Understanding Your Customers

No matter what the quality of your product/service is, it won’t capture the market unless buyers don’t believe in it. To persuade them you need to know what they are into. You need to figure out what your customers need.

Draw Your Audience Circle

Communicators who understand their audience achieve the most! Yes, it is true. You need to identify your audience and analyze them. Audience are generally composed of people with different perceptions. Sometimes you are familiar with your audience, other times you may not. When your Audience is not familiar you should make a separate list of them. Put yourself in their shoes. This way you can gain insight of what they want. The best thing you can do to them is improve your communication.

Research Methods

Audience research is any communication research carried out on a specific segment of people to formulate any conclusion on the basis of their attribute, knowledge, interest, perception, etc. The point of doing this is to get better insights of the target audience.
There are several categories in which your audience fits into. This may be on the basis of income, profession, sex, age, etc.
There are various methods to know your customers −

• Surveys/Questionnaires − It is relatively an easy and accurate method that provides you quantitative results that are easy to measure and analyze. You can create them and distribute via newsletters, e-mails, social posts, etc., or advertise on online tools, like survey monkey, etc.
• Interviews − An interview is a face-to-face conversation. You can communicate with customers directly to gather data. It can be conducted in person, on phone, online, etc.
• Focus Groups − Here a researcher asks a group of relevant people questions. These questions are debated upon and a final conclusion is formulated.
• Observation − Here a researcher observes the customers and pin data about them on the basis of observation.

All the above-mentioned methods work for sure but be mindful of the ethical implications upon them.

Segmenting Data as Per Relevancy

Audience segmentation is dividing your customers into groups on the basis of certain characteristics. Website visitors have variable needs and perception. You need a website that serves all. For this, visitor segmentation is useful.
You can do this in various ways, some of which are −

• New and Repeating Visitors − You can offer a beginners guide to new visitors and different and detailed page to recurring ones.
  
  • Source of origin − You may segment them as per the source that landed on your page from. Like, through PPC, SERP, social sites, etc.
• Geography − You may target customers from a particular place. This comes useful for ecommerce sections or service based like cab booking service, etc.
• Behavioral Targeting − This is worth segmenting especially for ecommerce. For example, if a particular product was more searched by men in this time slot. You may offer discount on another similar time slot.
• Conversion Basis − You may track what channel gives you the maximum conversion. Like, do Facebook advertisements bring you more conversion or AdWords?