There’s nothing more important in business than success and stability: if your company goes the distance, you need both in the long term. You need money coming in from customers (or clients, depending on your business model), and you need it happening reliably to feel confident about the future and make plans for it.
Achieving success requires many different tactics, but one of the most important is listening to your customers. Today, we’re looking at why that’s important and some ways you can achieve it.
Watching Customer Behaviour
One of the simplest ways to get insight into how your customers think and make their decisions is by observing what they do. How long do they spend in your stores? When do they come in? How much do they spend, on what, and after how long spent searching?
Suppose you know what people come in looking for and how they look for it. In that case, you can design a journey for your customers to ensure their path through your shops offers them lots of chances to discover other products and present them with your key products before their patience is exhausted.
You can do the same thing online. Heat mapping tools allow you to find your website’s most visited, clicked-on, and read pages. You can follow the customer journey in the same way: finding out where people arrive from to browse your site, what they search for, what they click past, and what they pore over allows you to optimize your site for the customer experience, finding the perfect balance between a frictionless purchase experience and opportunities for discovery.
Market Research
Market research can inform and improve your business approach in many ways. One of the most basic and vital is brand tracking. This form of a survey asks members of the public to rank your business against your rivals on the key qualities that define your brand so you can recognize whether your plans for communicating your business to customers have been successful. If customers are not rating you for the main qualities you’ve been trying to speak to them, it’s evidence you need to rethink your plans or find the customers your branding efforts are working for and target them instead.
