Why know your customer?
Knowing your customer is the unshakable foundation for your consumer goods & services/tech startup’s growth strategy…from product development, to marketing and sales enablement.
Here are some convincing statistics:
86% of buyers will pay more for top-notch customer experience
49% of customers make impulse buys after receiving a personalized experience
48% of customers have left a website without buying because it was poorly customized to them
33% of customers will leave a brand they love after one bad experience.
How do you study your customer?
The easiest way to deeply discover your customer is to talk directly to them. You can do the research yourself if you’re adventurous, or partner with a research provider to guide you. More info on that at the end of this article.
1. Meet your customer’s real needs
In software building/ CBG messaging, it used to be that features and benefits made the sale.
But the offer has evolved.
Tap into the outcomes and transformations that motivate your audience to establish yourself as a cut above.
For example, here’s is a coaching program (energy renewable SaaS/probiotic yogurt) selling features:
Our AI-driven software generates forecasts about weather, prices, and energy demand, to analyze how energy assets can capture value at different times of day.
Our probiotic yogurt benefits your gut by regulating the digestive system and decreasing gas and bloating.
And here’s that same (energy renewable SaaS/probiotic yogurt) program selling outcomes and transformations:
Adding energy storage to solar projects is increasingly key to maximizing solar project value. With our best-in-class software, we enhance storage offerings through optimized design, streamlined procurement, and customized deal support.
With our probiotic yogurt’s live cultures alleviating xxxx, you can get back to enjoying life, naturally. No more dreaded discomfort in the during your favorite concert or when out to dinner celebrating.
Get to know your audience’s bigger picture and link that to their use of your offering. You’ll have to put on your innovative mindset to do this, no doubt.
To discover the outcomes your customers want, interview them. Ask your customers in-depth questions about what they are trying to accomplish in their day-to-day if B2C SaaS, or in their day-to-day work if B2B SaaS.
But your results will give you powerful marketing messages, productive sales conversations, and on-point product development.
2. Create Robust Buyer Personas
Buying is emotional – even in B2B markets – so you should never create your personas around demographics or firmographics. They aren’t personalized enough for your marketing efforts.
You want your buyers to feel that you are speak directly to them in your marketing. In product development, you want your features to speak directly to them.
With B2C tech markets, psychographics are the way to go:
lifestyle choices
values, opinions, and beliefs
hobbies and interests
For B2B tech, include the following professional measures:
job role
job performance metrics
role in buying cycle
trusted resources for information
Be sure you analyze their must-haves and especially your customer’s unmet needs. Innovation is proven to be most successful where you can alleviate those pain points.
Include customers’ desired outcomes/transformations discussed in the section above. What are their trying to accomplish in the big picture that your product can be part of?
When you include all the above, you have a persona that converts!
To create robust personas, surveys and interviews are needed. To uncover hobbies, interests, values, and lifestyle, it’s best to use a survey with possible choices listed out.
For customers’ desired outcomes and needs, you’ll need to get in-depth and let customers explain in interviews.
As a techie, that’s not your preference, but before running a survey, you need users to tell you what they want. You can’t create a survey if you don’t know exactly what to include in it.
Once you get the intel from customer interviews, use it to create survey questions.
3. Turn Prospects into Customers More Quickly
When it comes to skilled prospecting and social or digital marketing in tech/SaaS, B2C demographics and B2B firmographics are important.
When you sell on social media, demographics/ firmographics will lead you to your best buyers.
For example, say your target buyer is between 36-54 years old, a lower or middle manager, and lives in the Midwest or South. You can choose these precise characteristics in Facebook, for example, when targeting the potential buyers who will view your ad.
Your PPC campaigns will also come alive when you integrate demogs/firmogs.
Say many of your current or future customers are in SaaS (a firmographic). When choosing your PPC keywords, you will include the term SaaS.
So if your company name is ABC Company, and you are selling a CRM program, your PPC ad would read, for example: ABC Company, a SaaS CRM.
Another example, is that you can buy or generate targeted prospect lists based on the demographics/firmographics that characterize your ideal buyer (e.g. income, location, and sex).
This way, your sales efforts will reach fruition sooner because you’re contacting segments that you know already want what you offer.
Common demographics:
∙ sex, age, location, ethnicity, income, political affiliation,
religion
Common firmographics:
∙ company size, company location, industry, revenue,
founding year, technologies used, job role
4. Connect with your customer’s personal ‘why’
There is a deeper listening that taps into a customer’s most personal self. The CEO of Bodoh International, a customer experience consultancy, tells it this way:
“Our customer advisory board was showing their customers around the table, and these were all CIOs showing the feature and function.
“One of the customers said, ‘But I want to know how you’re going to help me keep my job, how you’re going to help me stay with my family on the weekends and not have to work and worry, and how you’re going to help me sleep at night. That’s what I want to know from you.’”
You’re a business, but the human-to-human connection with your customers is what will set you apart in today’s customer centered marketplace.
Imagine sitting down and interviewing your customers to find out their deeper why’s. Once you connect with this aspect of their lives, and succeed in seeing patterns across 15-20 interviews, your sales and marketing will resonate with an incredible pop to your future customers, and magnetically draw them in.
You are going to tap their most emotional self, and that emotion will guide them to buy.
How about you?
How about you? Do you have the sense that maybe you don’t know your customer as well as you’d like?
The most cost-effective way to get results is to tap your own customers. If you want to DIY, go into your contacts and find your customers’ emails and launch your own study.
If you survey your customers, run a $1,000 drawing with three tiers for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place with 150-400 customer respondents (the more responses, the better). If you only have say 50 customers, find a way to get most/all of them to respond.
For in-depth interviews with your customers, pay $75-$100 per hour for B2C and $150-$200 for B2B, and complete 15-20 of interviews.
Don’t skip your customer research. And don’t expect customers to give you valuable growth strategy intel for free. Too many businesses try to talk to their customers for free, but don’t forget that ROI is the name of the game. You can’t really get something for nothing.
We hope you were able to get some use from this article!
References
https://www.paraphrasecomm.com/reword/features-benefits-outcomes
https://neilpatel.com/blog/understand-your-customers/
https://instapage.com/blog/firmographic-segmentation
https://www.stibosystems.com/blog/why-it-pays-to-know-your-customers-personally