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Any marketer worth their salt
will tell you a long-term competitive advantage is gained
only through the continual collection of information
about your customers' wants and needs.
You could pay to get this information
from a market research firm. But these customer intelligence
reports are often either not specific enough for your
firm's niche market, or too general, with an overwhelming
amount of information.
You could commission a specific
market research project, but these are often incredibly
expensive.
So why not use a readily available
resource - your company's website - to collect and automatically
analyse that market information?
You will often find that customers
are willing and happy to provide all types of non-sensitive
information about themselves if it means you will potentially
be able to build a better relationship with them by
more closely matching their needs. Or if you provide
a strong incentive for them to give you that information,
such as a perceivably valuable prize.
Some of the most important things
to ask your customers include:
- Their experience with
your company so far
- Their experience with
your competitors
- How your products/services
could be improved to better suit their needs
Lifestyle demographics
Based on this collected
information, you are able to build a much clearer picture
of your customers, and their relationship with your
company. Make sure this information is effectively utilised
in your marketing plan. Three ways this can be done:
- Develop
new products/services that respond to what your customers
asked for. Tell them when you make changes based on
their feedback.
- Take
the best strategies used by your competitors, that
were reported by your customers, and look for ways
to incorporate them in your own activities.
- Conduct
marketing campaigns around the same demographics reported
by your customers. E.g., if your customers say they
always go out to a bar on a Saturday night, perhaps
you should organise a party/nightclub event when launching
your next product.
It would only cost your
company between $1,000- $5,000 (depending on the level
of analytical sophisticated you wanted), to add a customised
information collection, analysis and reporting tool
on to your website.
But the impact of the increased
level of customer knowledge on your business's bottom
line is likely to be huge.
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