As a small business owner, you understand how important it is to build strong relationships with your customers and create powerful connections with people in your community. Having insights into the behaviors and needs of your customers is an important part of managing those relationships and partnerships. However, it can be hard to get all the information you need when you don’t have customer intelligence tools necessary to collect key data.
A customer intelligence platform for small business owners is a must-have for people who want to expand their business and get an edge over the competition. By having the right platform at your side, you can gather all the customer intelligence you need in order to understand your customers on a personal level and make the best decisions for your brand.
What is Customer Intelligence?
Customer intelligence is the process of gathering information and data about your customers and then analyzing it so that you can gain insights into your customer behavior while understanding them on a deeper level. Customer intelligence includes information about your customer demographics, interests, needs, preferences, and other key details such as:
- Geographic information
- Pain points
- Product and service likes and dislikes
- Customer interactions
- Purchase history
- Demographic information
- Customer status (current, former, future)
- Customer needs
When you have this information at your side, you can understand why your customers behave the way that they do. You can then use those insights to improve the customer experience with your company and engage with your audience more personally. This helps you create strategies to grow your business and increase loyalty with your core customer base.
When you have a customer intelligence strategy in place, you can increase your conversions and sales by coming up with marketing initiatives that target customer needs. You can also use real-time data to reach customers when they are most ready to make a purchase with your business. It also helps you segment your customers into groups so that you can tailor the user experience for each key category of customers you have interacting with your business.
How to Develop Customer Intelligence
It’s clear that customer intelligence is crucial to the success of your small business. In order to develop your plan and create ways of gathering customer intelligence, it’s important that you know the best ways to go about collecting that key data. Here are a few of the best ways to get customer intelligence and data.
Read Your Reviews Online
When customers leave a review of your company online, what they are really giving you is an honest insight into their experience with your business. These reviews can be used to help you gather feedback from your customers and learn more about them. You can discover what worked for them, what you can improve upon, and if you missed the mark in any way while the customer was working with your brand. Customer intelligence is often gathered from the feedback of your customers, so regularly reading and responding to your online reviews is a great way to engage with your audience and help build positive sentiment about your brand.
Study Your Competitor’s Reviews
In addition to your own online reviews, your competitor’s reviews are another important way to learn about your customers. You can discover exactly what a customer liked about a competitor’s company by studying their reviews and online ratings. This can help you narrow down what your niche in the market space is and why a customer would prefer your business over a different one. You can also learn why a competitor might be appealing to your audience, so you can adjust your strategies accordingly.
Look Through Your Website Analytics
Website analytics refers to the data and information collected by your website that tells you about the online behaviors of your customers. You can learn things like what pages they prefer looking at, what blog posts resonated the most with them, and which products a customer spent the most time considering. It’s a great way to start diving into the behaviors of your customers and understanding why they come to your website in the first place. That helps you gather important metrics for customer intelligence. A marketing platform like Surefire Local can help you by doing the hard work of analyzing data for you and delivering the results of that analysis directly to your dashboard.
Send Out Customer Surveys
While reviews are a voluntary tool, a customer survey is a more direct way of asking someone for feedback. A review is often left at the height of emotion, either positive or negative. A customer feedback survey is much more neutral and can help you gather customer intelligence with specific questions and queries. This method of information gathering also allows you to survey a large group of current and even former customers so you can understand their behavior in the most direct way.
Ask for Customer Testimonials
A customer testimonial is similar to a feedback survey in that you are speaking directly with a customer for information. However, a testimonial is a much more complex and in-depth interview where, instead of asking general questions, you walk through a specific use case. You can use a customer testimonial to gather information on how a specific service or product benefited them, or walk through the entire experience starting from how they heard from you to whether they would recommend you to other people like them. It’s a great way to gather detailed information for customer intelligence.
Go On Social Media
Speaking of direct communication with customers, social media is another place you can go to look for important information regarding your customers’ behavior. On social media, you can ask questions to your followers, put up polls with questions, or directly message customers to ask them for feedback or if they have any concerns with your business. Social media can also help you discover what people are saying about your brand by looking for mentions of your business and if they are generally positive or generally negative.
Join Local Groups
Your local community is where the majority of your business comes from. Becoming active in that community can help you both strengthen your brand’s reputation and gather information and feedback from community members about the usefulness of your company. Local community meetings or industry groups, either in person or online, are a great way to engage with your customers and understand more about their needs and concerns, so you can adjust your messaging accordingly.
Surefire Local Marketing Platform is the Leading Customer Intelligence Software for Small Business
Gathering customer intelligence is an important component in the success of your business. However, when you don’t have the right tools by your side, it can be almost impossible to gather the insights you need to know what decision to make and to understand your customer base. That’s where customer intelligence software for small business owners like Surefire Local comes in.
Surefire Local is an all-in-one business intelligence marketing software that helps you capture and analyze all relevant customer data from a wide variety of sources. With the help of Surefire Local, you can learn where your leads are coming from and which channels are most important for your marketing strategies. You can also uncover what the cost-per-lead is so you have a better understanding of how to budget for marketing initiatives. Surefire local also calculates your generated revenue so you can see the direct impact of your actions on the bottom line.
With the help of the Surefire Local platform, you can create digital ads and content that are tailored to the individual experiences of your customer segments and address their specific needs. You can also communicate directly with your customers with the help of text and email communications directly from the Surefire Local dashboard. This helps you save time and automate communication so no customer gets left behind. Surefire Local’s social media monitoring tools can help you learn about brand sentiment and what words people are commonly using when describing your brand and your services.
If you want to become a partner with Surefire Local, make sure you attend a demo of the platform. There you’ll discover all the different features that the solution can offer your small business, including the best ways to gather customer intelligence and improve your relationships with customers.