Wouldn’t it be great if you could just climb right into the minds of your customers to find out their most burning desires? Identifying customer needs is crucial if you want to be able to predictably grow and scale your business.
The better you can be at identifying customer needs the better you will be able to deliver your message, the more leads you will generate, and the more sales you will make.
Today we are going to look at 3 top ways to find out more about your visitors.
Identifying Customer Needs – 3 Top Ways To Find Out More
We know thanks to psychology that there are really only two reasons people make a buying decision and that is to either avoid pain or gain pleasure. If you can understand customer needs down to this level and how your product fulfills the prospect’s goal of avoiding pain or gaining pleasure the better you can convey your marketing message and the more sales you will make.
Let’s look at three top ways to identify customer needs.
1. Competitive Market Analysis
Competitive market analysis is basically another term for “market research”. This technique is one that is overlooked by many companies as they feel they already have a good understanding of the market.
Doing a market analysis serves several purposes. It helps you go deep into your market to see what is selling, how it is being sold, and where the customers are hiding. Leveraging what competitors or other retailers in your market are doing can help tremendously in identifying customer needs.
You get to see what keywords are being searched, what marketing messages are being used, and get a glimpse inside the minds of the customers in the market.
To do this you can use tools such as compete.com (there are loads of other tools as well) or simply do several keyword searches to see what advertisers are using in their ads and what pages and messages they are using.
We don’t do a market analysis to steal from the competition. We simply research to find leverage to better serve our customers and identify their needs.
2. Behavior Tracking
What better way to identify your customer needs than to find out where they have already been and where they are going? This allows you to better position your product in front of them when they search for the solution.
Behavior tracking takes some of the findings from a market analysis and breaks it down even further. What sites are they visiting? What ads are they clicking on? Are they on Facebook or other social networks? We need to know this as if your target market is not on Facebook it would make no point to spend advertising dollars to find them there.
When using behavior tracking in identifying customer needs you can also take a look at your on-site visitor behavior to uncover additional leverage points. How are visitors interacting with your site? What are they paying the most attention to?
Take a look at your analytics and use heatmap software to understand how your visitors interact on your site.
3. Testing
We have a saying that we often learn more from what doesn’t work than from what does work. This is why testing is crucial. Testing allows you to find out more about what makes your visitors tick and what gets them to take more desired actions at a more predictable rate.
Do they respond better to a certain color? How about a different headline? Is social proof making a difference? How your visitors respond to certain on-site funnel steps and what gets them to do what it is that you want them to do is a BIG part of growing and scaling any company. Testing allows you to better deliver your message in a way that gets the visitors to respond the way you want.
If you aren’t testing you are only left to your assumptions as to the needs and wants of your target market and you are most certainly leaving money on the table. The visitors don’t care about you or your product, all they care about is the end result. So don’t assume you know what they want, test to find out what they want using the data from the first two steps.
There you have it. 3 tops steps you can take in identifying customer needs. Do all three steps, change your messaging to reflect and watch your sales take a jump.
Be sure to like, comment share, and subscribe
If you want help identifying customer needs in your market be sure to reach out as we will be happy to discuss doing a full market analysis to help.