Understand your customers' needs

The number one thing we hear from clients nowadays is they’re having difficulty understanding what their customers need and want, and knowing this will help you align your sales and marketing efforts much better. While you are not your customer and will never be, it does help to put yourself in their shoes and anticipate what their needs and wants are.

According to Daniel Burrus, CEO of Burrus Research, a company helping leaders create anticipatory and innovative organisations by using predictable game-changing technology, companies should ask themselves: “as an organisation, am I being left out of this new revenue generation, or am I going to start paying attention to the exponential changes in processing power, storage, and bandwidth and what that allows me to do?” He further states that we always tend to under-anticipate our customers’ needs and wants and uses a great example to prove his point. “You have to understand that customers will always under-answer. Why? Because they don’t know what’s technically possible. Let’s face it, nobody ever asked for an iPod, an iPhone, or an iPad, yet Apple has done quite well.”

So, how does this work? It’s always important to keep your customer’s expectations in mind and create suitable solutions to their problems.

As Sarah Mills, an Inbound Marketing Consultant from Spitfire Inbound so clearly notes: “if you know what your customers want and what their pain points are, you won’t irritate them with unnecessary content (otherwise known as ‘spam’).  You’ll be answering their questions and giving them what they need, when they need it.”

Spitfire Inbound has a few tips and tricks to create a great customer experience. Here’s our overview:

1. Get inside a customer’s head and heart

Look beyond your business and its goals and try put yourself in their shoes: understand what they need, help them avoid their fears by actively solving their problems, and make sure you ask them the right questions to close that sales loop and in turn get the right answers. Johnny Campbell, a professional speaker in sales training, suggests the following: “enabling your people to spend time getting all the pieces in place for their customer, really understanding how to meet their needs fully and even exceptionally is a way to get them motivated and excited to be part of your team. It builds team spirit and morale.”

2. Communication is key

The main reason for collecting important information from customers is to improve the quality of the products and services you’re providing. It’s ideal to talk to your customer as it will give you a greater understanding of what their needs are. You can communicate via the following means:

• Face-to-face: Talk to your customers in person to get direct information from them.

• Over the phone: Having conversations over the phone means you can ask them intuitive questions.

• Social media: Using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media networks can help you do your research properly without being invasive. These platforms provide a great space to ask questions, listen and monitor what people say about your company. The following tools can help you monitor your reputation online:

1. Google Alerts- Get access to content related to your brand by doing Google searches. It’s fairly simple to set up any alert and get notified when your brand is mentioned online.
2. Tweet Alarm- A lot of tweets are shared by millions of users per day. Create an automatic monitoring alarm system when someone tweets about your company or product.
3. Social Mention - Want to know what others are saying about you, your brand, or your products? This site rates all content by sentiment (positive, negative, etc), date, and popularity, and will ensure that you're always in the know regarding your product reviews and feedback.  

• Contact forms (what we suggest): Have a contact form available on your website so users can email you with their questions and suggestions.

Approach your customers first and they will come to you. Marketers acting on an inbound trigger or a sales alert are more likely to identify their customers challenges and act on it.

Always remember that you built your company with specific goals in mind , so it is very important to get up close and personal with your customers and satisfy their needs too.

Penquin knows what their customers want, so try out our website grader to get insights on your SEO and page performance: