4 Effective Customer Research Methods to Help You Understand What Customers Want

Do you truly know who your customers are, and what the audience is for your products or services? When companies fail to research their customer base, they can make incorrect assumptions about who their customers are and what they want, and it becomes harder to reach them and sell to them effectively. But when companies invest the time and energy in researching their target audience, they can better connect with customers and build a stronger brand.

In this article we'll look at four different audience research methods that can help you understand who your customers are, what their pain points are, and what they truly want.

4 customer research methods to help you understand your customers

1. Review social media analytics

Many of your customers are likely extremely vocal and active on social media, and your social media dashboards can be a great resource for useful insight about your followers and those sharing your content and social media posts. This can be done as follows:

• Facebook analytics. Once you log into Facebook analytics, you’ll see a dashboard that comes packed with the most relevant data, including Highlights, Growth, Engagement, Monetization, and People.
• Instagram analytics. Go to your Instagram's business account, tap on the Insights section (on the hamburger menu), and select "Audience." Here you can see more generalized information, such as age demographics and location details to drive localized and personalized campaigns.
• LinkedIn analytics. Use LinkedIn analytics to measure metrics such as followers, clicks, shares, and comments.
• Twitter analytics. With Twitter analytics, you can engage with customers as soon as they mention you in a Tweet. Plus, you can analyze your Tweet data to understand your followers and analyze their photos, videos, text, etc. This way, you can boost audience engagement and measure performance, without compromising on the user experience or quality.

Remember, information from your social media analytics can be used to create buyer personas and help you understand how your audience might be changing with respect to buying intent, demographics, etc.

2. Consider live chat an important touchpoint

Live chat software is one of the most cost-effective, impactful, and intuitive tools you can integrate on your website to engage in targeted segmentation by analyzing real-time data collected over time.

Live chat can be thought of as "instant messaging" with your customers, allowing you to see their queries and gather insights about their opinions and preferences through data that's been gathered in real time. This insight allows you to engage in razor-sharp targeting that can be personalized at scale.

More articles from AllBusiness.com:

• The Difference Between Secondary and Primary Market Research
• 5 Ways to Turn Your Customer Service Team Into a Secondary Sales Force
• The 6-Step Guide to Creating Buyer Personas for Your Business
• 8 Word-of-Mouth Marketing Strategies That Really Work
• Do You Know What Your Competitors Are Doing? Create a Competitor Analysis in 5 Easy Steps

3. Solicit customer feedback, both positive and negative

Listening to your happy customers allows you to:

• Gather real-time insights into your customers' pain points, motivations, goals, and buying preferences.
• Improve communication among your sales, marketing, and customer support teams.
• Extract important phrases and terms used by customers (also known as the "voice of the customer") that can directly be used in your content marketing efforts.
• Analyze emerging user-centric buying patterns.
• Get an in-depth understanding of the users' questions, opinions, and beliefs about your product/service.
• Assess how your sales and support teams are interacting with your customers and make modifications if needed.

Sometimes, things will not go as planned and you'll have unhappy customers. When that happens, you must also listen to them. To continue to provide high-quality products and a stellar customer experience, businesses must determine what’s not working. The information and insights provided by dissatisfied customers can be used to create a more positive customer experience going forward.

For example, CleverTap captures the voice of its customers and conducts audience research by sending out a series of emails to understand why customers dropped their services. The first email encourages users to give feedback while redirecting them to check out the brand’s latest blog posts; the second email highlights the benefits of products, and more important, engages in peer validation to encourage users to continue using the platform; the third email is about demonstrating customer success.

The result? The company's campaign boasts a 44% open rate, a 27% click-through rate, and a 35% reply rate, making it a huge success.

4. Invest in secondary research

At the heart of secondary research lies data. This cost-effective research method uses existing data (often performed by a third-party) to extract relevant insights. Some important sources of secondary research include:

• Reports issued by credible research institutions
• News reports
• Academic journals
• Newsletters
• Magazines and newspapers

If you wish to understand the following attributes of your customers, secondary research should be on your to-do list:

• Consumer attitudes
• Product and brand preferences
• Media consumption habits
• Demographic and lifestyle characteristics

To conduct secondary research, follow this basic five-step process:

• Step 1. Identify your topic of research as well as the research purpose.
• Step 2. Narrow down the preferred list of information sources related to your research goal.
• Step 3. Collect existing data from diverse, authentic sources such as public libraries, reports by government and non-government agencies, etc.
• Step 4. Collate and compare the data to get rid of duplication, and weed out unnecessary or irrelevant information.
• Step 5. Analyze data to see whether you have all the desired information to extract meaningful, actionable insights.

Customer research provide you with real data

Brands often slip up by basing their buyer personas and content marketing campaigns on intuition instead of credible information. If you wish to engage with your customers in a more targeted and personalized way, embrace these time-tested audience research methods.

One final piece of advice: Remember that the more diversified and credible your data sources, the more effective and on-point your targeting will be.

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