Ever feel like crafting the perfect business strategy is like mixing a cocktail in the dark? Well, it’s time to turn on the lights and get clear on those ingredients. This week, we’re exploring three steps for turning customer insights into actionable strategies. So, grab your favorite drink, and let’s shake things up!
The Secret Ingredients You’re Missing
Many business owners struggle to understand their customers, which leads to ineffective marketing strategies, unclear messaging, and poor business decisions.
Without a clear grasp of what makes your customers tick, you’re essentially mixing drinks without knowing the recipe. The result? A cocktail that nobody wants to order.
Turning customer insights into actions is like crafting the perfect drink. You need the right ingredients, a solid recipe, and a bit of finesse. Here’s a step-by-step guide to making it happen:
Step 1: Interview Your Ideal Customers
Interviews are your golden ticket to understanding your customers’ objectives, obstacles, objections, and desired outcomes; they are your behind-the-scenes look at what makes your customers tick.
To get to the good stuff, ask these questions.
Objectives: What are they trying to achieve? What goals do they have?
Obstacles: What are the things that get in their way of achieving their objectives? What keeps them up at night? Why does the problem need to be fixed now?
Objections: How do the obstacles make them feel? What are the things they say, think, and sometimes speak about with close friends and colleagues?
Outcomes: What are the measurable results they seek? What are they hoping to get by working with you?
BONUS: Interview your testimonials. Chances are your customers have answered the questions above in a testimonial. Take the time to read and highlight your testimonials for the items noted above.
Step 2: Create a Customer Persona
A customer persona is a fancy way of saying you’ll create a representation of your ideal customer on paper.
Your persona will be based on the information you gather from your interviews and testimonials. A persona is like a cheat sheet for guiding business decisions.
Without a persona, your marketing efforts will be ineffective, which will lead to wasted resources and missed opportunities.
Personas consist of two parts: Demographics and Psychographics.
Demographics: These are the boring yet useful things used to define the exterior of your persona, things such as:
- Business size
- Job title
- Industry
- Revenue
- etc.
They are the things all ad placement systems like LinkedIn and Facebook need to get started. By themselves, they are pretty boring, which is why you need psychographics to complete the picture.
Psychographics: Now, let’s look at the inside. It’s said that 95% of purchase decisions are based on emotions. Psychographics is where you get into someone’s head. You’re looking for things like:
- Personality
- Activities
- Interests
- Values
- etc.
It’s this emotional/personal stuff that helps you understand what makes your customers tick. Combining demographics with this is like the perfect pairing of wine with your dinner.
Bonus: Your persona should be as unique as your best cocktail recipe, tailored to your specific persona. The best part is that you’ve uncovered much of this information from your interviews and testimonials.
Step 3: Distill Your Message to Its Essence
You now have all of the ingredients you need to distill your message down to its essence —a message that is clear and resonates with your ideal customer persona.
For this part of the exercise, you need to gather everything you’ve done to this point and put it into this format to tell a story that resonates with your website, copy, marketing materials, and content.
Objectives: What is the one thing your customer really wants to achieve?
Obstacles: What is stopping them from getting that one thing?
Objections: How does not getting that one thing make them feel?
Offer: How do you help them overcome the obstacles in their way?
Outcomes: What do they get if they work with you?
The key to the story is not to include everything.
You need to boil everything down to its essence- the problem they have that you can solve easily.
Now Go Make Business Decisions
This is where the magic happens. It’s how you ensure all the information you’ve gathered doesn’t just sit in a file on Google Drive, but instead, you use it to drive your business decisions.
Review Your Insights: Go through steps 1-3 thoroughly. Did you miss anything? Does it feel right to you?
Develop your Strategy: Now you can develop a strategy that directly addresses your customers’ needs and desires.
Do it: Implement the strategies in your marketing, sales, offer, and sales funnel.
With all of your insights captured and in one place, you can begin making informed business decisions based on actual customer insights.
No more guessing. Instead, you’ll begin to make calculated decisions that align with your customers’ needs and expectations.
Last Call: Customers’ Points
Interview Customers: Dive deep into their challenges, motivations, and experiences.
Create a Customer Persona: Document detailed insights about your ideal customers.
Distill Your Message to its Essence: Understand the steps your customers take from awareness to advocacy.
Make Business Decisions: Use insights to guide your business strategies.
Turn your customer insights into business decisions, and you’ll create a brand strategy as clear and compelling as your favorite cocktail.
