Do You Have The Right Customers?
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Customers are the bread and butter of the business world. If you have no one to sell to, you can’t sell, and that completely tanks a company. So you do your market research and you innovate your product to fit the needs you discovered, and then hopefully, you’ve got yourself a neat profit waiting for you. But in reality, finding these customers isn’t so simple.
If you’re someone who runs a business using the online world, you’ve been told time and time again about the amount of people you could reach in your attempt to make a profit. But are you actually reaching them? And are you reaching the right people to make sure you’re maximising on your marketing and profit margins? Well now’s the time to find out and be sure about it; here’s a couple of ideas you could put to use in your business for the sake of your customers.
If you don’t have the research on your side, no amount of business meetings will help you come up with a better marketing strategy! (Unsplash)
Do You Know Who They Are?
This is the first step for making sure the customers who are visiting your website are the kind you’re actually marketing to, and to see if they’re really interested in what you’re putting out there for them to buy. All websites have an anonymous function, and as the owner you don’t tend to know who they are unless they sign up and tell you, or let their location be known by their browser.
But that just isn’t helpful when you’re trying to refine your marketing technique and save yourself a bit of money, so let’s try and fix that problem. You could make it necessary for people to sign up with an account if they want to use any service or buy any product on your site, but that can very easily turn people away. Website users are fickle people after all!
Customers don’t ever want to feel forced into something, and they probably never want to store their card details with you either, so keep this as an option they can look into if they want to. Instead, you can use the analytics on your site to find out who they are and what they want, and services like Visual Visitor can make this a very simple thing to do.
Use Some Personas
When you have a marketing persona on your side to help you direct what marketing directions you’re taking, you’re going to find it a lot easier to interact with real people in the market you’re trying to make a profit off of. Come up with some questions to ask the people you know are already customers of yours, get their answers and then feed them into a template; you’ll soon have a focus that you’ve been looking for since you started up.
When you have a persona to work off of, you know the kind of customer you’re trying to attract, and that’s the first step to making sure you’ve got the right base on your side. If you’ve never made a persona before, you’re going to need to get to grips with the idea now, and start researching to personalise your business. The more detail the better, as a persona can tell you everything you need to about your target audience, without even needing to be a real person.
Don’t Be Afraid to Let Customers Go
Whether they’re not responding to your mailing list emails, or they haven’t visited your site in months, or they haven’t spent a single penny on the products you offer. A customer that has no use for you isn’t a customer you should look to impress, and you should move on to bigger and better prospects.
Otherwise, you’re just going to waste resources. Make sure you’re focusing your efforts on the people who are actually buying from you, and those who leave you reviews (whether these are good or bad!); it’s always going to be a better strategy than chasing a dead lead. Just because you’re a startup doesn’t mean you have to grovel for attention from the market, so cut loose whenever you need to.
Having and keeping the right customers is an artform, and something that’s going to keep you in business for years to come. You’re not going to get it right immediately, but make sure you’re listening to your customer base, and always have something to offer the people who are interested.
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