subject: The 5 Keys To Understanding Your Customers [print this page] Making your business as successful as possible means getting to know as much as possible about what is on your customers' minds.
Let's look at five different ways to can get access to the information you need to find out what your market is really thinking.
The best way to find out about your customers will vary depending on whether your business already has lots of customers.
1. Existing customers: Conduct a survey of your own customers and find out about their worries and problems. Your aim here is not to be asking them what they want. You want to know what's on their mind. What keeps them awake at night?
2. Google searches: These days, the first place many people go for information about any topic is internet search engines such as Google. Just entering a few words related to the topic - known as 'keywords' - will give you a huge amount of information about your marketplace. Don't get too bogged down at this stage on thinking about the exact keywords - take into account what people would enter in if they were searching for information on the subject and see what shows. Try to be as specific as possible in the words that you use.
3. Social media: The explosion of social media has opened up access to a great deal of information about many markets. This includes social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, blogs, micro-blogging services such as Twitter, online forums and social bookmarking sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon.
4. Competitors: One of the best ways of finding out about your market is to check out your competition - what they are selling, how much they are charging and how they do their marketing. Your competition will show up when you carry out an online search - both in the natural search and in the ads that come up along the top and down the right of the search page.
5. News - online and offline: Checking out what's in the news is an important way of keeping track of your market and current issues of concern. Offline media such as specialist newspapers and magazines, local newspapers and TV news can tell you a lot about current trends. You can set up a Google Alerts at www.google.com/alerts to receive regular email updates on your topic of interest.
All these methods of research will help you get to know your market better.
When you have a good understanding of the people in your market - and what they want - you are well positioned to help more people and make more money.
