Customers are the lifeblood of any business. You need to have customers in order to grow your business, sell products and services, and get revenue. That’s why the customer experience is so important to your marketing efforts. No matter what your role is in the business, understanding your customers is essential to improving their experience with your brand.
Customers are often the best people to tell you what their experience is like. They can also provide detailed insights into other areas of your business and help you collect essential data to improve your processes, products, services, and approach. In this article we’ll help you uncover different customer journey insights for small business marketing, and help you understand how you can apply those insights to your company.
What are Customer Insights
A customer insights is an interpretation or analysis of data collected from your customers at different touch points within the buyer’s journey. These data points can be collected in a number of ways, including through feedback, loyalty programs, observations, surveys, digital tools, and more. The insights you collect give you a deeper understanding of the customer perspective and their experience in dealing with your brand.
Customer insights provide both quantitative and qualitative data, so having the right approach to analyzing and interpreting that data is key for success. Having the right digital tool in your toolbox can help you get to the bottom of your collected data and pull valuable insights that can be used to further develop your marketing efforts.
Why are Customer Insights Important?
Customer insights have many important implications and direct benefits for your brand. The first is that they help you understand what your customer’s needs and wants are. This helps you deliver a better customer experience and create engagements and initiatives that touch on what matters most to your core customer base. That brings them back for more and can give you important revenue streams.
Another important benefit of customer insights is the ability to analyze customer behavior. Oftentimes, we collect so much data on our customers but are unclear on what to do with that data. Looking for customer insights helps you look into the patterns of behavior your customers have when interacting with you and leverage that information as needed in order to develop better plans for the future.
Customer insights also help you connect to your customers on an emotional level. Your brand should be able to provide a deeper story into the why behind your products and services. When you can connect with your customers and speak to their emotions, you can create emotional motivators for purchases and give them more reasons to purchase from you over competitors.
The data you collect from customer insights can also be used to help develop your internal building blocks, such as buyer personas. Your personas are important characterizations of your ideal customers, and help you focus your marketing efforts in the right direction. They provide a base understanding of your audience that can be used by your entire organization, so you want to make sure they are accurate. Customer insights help you understand how accurate your personas are and what profiles might still need some development.
How to Gather Customer Insights
Now that you know what customer insights are and why they matter, let’s take a look at some ways your brand can gather customer journey insights for small business marketing efforts.
1. Your Online Reviews
Online reviews are a great source of information and customer insights. A review is a way in which a customer can leave voluntary feedback and give you their honest opinions about their experience with your brand. Good or bad, these reviews are honest critiques of the customer experience and help you get an idea of how your brand is positioned in the eyes of your customers.
2. Your Competitor’s Online Reviews
Don’t just look at your own online reviews to see what customers are saying. You can also check the online reviews of your competitors to gain more insights. Are there complaints that you are getting that your competitors aren’t? What are people praising about your competitors’ practices, products, or services? What sort of compliments are you getting that your competitors’ aren’t? Asking these types of questions can help you understand how you stack up against your competition in the eyes of your customers.
3. Website Analytics
You can also access the hard data from your website analytics to learn more about customer behavior and gather insights. The behaviors your customers have on your website pages is a key indicator of their needs, experiences, and interactions with your brand. You can look at the types of keywords that are connecting customers to your website, examine what devices they are using or what channels of yours they use regularly. You can also examine different topics of interest that your data collection is finding and apply that to customer insights.
4. Customer Surveys
Surveys and questionnaires are some of the most direct ways of collecting feedback. Rather than waiting for customers to leave a review or pouring through website data, you can just ask your customers directly what their feedback is regarding your brand. You can create simple surveys using digital tools and send them to customers to fill out. You can ask virtually any question you want, so carefully plan your surveys to tailor the questions to what type of information you want to gather. You can even automate these surveys to save you time and collect as much customer insight information as possible.
5. Customer Interviews and Testimonials
Another way to directly collect insights from customers is through an interview or testimonial. This process allows you to speak directly to a customer and ask them questions about your brand and their experience with your products or services. This is great to use for marketing purposes, but also allows you to gather insights. It’s a good format for asking follow-up questions that your questionnaires can’t get and to build relationships and emotional connections with your customers.
6. Social Media
Customers spend a large amount of their time on social media each day. By looking through the social media profiles of your customers and your own brand, you can extrapolate many valuable customer insights. Take a look at what customers are saying about your brand and how they talk about your products or services. Try to look at both posts that have your brand tagged and posts that only mention your brand. This will help you get more accurate customer insights.
7. Industry Groups & Communities
There are often many groups and online communities centered around your industry. These groups can help provide important customer insights into your market position, usefulness in the industry, and reputation among customers. Try to monitor the conversations taking place in these groups and see if your brand ever pops up as a good solution to a common industry problem or what experiences these industry leaders have had with your brand over time.
Request a Demo of Our Business Intelligence Marketing Software
At Surefire Local, we understand how important it is to have the right customer insights for your brand and how to analyze those insights for actionable uses. That’s why our all-in-one platform helps you gather customer insights from all of the above listed sources and sync them in one platform.
You can use Surefire Local to monitor your online reputation and your competitor’s reputation in one place. For example, you can see all of the commonly used words from your reviews in one location. You can also view your website traffic and analytics with a Google Analytics integration, allowing your brand to look through massive amounts of data and pull out the relevant metrics. Your customer communications can also be centralized into a single inbox for both text messages and email communications with your customers.
Take action from a single platform to improve the customer experience with Surefire Local. You can send customer requests to leave reviews and post replies to existing reviews all in one place, without needing to log into multiple platforms. You can get active on social media with Surefire Local’s scheduling and posting tools, further saving you time and hassle from logging into different social accounts.
To learn more about Surefire Local’s abilities when it comes to customer insights and see for yourself how this platform can improve your marketing efforts, then book a demo of Surefire Local today and examine this amazing tool for yourself.