you are gathering your insights from behavior and buying patterns, the conclusions you draw are what your customer insights are.
There are many ways to get customer insights, depending on what your audience is and what insights you hope to gather. However, in order to start analyzing data and pulling out actionable insights from your customer information, you first need to be able to collect that information and plan on how to approach a customer insight strategy.
Why are Customer Insights Important?
Customer insights are important because they provide crucial information about who your customers are and what their pain points are. Using this information, you can discover what you can offer that will impress them, what they would like to purchase from you, and what decisions they need to make before they hire your business. Insights also help you:
- Deliver messages and content to customers
- Highlight the features of your services that are the most appealing to customers
- Create emotional connections with your audience
- Segment and personalize your targeted marketing campaigns
- Create a unique selling proposition
- Increase customer satisfaction levels
- Reduce customer churn
- Increase the loyalty of your customer base
How to Gather Customer Insights
Now that you know more about what customer insights are and why they are valuable to your organization, let’s take some time to dive into different strategies that you can use to uncover customer insights that you haven’t found yet. These strategies will help you boost your marketing efforts and understand the motives and needs of your customer base.
1. Your Online Reviews
Online reviews on platforms like Google, Facebook, Yelp and others are a great place to find out what your customers think. They are an authentic source of customer feedback, as your customers or people you interact with will leave an honest, unbiased review of what they think of your services.
The customer review can let you know what they thought of the work you performed for them. They will leave feedback on what you could improve on, what they liked about what you did, and how they felt about your work compared to anyone else who might have done similar things for them in the past. This information is crucial to understanding the mindset and pain points of your audience.
2. Your Competitor’s Online Reviews
Not only are your own reviews helpful, but your competitor’s online reviews are another great place to learn about your customers. When you research and read the reviews left for your competitors, you can learn important insights about what your customers like or don’t like about the work your competition does.
For example, if you notice that your competitors get a lot of low-star reviews about their lack of customer service, you can identify that shortcoming and use it to position your business as the best option for superior customer service. You can also learn what your competitors are being praised for that you are not getting similar feedback on and generate ideas that clearly resonate with your audience.
3. Website Analytics
Your website analytics provide important data insights into your customers that is essential to diving deep into their behavior and patterns. Customer insights from your website data help you identify what keywords or general topics for content are the best options for your audience. You can also learn what pages they leave on so you can add a form or strong CTA, and see which landing pages or forms are generating the most interest.
In addition, you can see what devices your customers spend their time on, what platforms and social media sites they prefer, and what channels generate the most success from your customers and leads. All of this information helps you understand who your customer is and why they choose to take the actions that they do.
4. Customer Surveys
Sometimes a direct method is more helpful for gathering customer insights. Instead of waiting for a customer to leave a review or for you to put together an analysis of your website data, you can use customer surveys to get the answers you need. A survey can be multiple choice, open-ended, or a combination of different techniques. And with a survey, you can ask specific questions about what insights you’d like to gain, such as:
- What did you like most about us?
- What would you change about your service?
- How did you hear about us?
- Where can we improve?
- Would you recommend our services?
- Was our pricing affordable?
5. Customer Interviews and Testimonials
Another way of gathering direct information from your audiences is through the help of a customer interview. You can sit down and have a conversation with your current customers and ask them directly what they think of your home services contracting business and what they would change. This allows you to ask follow-up questions that are relevant and hear them directly from your customer’s mouth.
You can also collect testimonials, which are specific case studies from customers that clearly explain their experiences with your company. This will give you the opportunity to showcase stories that highlight the best parts of your business to other potential customers.
6. Social Media
People often go to their favorite social media sites to share their experiences with friends and followers. And, they will be brutally honest about how they feel about your services. You can pay attention to the comments on a post that mentions you or any post sharing about your services to see exactly what your customers are saying.
You can also use be proactive and engage your community on social media by posting polls. This not only allows you to interact with your customers but helps you start more conversations about your brand. It helps you understand their perspectives and preferences about your services.
7. Industry Groups and Communities
If you want to learn more about what other professionals or people in the industry think of your services, you can take a look at different online industry groups or communities. These forums will often have posts from people who are passionate about what you do and give you a chance to interact with people who have a strong interest in your business.
Request a Demo of Our Business Intelligence Marketing Software
Gathering customer insights is made easier with the help of business intelligence marketing software. Surefire Local allows you to gather customer insights from all channels and sync them into one platform. You can also monitor your online reputation and your competitor’s online reputation in one place, giving you the opportunity to see commonly used words found in your reviews.
Surefire Local also allows you to view website traffic and analytics with an integration with Google Analytics. You can manage all of your customer communications from one centralized inbox, text and email your customers directly, and send review requests and post replies to your customer’s reviews and posts. Take action on the same platform to improve the customer experience and get active on social media by scheduling and posting engaging content. To get a demo of Surefire Local, click on this link and learn how we can help you get your home services contracting business to the next level.