Your customers are trying to tell you something – when was the last time you listened?
“Know Thy Buyer”
Dan Kennedy, one of the most respected voices in direct marketing, suggests that if there were 10 Commandments of marketing, the first would be: Know thy buyer.
If you’re trying to attract new customers but you don’t understand the fears, desires, and motivations driving your target audience, any marketing you do will be a shot in the dark.
That’s where market research comes in – to tell you exactly who your target audience is and what they think about your product or service, your company, and your industry.
Most business owners never find the time to interview their best customers. They believe they already know them pretty well. They’ve been working with them for a long time, they know their names, their preferences, their quirks. So they skip customer interviews in favour of ad hoc “catch ups” and assumptions… and then wonder why their latest marketing campaign didn’t drive any clicks.
The Power of Customer Interviews
Research has shown that companies that talk to ten or more customers per month specifically for the purpose of understanding them grow two to three times faster than those who don’t.
When you interview customers with the sole purpose of understanding them, you discover insights that would never surface any other way. You might learn why they actually chose you (which is rarely the reason you think), the exact words they’d use to describe what you do to a friend or colleague, or what would help them refer you more often.
A customer interview is a structured, scheduled conversation, outside of your regular day-to-day interactions. And to work, it must be a conversation, not a poll or email. You’ll learn more from a couple of deep conversations each month than you will from a surface-level survey blasted out to your entire database once a year.
Ask great questions, keep following up until the answer makes sense, and even though the process feels slow, you’ll quickly learn enough to fine-tune your growth strategy.
To get started, here are three questions to ask a handful of customers this month:
- What made you decide to hire us? What almost stopped you?
- If you were describing us to a colleague, what would you say?
- What’s one thing we could do that would make you more likely to refer us?
The companies that make market research a habit – the ones who make a point of knowing their customers better than their competitors do – quickly become more efficient in their marketing and sales.
This Week’s Takeaway
When did you last have a conversation with a client or prospect where your only agenda was to understand them better?
And what would get faster, smoother, or easier in your business if you knew exactly what your target audience was thinking?
SYSTEMology: by David Jenyns
SYSTEMology is a practical resource for any business owner who feels like too much of the business still depends on them. David Jenyns challenges the idea that owners need to document every process themselves, instead sharing a framework for building systems that your team can help create, follow, and improve over time.
If you want a digital copy, David has kindly shared it as an audio book on YouTube, and you can pick up the PDF version here!
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