How much do you know your customers? Do you have any idea about their income, the online activities, and their problems in relevance to your solutions? According to a digital marketing report, 46% of the companies do not conduct research pf their customers properly and lose their clients. If you are unaware of the research methods, you are one part of that percentage.
If you want to build an online community for your business, you must simultaneously conduct research on your customers. You do this research to recognize the customer segments, demands, and behaviors.
There are two types of customer research, i.e., primary research and secondary research. Primary research is collected through surveys, questionnaires, and other methods. Secondary Research has the data that is already a part of the working plans. It supports your information and makes it part of your research.
Benefits of Research
Researching your customers allows you to attract them to your platform. They will have an impression that the business owner has done his/her revision before approaching the consumer. When you are researching your customers, you will experience a lot of benefits. Some of those benefits are as follows:
1. Better Understanding of your Audience
It is not a secret that your audience is the backbone of your business’ success. Recently, Strikingly allows the website owners to recognize the audience via names and emails. Therefore, if you want to conduct customer research, you must listen to your audience’s demands and fulfill them simultaneously.
When you ask different questions from your audience, you will listen to things that you like or dislike. This is crucial for the evolution of your business as you will identify the areas where you are doing well and the areas that require improvement.
For example, you may like to uncover product gaps and look into the new offers to meet the demands of your respective customers. Research enables you to find the best demographics which suit your audience. You will learn in more detail about your audience and see whether they like your current offerings.
2. Audience Segmentation
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Every person in the audience has different desires and demands. If you give them a generic message as one, your marketing campaigns will get nowhere. Therefore, you must research to get vital information for segmentation purposes.
If you want to know that what is customer research, you must also know about customer segmentation. Audience segmentation prioritizes the breaking down of the audience into smaller groups. These groups are divided based on commonalities, including hobbies, strategies, demographics, or personal interests.
When you consider segmenting the audience, you can create relevant content and products. It will allow you to provide a better customer experience.
3. Stay Ahead of your Competitors
Your competitors will have a considerable influence on your business’ success or decline. As a business owner, you would wish the leads to choose your company over your competitors. However, they will only select if you are performing better than them. With better customer research methods, you will understand how the target audience regards you and your competitors.
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You can ask about your business and your competitor’s business to further understand your audience’s perspectives. Strikingly knows how important questionnaires are to improving the services of an online business.
This is why we are happy to tell you about one of our features that will allow you to collect information about your audience’s perspectives regarding your product or service. Strikingly’s Pro Plan allows you to add a custom form for your respective customer questionnaire on your website.
4. Measure Brand Awareness
Brand management is an important aspect of every business. As a business owner, you would like your customers to recognize your brand and make it popular. If you conduct customer research, you will be able to know how the audience regards your brand.
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If you own a startup, you may receive opinions that encourage and discourage you. However, you should take the positive points, but not ignore the negative points. By ignoring the negative points, you will ignore the chance to improve your brand. As a business owner, you must always seek to enhance your brand and increase its awareness. By ignoring the criticism, you will only halt your progress.
The research will allow you to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your brand. If the audience isn’t familiar with your brand, it means that you must work on it to improve its recognition.
5. Gain Product Insight
When you add a new product to the market, you may wonder whether it will sit well with the audience or not. You may feel that a new product will be a breath of fresh air to the audience, but fate turns to be in the opposite way. With improved customer research methods, you will understand whether the audience is fond of that product or not before you release it to the market.
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In your research, you can ask questions to the audience about what they make of the new product. Then, you can wait for their responses. If the answer is positive, you would not think twice and add the product. However, if the response is negative, you may rethink your decision.
Tips for an Effective Research
If you want to conduct successful research on your customers, you must pay attention to every detail. How you conduct the research will have an impact on your audience. Here are some of the tips on achieving effective research for the betterment of your business.
1. Make It Purposeful
Many people in business make a mistake when they miss out on huge details regarding customers. For example, they will do a Q&A on Quora about their products or services to ensure that they will get the audience’s responses. However, the problem is that the Quora platform is too generic to attract audiences towards you.
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When you conduct customer research, it must have a purpose alongside it. Whether that purpose is product development or the evolvement of your business, you must prioritize it. Your analysis must have a specific direction so that your audience remains focused on it.
When you completely understand your research, you can create relevant questions to ensure that your audience gains interest in it. It will eventually benefit your research. Once the audience finds your subject interesting, they will go through the body of your research.
2. Be Careful with Incentives
Numerous organizations tend to use incentives to attract audiences so they can conduct customer research. Even though it can be an ideal way to increase the conversion rate of your platform, you must also be careful with the incentive size. You may want your audience to give appropriate answers regarding your research.
If you have an incentive, such as a $5 gift card, your audience will not find your research serious. They would just go through the entire research, knowing that they have to get the gift card. This strategy would lead to skewed answers because people will just answer questions randomly for the sake of the incentive. If you want to prevent this from happening, you must be careful with your incentives.
3. Make It Creative
You can go through numerous types of customer research samples, there will be one common denominator within each of those samples. They will all be creative. Therefore, if you want to conduct effective research on your customers, you must follow the same wavelength.
For example, if you put out a message of ‘Go through this research’ or any other generic message for your audience, they will not find any interest and ignore it. Webinars have gained popularity across many businesses in today’s period as entrepreneurs use them to get their points across to the audience.
You shouldn’t just complete your research and notify your audience about it randomly. You should think about the ways that make them feel excited about your research. They should be excited about your research before they even go through it. If you can make your audience interested in your research, it will generate effective results for you.
Conclusion
Customer research methods allow you to better understand your audience, which helps in making more suitable products for them. Once you know the demands of your audience, you will be able to provide a better experience for them. This understanding will eventually lead to more conversions for your business.
Strikingly is waiting for you to make the right decision regarding your business. If you find our content helpful, you can look into all the research tips that we have provided to benefit your business. You must make sure that you prioritize them highly and ensure that your business evolves to further heights. To provide a great experience, you must welcome them properly to your platform and look into the problems they are facing. After you identify their problems, make sure to resolve them efficiently. Do not approach your customers without researching, or they will run away from you before you know it.
