Understanding your customer on a deeper level

Knowing your customer at the beginning of your business journey is essential. As you grow, scale and maybe even implement strategies to pivot your business, knowing your customer is even more important in order for you to retain the members and customers that you have and wish to keep, as well as attracting new people to your business.

Understanding the needs, wants and desires of your customers is a continuous cycle that can:

• Bring in new and recurring sales revenue

• Build a loyal base of raving fans and referrals

• Help to create rewarding relationships that become mutually beneficial

• Support your strategies in packaging up your product and service offering in new and innovative ways

• Enable you to create a successful and trusted brand in the market place so that you can actively compete against others in the same or similar fields, as well as potentially leading the marketplace forward into new and exciting directions

Now, knowing your customer on a deeper level is no easy quest, it can be time consuming, challenging, and often make you feel as though you don't actually know them at all. However, if you put in the effort and truly desire to understand more about them, you can reap the rewards and benefits, not just in the short-term, but over the lifetime of your business.

Steps to understanding your customer

Here are a few steps to help start you off on your journey to truly understanding your ideal customer and looking at how what you have to offer can truly meet their needs and result in your business excelling both in customer service, and profitability.

1. Understand their pain points - Think about the things that are keeping them awake at night, the things that they may not openly tell you, but that if you put yourself in their shoes, you could understand would cause frustration, amongst potentially many other feelings and emotions.

2. Seek out their needs and desires - Think about what they might actually need or desire to have in their life that would actually resolve or go some way to solving their problems, or enhancing their lives in someway. Not everyone is the same and your customers may actually have a mix of needs and desires that differ from one another, but if you look at a subset of your existing customers and their needs and desires, you should start to see patterns and behaviours that inform you of what key needs and desires are for your customer base are which you can then use as insight.

3. Delight them and open up new opportunities - This doesn't have to mean that you have a product or service to sell them yet, this could be as simple as listening to them and talking to them about their situation, needs, and needs etc. Everyone likes to feel listened to, so by taking the time to do this you may find that you can create that feeling of delight that then enables you to discuss potential opportunities and ideas with them and receive their feedback. This feedback can then support you in carving out new products, services, ways of working, and strategies that can help your business grow.

There are lots of other steps that you can take to uncover what really aligns with your customer base, these three are just a starter to help you embark on the journey to business success.

The most important thing is that you have fun with it and enjoy the process, no matter what route you take. After all, business should be fun, and by creating an engaging strategy, you will keep yourself and your team bought into the process and truly caring what it is that your customers need and want.