The Brilliant Tools to Learn About Your Customers
What’s the key to growing a successful business?
In marketing, it all boils down to one thing: you must learn all you can about your customers.
When you truly understand who your ideal customers are, your marketing strategy enters a whole new level.
You’ll know exactly what kind of content to create, where and when to post it, and how to adapt your offerings to meet their needs.
Luckily, there are loads of brilliant tools available that can help you learn about your customers.
In this blog, I’ll list a few of the best ones to get you started.
But first, let’s talk about why it’s so important to put effort into understanding your customers.
The Brilliant Tools to Learn About Your Customers
Why It’s Crucial To Understand Your Customers
The world of marketing can be a fickle one. Trends come and go overnight, your usual marketing channels are constantly evolving, and how the algorithms work is anyone’s best guess from week to week!
But amidst all this confusion, one thing remains the same – your ideal customer!
Regardless of what rules keep changing online, if you truly know and understand your customers, you will stay on the right track.
For example, recent iOS 14 and 15 updates have sent ripples of worry through the business community. First, there were changes to the way you track and target your customers across the internet. Now, the way you manage and analyse your customers through email marketing looks set to transform.
While this may be concerning for some businesses, it really just pushes us to ditch the tricks and spying and create more honest, authentic relationships with our customers – and that requires us to understand them!
The Best Tools To Help You Learn About Your Customers
The great news is that there are some excellent tools out there to help you understand your customers better. They are:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) is an absolute treasure trove of information. Don’t just use it to find out basic surface info – it’s capable of telling you so much more than just bounce rates and conversions!
Dig deep and find out how your customers navigate around your site and what they are searching for while they’re there. You can even use it to gain insight into what’s called psychographic data (look at the ‘In-Market Segments’ and ‘Other Categories’), including the interests, habits and “affinities” of your audience.
Seriously, don’t underestimate the value of GA to learn about your customers. Spend some time learning how to fully utilise this tool, and it will reward you with some real gems.
Google Trends
This tool may not get as much attention as Google Analytics, but it is still an important one to add to the inventory.
Google Trends can help you learn about your customers’ interests. You can see what search term topics are trending in your niche, then create relevant content in response.
Social Media Analytics
Social media is a vital part of any marketing strategy, and each platform comes with some pretty great tools to help you understand the behaviour of your followers and subscribers.
Spend time looking at the demographics of your audience on each platform. Don’t forget to check how each kind of post is tracking to see what your customers are responding to.
Social Mention
Another freebie, this tool shows you a real-time analysis of social media. It looks for mentions of your brand across 100 different social platforms then organises them into a single stream, allowing you to listen in to what people say about you online.
Facebook Ads and Google Ads Libraries
Another great way to learn about potential content ideas for your customers is to look at what your competitors are up to! Facebook Ads & the Googloe Ads Library allows you to peruse your competitors’ social advertising creative and get a sense of how ‘active’ they are.
This can be really helpful for formulating your own ads strategy to reach your customers (don’t be a copycat though make sure you are first and foremost focusing on genuaine and authentic content for your audience!)
Stats New Zealand
Not every tool has to be fancy! Sometimes, more traditional information sources can provide valuable data to help you learn about your customers.
Stats NZ is one such tool. It contains detailed demographic information that you can sort by region, age, gender, and income. It even has a tool called Market Mapper, which helps you understand where your customers are located.
Connect With Your Target Audience
Did you know that most of us are exposed to anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 ads every single day?
It’s no surprise then that the human brain has learned to filter out a lot of the marketing content we come across online.
It’s not possible for us to pay attention to every detail in our daily lives. Our brains learn to focus on what’s relevant and important to us and block out the things that aren’t.
So, your job as a marketer is to create content that is relevant to your customers – content that gets through that automatic brain filter and causes them to stop scrolling and pay attention.
What kind of content that should be depends on your business and your audience.
When you use the above tools to learn about your customer, you gain more power to stand out from the crowd to capture – and keep – their attention.
We use these tools as part of our kit to manage our clients media campaigns, and we also work with organisations to help them upskill their teams. We’d love to help so get in touch to chat!
