Research is a critical component of all ventures conducted by entrepreneurs. An idea on its own has little chance of succeeding if you don’t put in the legwork of observing your competition closely, performing thorough online research, attending networking events and speaking to other people who are involved in your business sector. One key facet of this research is your target market and the consumers whom you hope to win over. You need to realize what your customers desire and how you, the prospering entrepreneur, can deliver it to them.
Saeed Torbati is a renowned entrepreneur who shares the majority of his time between Toronto and Ottawa, Ontario, working on his numerous enterprises.
When he began Ontario Green Savings, a company that was recently voted as one of Canada’s Top New Growth Companies for 2019 by the Canadian Business Journal, he ensured that he would keep the customers’ best interests at the heart of his business strategy.
“The idea came from realizing that there was a massive gap between the green technology equipment, high-efficiency equipment, and their affordability,” Torbati said. “We realized that medium to low-income families are not able to afford high-efficiency products, so we decided to tailor our business around that market knowledge.”
A personalized approach towards your customers, one in which their needs are placed above yours, will secure and retain their loyalty. Personalization has proven to be an engaging tactic, with 90 percent of consumers recognizing its value and 80 percent proclaiming that they’d be more willing to do business with a company that extends such services.
To guide you in knowing your customers to a greater extent, Saeed Torbati has outlined a few tips for all entrepreneurs to consider employing.
Construct A Profile
Develop a profile of the type of consumer you are seeking to draw in, Saeed Torbati says. This information will concentrate on three vital areas: background (relating to the individual’s current job, career path and family); demographics (fixates on the customer’s gender, age, income and location); and unique identifiers (observes how the person behaves in general and what sort of communication preferences they favor).
Having established the basic target market profile, you can then dive deeper to uncover specific details, including their financial resources, online tendencies, brand fondness, hopes and dreams, worries and fears, what he or she is searching for and their overarching influences. Ultimately, you should create a marketing profile that if you presented it to someone who did not help you create the profile, would be indistinguishable from a real person.
A word of warning: while it is imperative to seek out potential new customers with a profile, it should not be achieved at the expense of your present consumer base. If you have already formed a customer base and are striving to broaden your income with another one, be sure not to neglect the initial group. Instead, look at how you can expand upon your original group based on similarities between customers.
Survey Says?
Reach out to your target market with a survey for them to fill out, as it can amass newfound insights and opinions directly from the public. Saeed Torbati is adamant that you simplify the survey, since it might prove difficult to encourage their participation with a lengthy list of inquiries at first.
A case study from Get Feedback put two email surveys to the test, comparing one which contained a link to a web survey and another that featured embedded responses. Their findings concluded that the embedded survey increased starting engagement by 210 percent and inspired 125 percent improvement in survey completion.
Make your surveys a quick process for your prospective consumers, analyze the results and figure out the response rate. Should a worrying number of them be failing to complete the entire survey or not even bothering to commence, you can certainly tinker with it.
Real-Time Website Data
Find how active consumers are when they visit your website, utilizing tracking tools such as Google Analytics to uncover their behavior.
You can increase your awareness of what they might not comprehend online, what they dislike, how long they remain on your website, what links they are clicking on, what content leads them to uploading or downloading, and their overall preferences. Clients often become enraged when they are struggling with a website, and you can use that information to create a more user-friendly page if necessary.
Saeed Torbati concludes that analyzing this real-time data effectively will provide you a means of identifying patterns and predicting customer demands. Essentially, you will enable yourself to possibly anticipate target market needs before they have made up their minds.
