The customer is always right. It’s a phrase almost as old as civilization itself. It has guided corporate decisions and marketing plans over the millennia.
From its inception right into the 21st century, the concept of focusing on the customer to find success has remained at the heart of business. And yet, even the best marketing gurus can’t satisfy the requirement of giving customers what they want unless they know what those needs are in the first place.
This makes the methods that marketers use to gain insights into their business customers a key element in long-term success. You cannot craft an effective strategy without knowing your target market well. Understanding what customers need, what they lack, and the various pain points that drive them to your brand is priority number one when developing marketing plans.
With that in mind, here are several different ways that marketers can discover consumer needs to direct and inform the focus of their own customer acquisition strategies (and their business’s efforts as a whole.)
Identify What a “Customer Need” Is
Having a customer discovery process in place is key to understand who your ideal customers are. However, before you charge out in search of discovering your customer needs, it’s worth taking a minute to nail down just what a “customer need” is in the first place. This may seem obvious at first, and most marketers can provide a vague understanding of what a customer’s “needs” are.
Nevertheless, there are specific aspects of customer needs that should be detailed before defining your own audiences’ requirements. While each need is unique, all customer needs tend to fall under the umbrella of four different categories:
- Having choices: Is there a variety of options to solve a certain problem? This will allow a customer to find a solution that is the best tailored to fit their particular need.
- A range of prices: If a solution comes in a “one-size-fits-all” option, chances are, it’s going to have a single price point, too. Along with variety, customers also want a range of prices so that they can address each need based on the level of priority that it currently has in their life compared to other needs.
- Convenience: Solutions aren’t any good if they’re inaccessible or even difficult to find. From two-day shipping to curb-side pickup, the convenience of a solution largely impacts how well it answers a consumer’s need.
- Different levels of quality: The quality of a solution is also important. Again, customer prioritization is key here. If a customer wants a high-quality item, can they get it? If they don’t care much about their current need, can they get a low-quality, cost-effective solution?
All four of these customer need categories aren’t just common. They also play off one another. Often, in the process of creating a product, you might make something that is both higher quality and more expensive. Perhaps you offer your customers access to something through your e-commerce store that they can’t get otherwise.
Conducting effective marketing research can do wonders to discover what your prospects want. By furthering your understanding of what a customer needs, you can equip yourself with the ability to define the specific customer needs that should be guiding your marketing efforts.
Do you need help in discovering your consumer needs?
Listen to Others
Marketers often discover consumer needs by listening to others. Before you start looking inward at things like your customer journey and data analysis, start with a look around outside the walls of your business. There are many ways that you can learn about your customers by broadening your views and perspectives.
One of the most effective of these is to go directly to the source. The best way to do this is to seek out your audience on social media platforms and listen to what you’re saying.
This is called social listening, and it’s a wonderful way to get primary information from the same people that you want to ultimately serve with your business. While it’s powerful, though, you can’t let individual social listening encounters overly influence your marketing decisions. Instead, treat each interaction or point of research as a valuable addition to the data that will collectively impact your final strategy.
Along with social listening, you can also look at peers. Studying the competition is a classic way to learn more about your industry and, by extension, your customers.
Conduct market research on some of your competitors and see what needs they’re highlighting in their marketing material. What messages are they using to try to resonate with your shared audience?
As with social listening, you need to go about this process thoughtfully. Don’t assume that just because a successful competitor is focused on a particular message, it’s working for them. Remember, they could just as easily have conducted their own market research and used less-reliable information from yet another competitor to influence a particular campaign.
With that in mind, look further than just the message. Also, consider how their customers are reacting to it. Use things like social listening and customer reviews of your competitors to gain valuable insights into how good their own grasp of consumer needs might be.
A third way to look outside of your organization for research is to consider keywords. In the highly data-driven world that businesses operate in, keywords can be an instrumental way to gain the attention of your audience.
However, it can also reveal which keywords are particularly popular for them to use when searching for solutions to their problems. Look into keywords related to your business and see how competitive certain words and phrases might be. In general, the more often a keyword is searched, the more likely it points back to a customer pain point.
Put Yourself in Your Customers’ Shoes
If you want to understand the needs of the customer, you need to walk a mile in their shoes. In other words, you need to put yourself in prospective buyers’ shoes. There are many ways that you can do this.
For instance, one simple way is to role play for a bit. Imagine that you’re an ideal customer (you can use something like a buyer persona to hone this image.). Creating a buyer persona can help you get to know your target market and understand their pain points, challenges, problems, and individual motivations. Determine your ideal customer. Take the time to do your research by surveying or interviewing prospects and existing customers.
As you masquerade as Mr. or Mrs. Smith, look for ways to empathize with their wants and needs. You can expand on this concept by conducting Google searches based on your brainstorming to see what kind of information comes up.
This is a great way to understand the core inspirations and pressures that push consumers to seek out your brand. But you don’t have to stop there.
Another way to better understand your customer is to go through your company’s customer journey. Walk through the different stages of awareness, consideration, purchase, customer support, and so on. As you do so, look for the ways that your brand does and does not meet the needs of consumers throughout this process.
For instance, if you’re using a headless content management system, is it delivering content in the right format and the correct locations to draw you in as a consumer? If you have an e-commerce website, is your navigation laid out in a thoughtful way that facilitates rather than hampers a potential client’s ability to follow the customer journey that you’ve mapped out for them?
Putting yourself in the consumer’s shoes is a great way to learn more about the wants and needs that bring people to your brand.
Now is the time to discover your consumer needs and increase your sales.
Analyze The Data
Finally, you can gain valuable insight into consumer needs by using data. Marketers often discover consumer needs through thorough data analysis. As is the case with researching third-party sources, you can use data in many different ways, such as
- Tracking results such as traffic on your site or how many people click through to certain landing pages.
- Setting up feedback loops that encourage customers to provide detailed information on their experiences with your products, services, website, and other parts of the customer journey.
- Using analytics tools to organize data and gain valuable information from patterns and activities that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Data is a powerful tool that can be used to satisfy customer needs and cultivate brand devotion. However, with so many data collection tools available, you can also suffer from “too much of a good thing.”
If you’re collecting data hand over fist, it can be challenging to distill it into useful information that can actually help you better understand your customers. This overload of data is referred to as data analysis paralysis.
There are multiple ways to avoid running into this issue. For instance, resist the temptation to look for specific conclusions from your data. Instead, remain flexible to see what results it naturally presents.
If you have too much information, look for tools to increase your visibility and help you distill your focus, as well. While it’s a complex topic to break down in a couple of paragraphs, it’s absolutely possible to manage your data without falling victim to analysis paralysis.
Discovering Consumer Needs For Marketing
If you want your marketing to be effective, you need to understand your consumers and their needs. By conducting effective marketing research, you can find a lot about your prospects and customers. This can’t be a passing interest or a generic summary. Marketers must invest targeted efforts in understanding consumers and their needs if they want to launch a successful marketing program that resonates with them.
This can happen through third-party sources, such as social listening or studying competitors. You can also analyze your customer journey for strengths and weaknesses. Finally, use purposeful and flexible data analysis to look for any consumer needs you might be missing.
By understanding what demand generation means for your business and its distinction from lead generation, you can better create and plan your marketing strategies and maximize the ROI from your sales and marketing efforts.
If you can thoughtfully go about your consumer research, you can hone your marketing message and ensure that it truly resonates with the needs of your past, present, and future customers, alike.
Growth Hackers is an award-winning digital marketing and growth hacking agency helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs and business owners discover their consumer needs, generate qualified leads, optimize their conversion rate, gather and analyze data analytics, acquire and retain users and increase sales. We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact Growth Hackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
