Let’s talk about how to do customer research that will help you to increase revenue in your business.”

 

If you plan on getting customers in order to generate revenue from your services, you need to become an expert in your field but you also must be become an expert in understanding your customers.

 

A lot of new business owners make the mistake of spending a massive amount of time on SEO and other traffic tactics before getting a real understanding of their target market. This is a huge mistake. If you attract the wrong people they will have no interest and your services.

 

There is simply no point in bringing people to your website if you are not confident that you’re offering exactly what those specific people want. 

 

You’re probably thinking, well I plan to offer my services to a wide range of people. It’s impossible to know what all of them want. And you’re right. This is why you need to create a persona of your client. This is the process of creating a detailed profile of a typical client and it allows you to create specific services, marketing materials and content that will appeal to one person. This is obviously much easier than speculating about the needs of thousands of different people.

 

The research that we’re about to discuss relates to individuals but if you want to take a B2B approach then the only difference is that this research should be applied to the individual decision maker in the business that you will be targeting.  

 

First first step is the easiest – researching the demographics of the customer. This can include any statistic that describes your typical customer. This is a list of the most common demographics:

If you already have traffic coming into your website it’s relatively easy to figure out the demographics. All you need to do is install Google analytics and it will tell you everything you need. If you have an active Facebook presence you can also get demographic information from the analytics in Facebook. 

 

If you’re just getting started and need to know how to get demographic information while having no existing customers, you can do your best to predict your customer persona. For our example, you can just Google “demographics of [insert target customer type]”.

 

Go ahead and repeat this for several related keywords and look for trends. 

 

Psychographics allow you to add an additional layer of information to your persona buy also describing your client’s values, preferences, and attitudes. You can do this by you considering the following questions:

 

Answers to these questions are obviously not found in analytics tools. You’ll need to get this information by observing and maybe even interacting with your potential customers. If you already know about forums and social media groups that attract your audience then you need to spend some quality time reading as many questions and answers as possible in order to get a detailed understanding of your customer. 

Look for information about what they like and don’t like. Look for common problems where people are struggling to find satisfactory solutions. 

 

Think about how your service would be perceived by these people. What do you think they would like or not like? Do you need to add or subtract something in order for your services to appeal to these potential customers? Do you need to add or subtract content in order to appeal to these potential customers? 

 

If you don’t have any forums of groups in mind you can obviously just Google them but one good place to start is Reddit. The reason Reddit is useful is that it usually has very large number of participants and this is obviously important when you’re trying to develop a persona. You need your persona to reflect the needs of your entire audience rather than a small number of individuals that might dominate the discussion on a small forum. The other reason that Reddit it Is useful is that it uses the concept of upvoting. This makes it easy for you to see what your audience likes and doesn’t like because they’re literally voting on what they like and don’t like. 

 

You spent a lot of time looking at what people are saying but interestingly people don’t always act in a way that is consistent with what they say. For example, there’re a lot of people that pretend to read a lot more than they actually do. If you’re planning on offering content that will attract real paying customers then you need to understand how people actually consume content rather than how they say they will consume it. 

 

You need to know:

You also need to research the issue of credibility. If you want people to consume your content or buy your  services you need to establish your credibility first. Take a look at the comments in the forums and groups and figure out who seems to have developed credibility and who hasn’t. For those that have developed credibility try to figure out why? Is it their background? Is it simply the result of a lot of activity in this group or forum? What do you need to do to build credibility in the eyes of the same people?