Effective Business Growth Strategy (Tap Into the Mind of Your Customers)

What if you have the power of telepathy? How about having the power to read other people’s minds? As a business owner, these are two extraordinary capabilities you surely want to have especially as you strive to grow and expand. Understanding what your customers are thinking will positively influence your business plans and overall growth strategy.

Sadly, there’s no technology in our time that can do such and even if the technology exists, it will still need to pass through stringent scrutiny because of the legal and moral issues that its use can result to. Around the world, there are stringent laws on privacy which are applied to different types of communication media. You simple can’t hack into somebody else’s personal information without any legal purpose.

The Complicated (But Understandable) Mind of Your Customers

The human mind is a complicated machine. It is able to power choices while enabling instincts and impulses on certain occasions. For instance, a particular person would purchase a specific brand of phone not because it’s cheap or more advanced but because he/she simply loves the brand. Others would purchase it because they feel it has the full set of features that will serve their determined purpose. Still, there’s this other person who will purchase the same phone out of impulse or peer influence.

The driving force in each of these situations differ from one another, the first one did the purchase out of personal choice, the second is driven by need, while the third one bought the product because of impulse and outside influence. Customer behaviors and purchase patterns have been studied through the years and understanding such is not as hard as rocket science. You may not have access to every detail of the thoughts in your customer’s mind but using some existing studies and patterns to try to make sense of it is possible.

Going back to the topic on business, if you are to enhance and grow the venture that you have started, it is crucial that you understand what your customers are thinking and know how you can make sense of them in order to fuel business growth and enhance your overall marketing strategy. Here are 5 effective ways in how you can understand the mind of your customers so you can start taking your business to the next level.

1. Collect Customer Feedback Whenever Possible

Customer feedback is a great instrument for getting an insight on what customers think about your product or brand. It is supposed to shape your overall approach in product design, marketing strategies, and overall branding and guide your every step in improving your business as a whole. Customers love sharing what they think and letting others know about what they felt after using your product or service that is why giving them a venue where they can share such views is important.

Once you are able to gather feedback, consolidate and group them according to the sentiments and type of issues raised so studying them and finding solutions would be easier. You surely have noticed how big companies employ such feedback collection strategy in their customer communication so why not implement it in your business as well? If you’re having a hard time enticing customers to leave feedback, you can choose to offer something free if they leave feedback after purchasing your product or patronizing your service. This will not only increase feedback rate but also give customers the impression that you’re concerned about improving your product or business for them.

2. Collect Customer Reviews Every Time

Another very useful tool in understanding the mind of your customers is through reviews. A review is more focused on the tiny details of your product or service and is usually coming from customers who have used your brand for a longer period of time compared to feedback. It is when customers share with others what they’ve experienced while using your product in an in-depth manner with the purpose of informing others about its benefits, advantages, and disadvantages. Most product reviews aim to help others make a smart purchase decision and unlike feedback that is more general in scope, reviews would normally focus on the product.

We live in an economy where customer reviews are highly valued so why not go with the flow and place those valuable and honest reviews about your business in your website for everyone to read. Doing this will improve customer acquisition while enhancing your customer retention rate. So go ahead and start thinking how you can better encourage customers to leave a review whenever they come in contact with your business.

3. Show Empathy By Being Around All The Time

One common mistake that business owners do is failing to be around during the times when customers need them. For instance, you could be earning double for the first few months of your product’s release or your shop’s opening but if you didn’t employ some skilled customer support agents to handle the large volume of support queries, your business will be lacking on a crucial component which creates an image of empathy for your business.

Successful brands all have one thing in common; they have round-the-clock customer relations agents who are handling complaint and issues resolution in the most empathetic way possible. Don’t just hire people who can communicate well, choose those who are able to make customers feel that they are being heard and that your business is doing its best to help solve the issues that they are facing. When you have a strong customer support team, it is easier to understand which aspects of your product or brand needs serious fixing and which areas needs to be improved.

4. Listen To What Customers Say in Social Media

Popular products and brands have a presence in different social media platforms and the purpose for such move is like a two-edged sword. Having a closed group or an FB page will make that all-important space for collecting customer sentiments and feedback. People love to share their thoughts and they also want to be heard.

That is why it is important that you also have a social media manager who will be in charge of everything pertaining to your business’s presence in such platforms. Continually monitor these spaces for valuable sentiments, reactions, and have every query answered all the time (if possible).

5. Use Surveys To Collect Valuable Insights from Customers

Surveys directed to customers have long been used as tools for gaining deeper understanding on their thoughts. And thankfully, this tool really works. You can place surveys on your shop, your social media pages, or even send it as an email to your customers but just make sure that you clearly define the purpose on why you are conducting such activity.

Also, be extra selective on the things that you’ll place and carefully tailor it on the aspects of your business that you think needs some improvement on. For instance, if you want to improve your shop’s overall layout then be sure to include questions that will revolve around such topic. There are plenty of tools that can help you create such surveys so what’s left for you to do is to sequence the questions well and make sure that the survey looks enticing. You can even give rewards or discounts just to encourage plenty of customers to participate.

To Understand Customers, Think Like a Customer

All of us take the role of a customer almost every day in our lives so thinking like a customer shouldn’t be that hard. If you are building a physical business, try to pretend like a customer and enter your store premises, approach the order counter and take a look at the menu (if it’s a fast food or restaurant).

If you built an online shop then browse through every page there is and even do test orders to see how smooth the overall order experience is. Look into every product page and make sure to skim through the product descriptions to see if it delivers the right information for customers to make that decision quickly and place an order without having second thoughts. Try to walk in your customer’s shoes and the understanding will surely flow in naturally.

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