3 Ways to Keep Up with your Customers
As your customers change, your marketing needs to as well. But, staying on top of what your customers need and want can be time-intensive, especially while you're busy with everything else – like growing a company or simply executing the marketing plans you already have in place.
Keeping up with your customers will help you stay relevant as they continue to evolve and face new problems. However, this typically falls in the 'important' square of an urgency-importance matrix, which means it's easy to neglect.
But, it doesn't need to be painful, or something you only look at annually.
I'm going to share three things you can do today to make sure your marketing is keeping up with the times so you can embrace the most relevant marketing strategies for your market.
1 – Pay Attention to Marketing Data (especially from marketing technology companies)
There are some fantastic resources – events, newsletters, companies – that regularly publish data about the changing audiences and effectiveness of social media, email, search, and so on.
One of the best sources of this information is marketing technology software companies. Data analytics is a competitive advantage for them, so they share great stuff. Here are our some of our go-to's for this type of content:
Nevertheless, this can still be a lot for an entrepreneur to stay on top of, which is one of the benefits of working with an advisor or agency whose job is to stay informed about trends and to translate them into useful guidance for your business.
So that's my first tip – put some time on your calendar to read the latest martech news and data, because you should always be tweaking and adapting your approach as your customers change.
2 – Keep an Eye on the Competition
What your competitors are doing, especially if you’re watching larger organizations than your own, can help you decipher what’s working best in your market.
You can take cues from companies that have larger budgets and will hopefully have run more marketing experiments to discover what works and what doesn’t.
That being said – don’t take this too literally. What works for them won't always work so well for you. They may have different goals, for example. Your most pressing goal might be building awareness whereas your competitor's might be lead generation. That difference in goals will lead to two different marketing paths.
If you don’t have any direct competitors, think about businesses one level away from your solution. What’s the next best substitute? If you’re really stumped, then focus on other brands that sell to your target market, even if their products are unrelated to yours.
3 – Stay in Touch with Your People
Keeping in touch with your customers and employees will help you stay relevant as they continue to evolve in step with the broader population. Ask them regularly about where they go to find information about products like yours.
Set yourself a goal to run regular surveys – they can be anything from formal customer surveys to informal polls around the office – and track the results to help you spot trends in buyer behavior.
So, there you have it! Marketing must constantly be changing. The way we live, work, buy, and sell is constantly changing. And the people we're selling to are changing, from one generation to the next.
Hopefully you'll find my three tips helpful to make sure you're applying the most relevant marketing strategies for your market:
Pay attention to the data,
Keep an eye on your competition, and
Stay in touch with your people.
This blog post was originally published on July 28, 2020.
Photo Credits
Photo by Anna Dziubinska on Unsplash
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