Learn everything you need to learn about your customers

Do you run your own blog or a mobile app? Maybe you work for an ad agency or in sales? If you are in any of these fields (or related fields), the success or failure of your endeavors depend on how well you can connect with customers.

If your message resonates with people, you will get sales, shares, and subscriptions; if you make a message that no one cares about, however, you will fail. If only there was a way to figure out exactly what your customers want.

Provide your customers with what they will by by asking them

Imagine for a moment that you are selling sofas - huge, expensive sofas. Now imagine that you have tried to sell your products to owners of tiny, high-rise rental apartments in the central businss district of the city. How many do you think you will sell? Likely none.

Not knowing what your customers need or want is a surefire recipe for disaster. So when entering a new market, it is vitally important to conduct in-depth studies to fully understand your customers.

If you do not do your homework, then your prized products may likely end up gathering dust in the discard pile instead of bringing in good revenue. Surprisingly, this is what happened to Apple when they launched the iPhone 3G in the Japanese Market.

In the year 2007, consumers in the Japanese market bought 5 million mobile phones. The next year, when Apple showcased their new 3G phones, they sold an abysmal 200,000 units - a mere 4% of the Japanese market share. They sold mostly to already established Apple users. So what was the cause of this failure?

Consumers in Japan were used to shooting videos and watching television programs on their mobiles and the iPhone 3G did not even have a video camera! Apple had failed to figure out that buyers in the Japanese market had different demands than those in the US and Europe, and suffered.

To learn about the needs of your customers, you have to ask them direct. Unlike Apple, the Turkey based appliance company, Beko conducted interviews with potential customers before launching their clothes dryer in the Chinese market.

As a result, Beko's marketing team learned that a large percentage of the Chinese consumers believe that there is a spiritual component of exposing your garments to the sun.

So Beko designed their dryers for the Chinese market with a feature that allows the user to stop the drying cycle halfway through, allowing customers to dry their clothes in the heat of the sun. Their diligence was seemingly rewarded; their dryers are indeed selling very well!

Creating "Buyer Personas" help you better know your customer

During your next trip to the supermarket, look around you and see if you can figure out what the other patrons are using to evaluate the products on the shelves. Different customers have different ways of choosing items. As an example, when choosing eggs, some people will go for organic eggs, while others just want the lowest priced ones.

If you are in the market of egg production, you need to keep in mind why different customers behave in a certain way, in order to meet their needs and create a product voice that resonates with them.

In order to help you figure out the "why", you need to create what is called a "Buyer Persona". It is a detailed description of different types of prospective customers' problems and needs, identify their patterns and target what types of solutions they are paying interest in.

Let's go back to egg manufacturers: If they know which people want eggs that are organic and which people want the cheap eggs, and if they know the motivation for these preferences, then they can send the appropriate message to the correct customer, instead of broadcasting the same message to all customers.

Oftentimes, knowing a customer's buyer persona will reveal a lot of things about their purchasing habits that you otherwise would never be aware of. Let's take a look at this example to get an idea of how this works.

Famous marketer, Regis Mckenna was tasked with making a "Buyer Persona" for a company who sold pocket calculators. So he observed how the customers selected their calculators from among several different choices.

He had found that, when customers were comparing different models and weights, they chose the calculators that were heavier. Why? They associated heftiness with quality.

McKenna then took his findings to his client and told them to go against the prevailing assumption that smaller calculators were better. Instead, they should make calculators that were heavier than their competitors.

The company did just that and as a result, their sales increased.

Buyer Personas do not come to you by some magical stroke of luck. Uncovering buyer personas take time and resources. So if you are going to find it, you need to do it right.

Stakeholders That Are Skeptical Can Be Convinced To Implement Buyer Personas

People oftentimes prefer the known to the unknown. And usually don't like to venture outside our comfort zones. It is no surprise that you are likely to run into some resistance from stakeholders when you want want to try new and fresh things in the marketing department. This is especially true when it comes to building "Buyer Personas" for your offering.

Executive stakeholders, such as shareholders and management, each person will have their own reasons for rejecting the buyer personas. Some assume the project will be an unwieldy time sink, and that the resources assigned to identifying the personas will never be made back.

Other people will argue that they already know who their customers are. Why would they spend money to find out something they already know?

Fortunately, convincing these doubters to adopt buyer personas isn't actually that hard as long as you use the right arguments.

First, organize a meeting with the unconvinced stakeholders. During the interview, ask them to pretend to be a consumer as you ask them questions.

Ask them things such as, "When did you find out that you were in need of the kind of solution we offer?" "How did you compare the available choices?" and "Why did you select ours over the other solutions?"

As they give you their answers, find holes in their arguments.

More often than not they will say something like, "We chose your solution because it is the best in the market. It has the best features with the best price." When this happens, halt the roleplaying and ask, "If this were true - if we really offered the best features the best features for the best price - then wouldn't we be more fare more successful than our competition? But we are not, which is why we are doing this exercise in the first place, so maybe we should not be too optimistic"

These interviews will expose how little the stakeholders actually know about their products and customers. It should not be hard to convince them that buyer personas are of great importance.

Reach your target customers by using an external or internal database

Once you have gotten the internal stakeholder on the same page, you need to actually craft the buyer personas. This work starts with setting up the interview sessions with your potential customers. But how do you even reach out to them?

Firstly, you need to find your customers, and you will need the help of your sales team.

Even though the interviews and analysis will be done by the marketing team, the people on your sales department will be the ones who understand most about your prospective customers. They have the collective database of all the persons who have bought your products, or at least asked about them (even if they went with your competitors). Within this you will find many people who will be perfect interview candidates.

But while your sales team's database will definitely be helpful, chances are that you will have to find interviewees from other sources as well.

You cannot necessarily rely on your sales department's database to be perfect and curated. As an example, it may contain some false e-mail addresses, telephone numbers that are no longer in service and so on and so forth.

Further, external resources, such as statistic research agencies, can assist you not only to reach out to the correct people but to engage those who have no previous encounters with your business or products. Getting their fresh feedback can you help you grow your influence.

But what would you do if you sell solutions to other businesses as a B2B company? If you are in a B2B environment, you have to deal with two people: the person on top who approves and signs the deals and the person below who is doing all the research and development.

It is this researcher who puts in all the work to find out specifically what their company needs. As a person who is well versed with their suppliers and their business processes, this person's opinion will be the opinion that matters most.