The Way to learn about your customers, for Inexpensive

Among the most important techniques to help your company is to know the demographics and interests of your clients. If you don’t know your customers, it is hard to write content for them, develop products for them, or even promote to them.

In this post, I will clarify a few inexpensive tactics that I’ve used at FringeSport to narrow down our client demographics.

Customer demographics, interests

The underlying principle for me is to be interested once you see something which may help understand customers. Similarly if you see something which does not make sense, dig into that, also.

One example of this is when I worked for Living Immediate, the consumer goods retailer. Among other products, we offered air conditioners. 1 day a customer called me. He wished to know how many BTUs of air conditioning he had to counteract a certain number of watts from light bulbs.

I was confused about why this client had numerous lights in his home. Finally it came out that he had been conducting a”farming” operation in his home .

I don’t believe he had been farming tomatoes.

He had many grow lamps and they were putting out a tremendous quantity of warmth — hence his need for air conditioners.

It was that this client wasn’t alone. As time passes, we had a small but valuable set of customers who were purchasing our air conditioners for their grow homes. If I had been interested in the very first customer, we would not have known about this important and interesting demographic.

This brings me to my first low budget technique for understanding your clients: Speak to them. If your organization has a customer support staff, sit for a day or 2. Speak with customers and prospects.

If you do not have many call-in clients, you can call them. Ask how their orders fared. Engage them in conversation. How are they using your products? Where do they reside? What are their interests?

You may get a whole lot out by being friendly and seeing. You will probably discern some commonality.

It is even better if you can speak with your clients in person. In case you’ve got a physical store, this is straightforward. Otherwise, call clients who live nearby and invite them for a visit. If needed, provide a small incentive.

For FringeSport, it is easy. A number of our clients have garage gyms. We can provide to consult with them on building their gyms, offer to feature them on our social media feeds, or perhaps just work out together!

Google Analytics is another way to learn about your clients. Google Analytics will show your clients’ age, sex, interests, and much more. In my experience, it tends to be quite accurate.

Next is to go through the orders on your own ecommerce platform. I sometimes review 100 orders on our Shopify shop to verify our male-female customer ratio and anything else that jumps out.

The next step is to use Facebook’s advertising tools, to collect information regarding visitors to your webpage.

Moreover, if you’ve got large competitors with a similar client base, try to figure out who their clients are. 1 means to do this is via a look-a-like audience on Facebook.

Develop a customer character

As soon as you’ve learned about clients, assemble a persona. This is a hypothetical, perfect client, based on the demographic data you’ve uncovered.

By way of instance, with the example of the indoor farmer, I might have concluded that our clients were 25-years old, live in California, and have a moderate (money ) income. They are searching for air conditioners for farming. Their average order size is approximately $2,000 and they dictate about annually.

Beyond this, I must determine where that client hangs out, off and online. Then I could hang out there, too, and promote.

These are a couple of methods that I use to find out about clients. Did I miss any? Do you agree or disagree? Let me know in the comments, below.