Digital Lab

The most important part of marketing is… knowing your customer.

You can’t do good marketing unless you understand exactly who your customer is.

What do they like?

What do they hate?

What bores them?

What excites them?

This is the fuel that builds exceptional marketing campaigns.

So how do you learn to know your customer?

Engagement

One of the easiest ways to learn a little more about your customers is to pay attention to how they behave.

You’re likely communicating with your customers already on more than just your sales process.

Customers are interacting with your social media accounts, your emails, your ads, your staff, and a lot more.

Paying attention to what they engage with versus what they ignore will teach you a lot about what they care about.

Ask yourself questions like:

• What have we received pushback for?
• What do we get the most questions about?
• What was our best-performing content this year?
• What comes up most often in positive/negative reviews?

With only a tiny amount of digging, you’ll start to find interesting info.

1. Maybe your customers value your customer service over everything else.
2. Maybe your customers didn’t like a promotion you ran last year.
3. Maybe your customers dislike one of your products/services.
4. Maybe your customers have other problems you could solve.

Paying attention to how your customers behave can be done anytime in almost any way.

But it is step one in doing better marketing.

Sales

Some of the best feedback I’ve ever received has come from sales teams.

Your sales team speaks directly to prospects/customers when they’re making critical decisions.

They likely hear the same questions & concerns over and over.

They also see patterns in your good customers and your bad customers.

A great sales rep can identify if a customer will or will not be a good fit in the first few minutes of a conversation.

They also know Why.

If that information/knowledge isn’t shared with the leadership team or the marketing team then you’re certain to miss opportunities in your messaging.

Here are some common characteristics that sales can educate on:

• Most common concerns
• Most common selling points
• The most common reasons a deal falls through
• Things customers say about competitive brands
• Things customers say about your brand
• Decision-maker personas (who buys from you)
• Non-fit customers (who to exclude from marketing)

Customer Surveys

Nothing matters more than what your customers say directly.

You should listen to your customers intently.

You can do this in a lot of ways:

1. Talk to them
2. Read reviews
3. Send surveys
4. Exit interviews (when you lose a customer ask why)

The main point is to ask them why at all points in the process.

The more you can understand why they are making the decisions they are making (good or bad), the more educated you can be in optimizing for the good decisions.

If you know what they like, do more of it.

If you know what they don’t like, avoid it like the plague.

This goes double for marketing.

Marketing is often your first impression with potential customers.

So we should lean into what they like, and even call out what they don’t like as a “thing we don’t do”.

This gives prospects the impression we understand them.

And at the end of the day, that’s all they want.

They want to spend money with people who get it. People like you.

Are you using what you know about your customers?

Sometimes it can be hard to translate what you know about your customer into an actionable marketing strategy. How do you address the pain points? Through what medium? How should you word it?

That’s what we do. We can help you craft a strategy that is based on your customers. Getting you a more consistent flow of qualified prospects.