How to understand your customer with $0 spend — Review
Blog Posts have been yelling this at you for years!
Know your customer! Understand your customer! If you don’t have a solid idea of who your customer is, how can you give them what they want? Yadayadayagugugu.
We agree.The question is how do I know them?
Then, of course, it’s graveyard silence (Are graveyards truly silent? It’s a stew of happy ghosts, sad ghosts, angry ghosts, vengeful ghosts…think about it)
I digress. Or maybe not complete silence.
They tell you to do a traditional customer persona…you know imagine something about someone who signed up to your newsletter, add colourful images, throw in a few newspaper subscriptions and start building messages around the stuff you totally concocted in your head. (I might have given this advice at some point too).
Based on the few personas I have tried my hands at, it has the tendency to become bulls**t if you don’t know what you are doing. Don’t do it!
Okay, we’ve agreed on no personas…how do you understand your customer (and do it with $0 too)?
It’s one of the many things I learned from last week’s lesson in my CXL Institute growth marketing mini degree.
Disclaimer: This method only works if you have previous data you can analyse, i.e, not for new businesses. Also because you aren’t really spending anything…except maybe snacks and internet money… be prepared to spend time and hard work. Kay?
Let’s dig in!
Collate all information you have in-house. You will be shocked at the volume of data you are sitting on. I’ll break some of them down and what you should be looking for.
Data from customer service team:
Your customer service guys are walking divinity boards. They talk to customers every day, fielding the questions from angry people and managing to make them go away happy.
For instance, I think the sales team at Spectranet deserves a medal.
Sometimes the internet service can be frustrating and when I call? Best believe I’m taking out my anger on whoever is unlucky enough to attend to me.
When looking at data from your sales team, you want to know:
- What are the complaints they mostly have in common?
- What objections do they have about your product/service?
- Why aren’t they coming back?
- Why are they yelling? (Because nobody calls to say “good job!”)
- What do they wish your product does that it doesn’t?
Chineye Igbudu, A customer support specialist at Bolt says this and you should listen (she’s been talking to customers for 5 years now):
People want to be heard, feel heard.
At the root of every customer complaint, feedback, review; there’s a person at the other end that wants, no needs to be acknowledged.
They want to know that their concerns and experiences are valid to the brand.
Even in the instances of ‘small’ queries, they still want to know that it is important enough to elicit a response, a reaction from the brand.
This also reflects on how consumers demand information from brands. The customer wants to know that they are at the forefront of all your decision making.
The point is, they can have existing insight into customer frustrations, struggles and wishes.
Data from sales team:
While I was working at GrowthLab, we were selling an online Bootcamp. So many leads, so many prospects. I genuinely thought it was going to be a breeze. Hint: it wasn’t.
I ended up joining the sales team to call up leads and ask why they were not paying for the Bootcamp after they had shown interest.
So many reasons. Reasons we didn’t even think about at all.
Problem: I’m currently running a similar course
Us: (Then why’d you show interest in this one?!)
Problem: The ad didn’t indicate it was a paid course.
Us: Dang, fix the copy.
— — — — — — —
Problem: I really want in but I can’t afford it
US: How about we make it so you can pay twice. Part-payment to reserve your seat, then balance just before the course starts
Problem: It worked but then we had to chase some people to balance up. (some had to be yanked off)
Us: Never do this again. Either take your money at once or make it a free course.
There were so many lessons from this exercise and it gave a solid insight into who our customers were.
Your sales team talk to customers every day, trying to get them to dip their hands in their pockets. You can get answers to questions like:
- Where they work
- The questions they have
- Why they won’t buy from you
- What’s stopping them from making a purchase, now.
- Their doubts about your product/service
Data from social media team:
No, I’m not talking about shares and likes. I mean they are pretty cool metrics to have, but then what?
Paul Boag says to look into the kinds of things that people share and like. Stalk your followers (if you can make it less creepy, cool!)
You want to find out:
- Who are they talking to?
- Who do they follow?
- What do they post?
- What do they share?
- What kind of things do they say about topics relating to your product and service?
- Which posts do they leave comments under? (I leave comments under relationship posts )
But that’s not all… because I’m naturally nosy I also want to know what they are saying about my competitors.
- First of all, do people follow them? Why??
- What types of people follow them?
- Do some of these people follow us too?
- What do these people post?
If you can address some of these questions and concerns upfront in the sales process then you can close a sale faster. If you want to take creepy to a whole new level, see the next step.
Record site sessions:
Let me tell you, I only recently found out about this and it creeps me out and fascinates me at the same d*mn time.
By watching what people are doing on your website, you can get an indication, not just of their behaviour, but their underlying motivations, what it is they really care about.
That was a screenshot from Hotjar. It shows you exactly what people are paying attention to on your website and clicking on.
Below is an actual Hotjar screen record replay!
Think about the possibilities of this. Think about it.
Data from analytics team:
If you don’t have a team that monitors your analytics, it’s okay, look into it yourself and get answers to the following questions:
- What are the search terms that brought people to your website?
- What are the search terms that people enter once they are on your site? (I always search for paintings on Jumia)
- Where are people giving most of their attention when they visit their website? (Remember Hotjar?)
- What pages get the most dwell time? — Dwell time and visits will give an indication of areas people are most concerned with.
Play games with your existing customers:
I know how this sounds :))
We all want people to look at us a certain way, but the truth is, you can only influence that to a degree. People are still going to see what they want to see. Okay, on to the games
Famous Person Game:
Ask your users this question: “If our company was a famous person who would it be and why”
I’d advise not to do this in groups, but there are people who dominate conversations and can influence other people’s answers.
Watch out for certain words that just won’t go away: professional, no drama, funny, smart etc
Break up letter game: Some call it the love-letter game. But let’s go with the breakup. It’s more dramatic and juicy.
Ask users to write a breakup letter to your company. Imagine all the stuff they will dish out on you! Paul Boag goes indepth here.
Do you have tips on how to understand your customers? Please share in the comment box!
