Do You Know Your Customers?
You are probably familiar with the thrill of getting an idea that is sure to ‘change the game’ and that urge to just go out, build the product and bring it all to life. One common misconception is that having a ‘good product’ or the skill set required to offer a service is enough to ensure it sells — It’s not that simple.
I can’t count the number of times I have heard people say things like ‘we’ll just market it ’ and everything will be fine and dandy. Often times, what that means is a scattergun approach to everything from essential features of their product to communications and retail options. Next thing you are considering every channel or platform to advertise or sell your products. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest accounts are being set up, a website and an app are being built and so on. It all sounds exciting.
If you are a small business with limited funds and resources, you would soon find yourself in a bit of a bind. You have chased all these avenues that you thought would produce results and now you are probably spread too thin and burning through your limited cash. Yet the results are not necessarily anything to write home about.
At what point through all the decision making did you ask: Who wants or needs my product? Are my potential customers active on Facebook? How many people actually have smartphones and are able to download my app?
If your customer was the last thing on your mind whilst making these decisions, what then is the driving force? If “everyone else is doing it” is your answer, that is a very slippery slope.
Questions about your target customer may not be the easiest to answer but if you do understand that they should drive key decision areas, ranging from product development, sales channel selection, content creation to communication decisions then you are off to a great start. You are choosing to meet the person who is likely to buy your product where they are and at the points that matter to them.
There is a simple tool marketers use when faced with the question - Who is My Customer? They build something called a Persona. This is a fictional, generalised representation of your ideal customers. Their age, where they typically live, their goals, their pain points, information that would help you meet their needs and make any interaction with you worth their while. It is not a perfect science and gets even more detailed over time as you gather data.
Building A Persona
Initial profiling
Building a Persona is similar to the dating process. At first, a person fits into certain obvious specifications you are interested in e.g. physical looks and an interesting career, so you are willing to actually go on a date with that person. You might take a step further and find out a few more things about the person from their social media profiles. This has been made even easier because we leave crumbs of our identity out there.
In the context of the persona, initial data that start your process of selection or elimination is often easy to come by. This tends to be what we call demographic information and includes factors such as;
Age or age range
Gender
Geographical location
Level of education
Type of occupation
General income level etc.
With this, you are one step closer to getting the ideal customer but this level of information is still limited. For example, If I was to use only this information as the basis for Ad targeting on Facebook, it can get really broad. Not that broad targeting is necessarily a bad thing, but depending on what you are selling, you might end up spending more money trying to convert visitors to customers.
Imagine you sell organic air diffusers. This is a pretty niche offering but it does not mean that there aren’t people out there who actually want this. Let’s say you have the following information;
Person A: You know their age, gender, location, income level and not much else.
Person B: You know their age, gender, location, income level, interests include health and wellness and shops mostly organic
Which would you rather have access to- 500 people with person B’s profile or 5000 people with person A’s profile? Wouldn’t you rather speak to someone that is more likely to be interested in and receptive to your ad because they find it relevant to their lifestyle? Imagine being on a date with someone who is uninterested in what you are saying because there’s no common ground.
Unearthing more
What you want to do is get as close as you can to that ideal customer. In dating speak, I would probably go on a couple of dates to find out if this person is a right fit for me and if I want to establish any sort of relationship.
In marketing speak, this is called research. Some time in the early phase of product development is when you should invest time and/or money in primary research - your options range from surveys and focus groups to interviews and observation. The method you use would depend on the amount of information you already have access to. Typically, more qualitative options such as interviews give more depth and opportunity to probe further, which helps to start stringing together narratives for why and how different people may use your product or service. This is usually a good place to start when unsure, before going on to test on a larger scale via surveys and statistically prove if truly the pattern you established can be seen across a larger population.
Information you are hoping to get at this stage should start to include psychographic aspects ranging from their lifestyle, interests & hobbies, shopping habits and motivations to pain points.
Some examples of psychographic data include;
Lifestyle & Interests
What they enjoy doing in their free time
What sort of places they visit frequently
Opinions on things from fitness to politics
Might start to point to their willingness to spend on your product if it somehow fits into categories they are interested in and even how they may respond to your messaging.
Shopping behaviour
How much they spend on certain items
Where they like to shop, even think about the sort of retailers they might buy from
How do they use the products they buy
Might get you thinking about the sort of stores to stock your product, whether to sell online or offline, maybe both and even pricing decisions.
Values and motivations
How do they view themselves
How do they want people to view them
Aspirations for the future
How does your product fit into their identity
Products or brands that often allow people to express their identity garner loyalty. There is so much talk about how brands today need to embody values important to millennial customers to win their loyalty.
Pain points
What are the current points of need not being addressed
What are competitors not getting right
What do they find frustrating with current processes
Might get you thinking about features existing competitors haven’t tapped into, process decisions and more.
With such data, things start to get clearer and the image goes from 1d to 2d. This is probably a good time to give your persona a name and put a picture in as a depiction. From your research, you may even find that there are further micro-groups and not just one group, each with unique characteristics and expectations but they all want your product or service. So instead of just Lisa, you have Reni and Miranda as well.
Example Customer Persona for a specialist e-retailer selling contemporary African made and inspired brands in the UK
The journey to discovery
Some of the questions about your customers are not easily answered until they start engaging with you. You’ll never fully know everything about a person before you make decisions to have some sort of relationship with them. You find that you are still discovering things about them as time goes on. As with your Personas, it is fine to not have all the answers before you start, as long as you have some, you avoid going in blind.
Over time, as you get customers and feedback you are able to glean further data that informs even more targeted marketing efforts e.g from website traffic you may find that you have been targeting people in the 22 - 45 age range but your most active customers are actually below 35. It does not mean that you ignore those aged 36 - 45 but you know how to manage your effort and resources.
You might even get more granular data on what people respond to. For example, you may notice that fewer customers are signing up to free trials on your website or that there are significantly more complaints about a particular product range. In the case of fewer free trial sign ups, this could be a website issue affecting your customers across the board, let’s say the call to action is just not as clear with the new copy, in which case the problem is easier to solve. However, where it gets complicated is if the problem is attributable to just certain groups. In which case, you might want to run A/B tests on your different customer groups, to see what works for who and what doesn’t.
In the process of discovery, you learn new things about your customer and sometimes you can’t even ask directly because it is not always easy for customers to communicate their problems.
Ultimately at this level, research becomes dynamic. A combination of research and data analytics will push you to a point where you become proficient at meeting and anticipating your customers’ needs. You get responsive with product improvements, new product releases actually meet customer expectations, better customer service decisions are made, brand experience improves and so much more. The picture you’re developing moves to 3d, 4d and on and on.
Knowing your customer really is a journey - one that never ends. One that leads to even more possibilities because humans are not paper cut, they are complicated and if you take the time to find out what makes them tick you may be building a customer for a lifetime. One that is an incredible source of word of mouth.
It is about showing that you are actually thinking of them every step of the way. This is not about using some framework that has been in existence since 1905, it is about being intentional.
If you would like to learn more or would like help with your Marketing or Customer strategy, please get in touch with us at studio@thethreadgroup.com
Oyin Awosika is a Director at The Thread Group. With her Retail and FMCG background, she focuses on Marketing and Customer Strategy, helping businesses leverage data and craft solutions to meet the ever-evolving needs of their customers. She is also guiding clients on their journey to transform brand interactions and experiences with the design-led Studio team.