Many online marketers make basic mistakes because they simply fail to understand their customers.
If you can put yourself in your customers’ shoes, it’s easy to understand what they want and how to deliver it to them.
When you empathize with them, you can create a marketing message that resonates with them and shows that you’re a responsive business that cares about their customers.
Understanding What Your Customers Want
When you put yourself in your customers’ shoes, you quickly understand what they’re looking for.
If you’re a restaurant owner, imagine what you’d expect if you were looking for a meal.
You’d want the shop to be visible, clean, and friendly, and to offer something others don’t.
Each online niche has certain characteristics that its customers look for.
Don’t only think about what they want, but also what your customers don’t want. There is always risk involved in making purchases, especially when a customer chooses a new shop for the first time.
If you can imagine your customers’ fears and concerns, you can address them before your customers have a chance to worry or object.
Shut up and Listen
One of the biggest mistakes marketers can make is to assume.
In order to really understand your customers, you need hard data that they provide themselves.
Listen to customer feedback about your company, as well as the conversations they have online.
You can learn about people’s thoughts and feelings through blogs, blog comments, forum postings, and social media sites.
Even better, you can solicit the specific data you need by directly asking them to take a few minutes to give you feedback.
Online surveys are incredibly easy to conduct these days, and there are free tools, such as Survey Monkey, which make it a no-brainer.
Questions to Consider
Think about any company you deal with on a regular basis, and analyze your feelings about that company.
Then, try to discover why you feel that way. A few questions to ask yourself are:
What do you like or dislike about them?
What makes you want to go back and do business with them again?
Is their image friendly and professional?
Can you easily get what you want from them, and are interactions with them smooth and seamless?
What does the company do when you’re not satisfied with their products or services?
Through these questions, you can understand as a customer what makes a business’s service good or not.
