If you want to grow a service-based business online, you need to do a deep dive into understanding your customers and clients. Service-oriented business, whether home services that go to customers or professional and health-related services that bring clients to their brick-and-mortar location, have to make a connection with their clients to successfully reach them with marketing. If you want to make customer-centric marketing strategies for small businesses that will effectively target and reach people where they are, you must understand your market and its needs.
So how can you grow your knowledge of your customers so you can target your marketing to them more effectively? Here are some strategies we see our customers have success with.
Unlocking Customer Insights
First, you need to know where to look for data on your customers. While you could survey satisfied clients to learn why they liked doing business with you, it’s more effective to gather this data before you sign a contract with new customers. Your goal is to figure out where your target customer is hanging out online, so you can reach them where they are. These are some of the best places to get that data.
Google Analytics
By far, the most effective place to learn about your customers is through Google Analytics. Specifically, Google Analytics can show you the following insights about the people who visit your website through Google links:
- Demographics: This is the age and gender breakdown of your website’s visitors. You’ll not only get this raw data, but you’ll be able to see how different age and gender groups differ in their interactions with your website. If you’re effectively reaching younger people but you provide roofing services, you might need to change your marketing efforts to reach people who are in the homeownership demographic instead.
- Interests: Google shows you affinity categories for your website’s visitors. While this doesn’t always mean it’s showing what they’re interested in, it can give you an idea of their interests and purchase intentions. You can then personalize your marketing strategy to reach those interests.
- Location: Are your local search marketing efforts paying off? See where your visitors are searching from so you can be sure you’re reaching people who can realistically do business with you.
- Customer behavior: What are people doing once they get on your site? How often are they visiting, and what pages are they interacting with? If you have a high bounce rate, you can discover this and take measures to increase retention so people stay longer.
- Acquisition: This metric refers to how people found your site. Did they come from a paid ad, social media post, or specific keyword search? Again, this can help you see where they’re shopping and what marketing tactics are working best.
Social Media Platforms
While you won’t likely have time to spend analyzing every social media fan you have to see what they like and need, you can use data from social media platforms to determine some of the interests and needs of your target demographic. You can see who your audience members follow and the content they share to discover what’s of interest to them. You can stay active on your social media pages to see what content you post resonates most with your audience.
You can use tools within social media business pages to gain insights into your customers more easily without visiting each page. Track these insights to see what your target audience is interested in, and then you can create content that engages with those interests.
Reviews Platforms
You can also gain data about your audience from common review platforms, like Yelp or Google. Again, you can use this data to track information about the people leaving reviews. Again, this data will just give you more of a picture of your target market, giving you the ability to make data-driven choices.
Advertising Platforms
If you pay for advertising on Google or Facebook, you can gain insight into the audience you’re reaching on those platforms. They provide detailed insights into the people who click on ads. This data is collected with the analytics about your advertising campaigns, so you can use it in addition to your advertising metrics.
What Data to Look For?
As you analyze your audience data from these various sources, you need to know what to look for. While demographics and data about interests help you know your target audience, this is just one area that customer-centric marketing can help. There are other, sometimes less obvious, data points that will have a big impact on your marketing efforts.
Specifically, this data will be the most helpful:
1. Where They Came From
Track information about where your customers come from when they get to your site. Is it from a paid ad or a social media post? Are they coming from Google or another backlink on a partner’s site?
With this data, you can decide where you need to spend more of your marketing time and effort. If one particular platform is working well, don’t neglect it, but if one is not working well and you want it to, spend more time and energy there.
2. What They Read and Watch
As you analyze data about your customers, consider what they are looking for in their content consumption. You want to craft the type of content that resonates with your target audience. If they’re drawn to video content, then focus your efforts on creating excellent video content. If they’re drawn to highly local articles, then put some time and effort into marketing highly local content.
When you understand your customers and what they’re looking for, you can focus your content creation more effectively. The more content you create that meets their need, the more engagement you will get, and the more success you will have with your online marketing efforts.
3. What Brand Sentiment Resonates with Them
Ultimately, understanding your target audience is about knowing what type of branding reaches them well. Do they appreciate humorous or sentimental content? Are they engaged with how-to articles that help them do some self-help before they hire you, or do they want highly marketing-heavy content? Each audience is different, so the answer is going to be highly specific.
Once you know what brand sentiment resonates with your customers, you can then learn what they think about your business, specifically. Do you have the content that resonates with them, or do you need to adjust your marketing efforts? You can only do this if you have a customer-centric focus and use information about your customers to make data-driven decisions about your marketing strategy.
Put the Right Tool in Your Corner with Surefire Local
As you work to implement these customer-centric marketing strategies for small businesses, make sure you have the right tools at your disposal. Surefire Local makes it easier by putting all of the data and platforms you use to market to your local customer base in one place. Our all-in-one platform connects to Google Analytics, your social media pages, your review platforms, and your other advertising venues, collects the analytics in one location, and reports it in an easy-to-read format. You can track your customers and their behaviors in one place rather than having to log on to multiple platforms to piece together a picture of who they are. You can even see and maintain your business’s information in over 80 directory listing sites right from the platform.
In addition, Surefire Local lets you schedule and post content to all of these places from one location. You can learn how to target them directly to your audience better, and you can maximize every dollar you spend on marketing. Nothing is wasted, including your time, when you have an efficient, centralized place to handle your online marketing.
As a small, local business, your time is valuable. You need to use that time to exceed your customer’s expectations, not spend all of it trying to attract more customers. Surefire Local provides a local marketing platform that helps you maximize your time. Streamlined and effective marketing puts more time in your schedule and money in your pocket, and that’s what Surefire Local offers.
The best way to understand Surefire Local and how it can benefit your business is with a demo. Attend a Surefire Local demo today to see for yourself.