Marketing should change over time for your small business. At the beginning, your business is trying to find its audience. Over time, you can hone your marketing by learning from the customers you have gained.
Customer insights help small businesses like yours understand what your customers like about your business and what they want. Discover what motivates their behavior and their viewpoint on your services and business.
Then, this information becomes valuable as customer insights for small business marketing.
Understanding Customer Insights
Customer insights are what your business comes to understand about your customers by evaluating data on them, including their feedback and behaviors. These insights give your business deeper information on customer motivations. So while you may know customer actions, such as scheduling your roofing or chiropractic service, you might not know why or when they need it. Insights give you that kind of information.
Insights differ from data. You evaluate data to come up with insights about your customers. For instance, data may show you the demographics of your customers, which services they use and when, and other important information. But you need to use the data along with customer feedback to understand the underlying drivers.
These insights play an important role in marketing strategy. For instance, they could help your business create more targeted marketing campaigns rather than generalized ones.
Insights are crucial for small businesses with limited resources. They provide helpful information that determines the direction of business planning and marketing, yet you can collect and analyze them simply and within a small budget. While some forms of gathering customer insights require more resources, it doesn’t have to be that way. For instance, you can send surveys to your email list and put up polls on your social media pages without much time or money invested.
Collecting Customer Insights
Surveys and Feedback Forms
Here are some tips for creating surveys and feedback forms:
- Determine the information you want to know about customers.
- Gear the questions around gaining that information.
- Figure out what information you already know and what you are missing.
- Ask staff members what kinds of insights they are looking for.
- Ask sales and customer service teams to help guide the questions and formats.
These tips help you ask the right questions and create effective surveys:
- Consider that people often provide other responses when asked an open-ended question compared to a closed-ended one. Nonetheless, it’s possible to start with an open-ended one to come up with a few common answers for a closed-ended version.
- Try to limit the number of choices for closed-ended questions.
- Keep in mind that close-ended questions where the person has to choose one answer generally result in more accurate responses compared to ones where they can select all that apply.
- Pretest your questions. For instance, try asking other employees or a small test group before sending out the survey to everyone. This will help you understand how people interpret the questions and work out any concerns in advance.
- Make the survey or form easily accessible, simple to fill out and easy to submit to avoid hurdles to completing it.
- Consider efficient ways to get the survey to your audience, such as sending it to your email list, putting it on your company website and posting about it on your social media pages.
Social Media Monitoring
Monitoring social media is an efficient way to learn more about your customers. Rather than browsing comments and mentions yourself, which could be time-consuming and inefficient, rely on tools for tracking mentions and engagement. Here are a few social media listening tools:
- Buffer looks at interactions on numerous platforms and gives you analytics that help you listen to and join relevant customer conversations and determine how your audience engages and behaves.
- Brandwatch monitors mentions of your company’s brand name, logo and other information to provide a better picture of customer associations with your brand and to find trends.
- BrandMentions sends mentions of your company and useful information related to your niche.
Keep in mind that these are just a few examples. You can use the data you gain from social media listening and feedback to get a clearer idea of how your brand is seen, what customers want in your field and what broader trends and conversations are happening that impact your business and the best ways to market.
The Surefire Local platform also allows you to monitor social media interactions while analyzing your overall brand sentiment.
Customer Reviews and Testimonials
Use tools to monitor Google reviews and other reviews customers leave online about your business. These tools also help you analyze the information in the reviews. For instance, software and apps can gather information from reviews on different sites, provide sentiment analysis of the reviews and offer insights about customer experiences.
A great way to collect more feedback from customers is to ask them to provide reviews and testimonials. You can offer them various methods, such as sharing a testimonial directly or adding a review to your Google or Facebook page.
Both reviews and testimonials offer valuable information on customer preferences and trends. They also offer insights into customer language and thoughts to guide your marketing.
Sales and Support Interactions
Leverage insights from customer service and sales teams. These teams already interact with customers and gain feedback from them, so your business should tap into this information.
Create a system so customer service and sales employees consistently share the feedback they get with your marketing team. Also, have a system to analyze the feedback. For instance, these teams could add relevant data to a customer relationship management platform each time they have an interaction, or your business could use sales tracking software.
Analyzing Customer Insights
Segmenting Your Audience
Use segmentation software to divide customers into meaningful segments, such as by demographic, geographic area, behavior, needs or values. Segmentation features are often included in customer relationship management or content management systems.
It’s generally easy to segment when carrying out marketing strategies. For example, you can set up email marketing to go to certain segments of your list or create ads that are targeted to part of your audience. This allows you to send the right messages and promotions to the right people at the right time.
Identifying Trends and Patterns
Analyzing the data you have about your customers makes it easier to spot trends in their behavior and preferences. The most efficient way is to use analytics to find the patterns in your customer data. Analytics can also help your business determine trends by carrying out a time-series analysis, regression analysis and comparative analysis.
Creating Customer Personas
Develop customer personas to shape marketing strategies that better target real people. Use the data you have on your audience to create fictional customer personas that symbolize your business’s ideal customers. These personas often include many details, including age, job, needs and values.
Applying Insights to Your Marketing Strategy
Tailoring Your Messaging
Using insights allows your marketing team to align its messaging with customer needs and preferences. An example is a veterinarian practice that sends a marketing campaign just to customers with cats, whereas sending a specific cat-related message to everyone on the list could alienate the other pet owners. In addition, a roofing company might see words like timeliness, quality work and good value as attributes customers like in roofing services, and its marketers could use that wording in messaging.
Optimizing Your Content
Use insights to create relevant and engaging content. Once you have a deeper understanding of customer motivations and problems, that information provides topic selection for content creation. Look at overall trends, keywords, needs and problems to guide your content. You can focus on the type of content as well, such as creating guides for in-depth topics, blog posts for simple topics and FAQs for common feedback and questions.
Enhancing Customer Experience
Apply insights to improve customer touchpoints and interactions. For instance, if you notice a pattern of reviews mentioning a poor customer service experience when calling your office, your business could focus on improving reception and office systems to solve these problems and provide a better customer experience.
Adjusting Your Marketing Channels
Your customer insights might show you the sites where your customers talk about your brand or relevant topics the most. This information can help you meet your customers where they are, building strategies around those channels. This is likely to vary by your type of business and service, as customers may expect to find you on LinkedIn vs Facebook, or vice versa.
Implement These Strategies
Customer insights give a valuable tool for shaping your company’s marketing. Use methods like surveys, reviews and social media monitoring to collect insights. Then, analyze them by segmenting, finding trends and developing personas. After this, you’ll be ready to apply these insights to your marketing strategy.
Taking these steps can help you connect better with your customers and enhance their experience, which in turn improves your business. You can implement these strategies yourself, or if you need assistance, attend a Surefire Local demo to see how we can help.