If you don’t truly understand your customer, can you ever really build a great marketing strategy? Of course not, because knowing your customers and audience is the foundational pillar of good marketing and effective sales nowadays. After all, you might have the best product on the market, but you can’t expect anyone to care if your messaging is generic and your online presence stale and uninspiring. 

When you’re trying to act on the most important marketing trends for 2021, you will find that understanding your target demographic is what drives every marketing tactic you employ. You can’t move forward without customer research, some trial and error, and continuous optimization.

To that end, let’s rebuild your marketing strategy on a better foundation by taking a look at the five tips on understanding your customers better. With this information, you will be able to take your digital marketing, sales, and your entire business to the next level. 

Analyze each and every touchpoint

Firstly, understand that to know your customer, you can’t just analyze one interaction, one communication channel, or one touchpoint. The online world has a number of touchpoints that connect the customer to your brand, and each one can yield interesting and actionable insights. To move forward, your first priority should be to list all touchpoints and start digging for valuable data.

You can put every touchpoint into the perspective of a mini SWOT analysis, which is a great and simple way to structure your research and create easily-digestible reports. Note down every marketing touchpoint, and put all data and findings into the unique strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for each touchpoint.

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This is your foundation and it will give you a bird’s eye view of your customers, what their pain points are, what they like and dislike, how they use these touchpoints, and much more.

Leverage social listening to understand your audience

The next step would be to take advantage of social listening platforms to ascertain the position of your brand in the hearts and minds of your customers. While it is important that you spark up a conversation with your customers as well, keep in mind that you’ll not always be able to get honest answers, or enough answers to make detailed observations.

That’s why turning to social listening can be very beneficial for your marketing and sales strategies. Knowing how and in what context people are mentioning your brand will allow you to optimize your communication, content creation and marketing, your innovation process, the marketing methods you use and how you use them, and achieve a number of different goals. Most importantly, though, social listening allows you to get to know your customers without intruding their lives online. 

Understand how your customers want to pay

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is being overly concerned about the creativity of their campaigns instead of the functionality of their messaging. In more concrete terms, you need to look for the functional, quality-of-life features that your customers want instead of focusing only on creative ads and posts. For example, the way people want to pay for products and services is a big insight into how you should approach your marketing strategy.

In Australia, marketers have realized that people want to get their hands on products right now, but prefer to pay later. Currently, delayed payment platforms like the Humm buy now pay later in Australia are popular with customers and businesses, and marketers are heavily promoting the buy now pay later trend to appeal to the modern customer group.

Payment flexibility is a functional perk that people want, and you need to discover the payment methods that are popular in your market in order to motivate buyers. Strive to understand your customers through the features and perks they’re looking for, rather than the fancy copy that may or may not turn them into leads.

Handle negative and positive reviews the right way

Reviews can decide the fate of your brand in today’s oversaturated online marketplace. People have so many brands to choose from that the reviews are about the only thing they have to differentiate between the good, the bad, and the downright ugly. 

What’s more, reviews hold a ton of information you can use to your advantage and improve engagement across the board. Make sure to reply to and handle all reviews in a personalized way, but use them to analyze customer behavior as well, spot patterns, and derive meaningful insights. Ultimately, your reviews should help you shape your marketing, sales, and support strategies. 

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Capitalize on and learn from mobile customers

Lastly, keep in mind that mobile commerce is booming around the world. Your goal is to market your brand to more people but also to sell more, and the mobile demographic opens up a new world of marketing and conversion opportunities.

That said, it’s not just enough to optimize your site for mobile – you also need to understand your mobile audience. Typically, what you will find out is that mobile shoppers want seamless browsing on their smartphones, more simplified checkout and shopping journeys, mobile payments, and above all, better mobile loyalty programs. 

Be sure to invest in a mobile loyalty program that keeps people engaged and sparks a conversion with your brand. This will allow you to monitor their behavior and learn more about your mobile customers in the long run.

Wrapping up

Understanding your customers should be the foundation of your marketing and sales strategies. Only by making an effort and using the right tools to understand them can you truly optimize your approach for maximum lead generation, acquisition, and customer retention in 2021.