Marketing – Start By Knowing Your Customers!

In whichever field your business operates in, the importance of knowing and understanding who your customers are is paramount to running a successful company.  Quite often and particularly when time is short we can fall into a trap of thinking we know what our customers want, but never checking.  When this happens, you could end up marketing a product or service that may not appeal to the customers you are trying to target and subsequently waste valuable time and investment.

When you run a small business, there is always a temptation to launch your company and its products or services quickly for numerous reasons.  It could be a financial reason – you’re not working for anyone else other than yourself, so you need to start earning quickly or perhaps you have an extremely tight budget so it could be hard to carry out enough research?

Researching and testing your products or services with customers will pay off in the long term.  Feedback in whichever format is crucial to your business being successful; without it how will you ever know if people like what you are offering?  But how much market research is necessary you ask?

If you are at the start of your journey and you have a new offering then research is extremely necessary.  By recruiting potential customers you think your business would appeal to and asking them questions about your business including their thoughts and opinions will give you a whole host of information to go away with and tweak your products or services with.  You could ask questions around how appealing your offering is, how much a person would be prepared to pay for it for, or how do you compare against other competitor products or services for example.  The list goes on.  If your business is relatively established already, then you may only need to get ongoing feedback to tweak what you are doing and ensure you are still appealing to your customers.

We will cover different types of research and ways to collect feedback on a more detailed blog.  In the meantime if you are needing advice or need someone to carry out some customer research for you, then feel free to contact us!