DMN3 Blog

Marketing is all about aligning your product or service with the customers’ needs. Given that, you would think that organizations would spend a lot of time studying their current and targeted customers. Do you understand your customers and what drives them to buy your services?

If you are like many small and medium sized businesses, you probably don’t spend the effort needed to really understand your customers, their needs and what motivates them to take action.

Whether we are talking Internet or traditional marketing, understanding our “most probable” customers is the basis for our market positioning and messaging decisions. If we don’t spend time gaining this insight we will dramatically reduce the success of our online and offline marketing efforts.

In this blog posting and the one to follow next week I am going to discuss strategies to obtain better customer insight. Following these postings, I will also discuss some simple competitor research that can also help you gain market insight.

In two previous postings, I’ve discussed this subject as well. You can find them here:

• Maintain Your Online Marketing Customer Bearing
• Marketing: It all Begins with Understanding Your Customer

My hope is to convince more organizations to take more time at the front end of a project to do the research necessary to better assure a successful outcome of their marketing efforts. If you are contracting with other organizations for your Internet marketing efforts, make sure they are providing sufficient market insights as part of their efforts. The research portion of your marketing budget can have a great impact on marketing success. Consider that when approving various parts of the marketing budget.

It is important that we understand our existing and probable customers on two levels: demographically and psychographically.

Demographics: These are the objective, directly observable characteristics that describe people and organizations. They are the tangible facts that describe your prospective customers and help you identify and segment them. In a b2c oriented business, we are interested in things like age, employment, location, gender, education, race, occupation, marital status, income, etc. For a b2b business, we are interested in demographics dealing with industry, product line(s), size, type, location(s), geographic coverage, financial status, sales volume, etc.

Psychographics: These are characteristics as to how prospective and existing customers think and make decisions. Remember, it is in the “Mind” where marketing happens. Marketing strategies must be geared to positioning your product and service in the mind of those you target. Remember that “minds” are not a blank slate. Prospects will view our message in the context of their experiences, emotional associations, and the particular process in which they arrive at a decision.

The buying process occurs at both the “conscious” and “unconscious” levels within the mind. Think of it this way. Our conscious mind is concerned with “reason” and our unconscious mind is concerned with “impulse" during the buying process. To be effective in your online and offline marketing efforts, you must communicate with both levels of the mind.

The more information you have about your customer, the more likely you will design a marketing program that reaches the customer in a way that will entice them to take action.

In today’s environment, your website is a critical component of your marketing efforts. Yet, often organizations don’t use customer insight in website development. There are lots of
website development resources who will build a website for you. These developers will seek information from you about your organization and its products and services. They may also have you provide information as to what you want for website functionality, themes, pages, etc.

The resulting websites end up being about the organization rather than the customer. Incorporating customer insight allows you to position your products and services as a solution to their wants and needs. You can also utilize what you know about what drives them to take action as part of your messaging and sales funnel.

If your knowledge of your customers and potential customers is anecdotal at best, then someone should take the time to gain a better knowledge of your customers. That information should then be incorporated into the design of your marketing campaigns and your website.

Do not let anyone that doesn’t understand your customers design a website for you . Either you educate them or they provide a “research” component to their services so that the information needed is acquired before website development begins.

Below are some strategies you can utilize to gain more customer insight and achieve a better ROI for your marketing budget. I’ve listed them in the order of increasing complexity.

• Document what you already know
• Interview current customers
• Interview those in your organization who interact with customers
• Use Intelligence gained from your existing website
• Acquire information from others’ research
• Survey current customers
• Conduct focus groups
• Incorporate "customer" feedback in the marketing development process

In my next post I will discuss them in more detail.