As a business owner, really knowing your customers should be your top priority. However, many companies forget this and instead tend to focus on themselves, rather than the needs and wants of their consumers. Having empathy is the key to being a successful entrepreneur.
Although it may seem daunting, Kami Huyse breaks down how you can get into the mind of your customer. You can find the full video here. Don’t forget to get on our list for more tips to take your social media from meh to mighty!
To start off, you can take advantage of these resources to do your research about your business and industry:
- Spark Toro, which helps you find the interests of your ideal client. It shows you what your audience talks about online, including top hashtags and frequently used phrases.
- Facebook Groups, which you can use to research and connect with your clients. It’s a great place to look for the pains and problems that they’re experiencing as they ask for help and advice from their peers. You can search within groups to look for specific keywords or terms.
- Reddit, which is especially helpful for looking for complaints that people have. You can search through subreddits to find questions and problems that people may have.
- Quora, which can help you find questions and conversations related to your topic of interest. You can also see what your competitors are thinking.
- YouTube Tutorials, which allows you to see what other people are saying and creating content about your topic.
- Answer the Public, which is a great place to find what people are searching for regarding your topic.
Five Step Annual Review
Now that you’re armed with these tools, follow this five-step framework while doing your research about the goods or services your company offers. Aim to do this about once a year so you’re updated on any new trends or issues, and you’ll be understanding and connecting with your customers in no time!
- Pain
Pay attention to how your customers describe the problems they’re currently facing. What adjectives and descriptive terms do you see being repeated? These can be presented in a few different ways:
- Questions: Are there problems that your customers can’t solve or need help with? People are looking to buy things that they need right now. Whatever is most urgent to them at the moment is what they’ll be looking for, so it’s important to take note of these things.
- Statements: People will often just state what’s on their mind, and it can be very revealing of what is really bothering them and what they’re looking for solutions to.
If you see the same kind of problems popping up, pay attention to the language that they use and incorporate that into your own marketing.
- Relief
Now that you’ve identified the pain that your customers are experiencing, identify how your product or service could help relieve them of it. Describe how your clients would feel once this pain is removed.
You can also incorporate this into your marketing by showing how what you offer will relieve their pain and the pleasures they’ll feel when it does.
- Interests
It’s especially important to know the interests of your target audience when it comes to advertising. What organizations are they a part of? What hobbies do they enjoy and what can you find them doing in their free time?
Knowing this information, you can target the specific groups that they’re interested in and have increased engagement with and from your audience.
- Bad Advice
Especially nowadays on social media, you need to have a powerful message that cuts through the noise. In order to do this, you need to have a solid understanding of what makes your company unique and sets it apart from others in your industry.
When you see pieces of bad advice, take note of it. This will help you attract people who have similar beliefs to you – who also think that is bad advice, who have tried it and know it doesn’t work and are looking for other solutions, such as yours!
- Objections
Think about the objections that people are going to have to your product and what would stop them from trying it. Then, address them in your messaging.
This doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to solve all of them, but it’s important to at least acknowledge and try to resolve the objections they may have to what you offer.
You can organize all of this information into Google Docs or on tools such as Trello. Then, you can easily address one issue at a time and talk about each one during different livestreams, for example. This saves so much effort and greatly lowers prep-time for you!