What happens if you don’t keep your customer top of mind — and what to do about it

Photo Credit: Jamie Lopes on Unsplash

It’s an easy trap to fall into. You know your product and what you want to get across so well, you become inadvertently tone deaf to what people really want - be they new customers, existing customers or lapsed customers.

Dollars are poured into performance marketing campaigns, influencers, media buys, but what you say fails to resonate — people don’t understand it or they don’t see it the way you are positioning it. The result? They don’t take action and don’t become customers, which means poor conversion rates and ROAS (return on ad spend) from an ROI perspective as well as missed revenue targets.

Even if you think you know best, oftentimes you don’t.

Whenever I start working with a new brand, if their mission, positioning, brand pillars, and style guide are already in order I immediately focus on customer journeys and personas.

Talking to actual customers about what they love and don’t love, how they perceive you versus how you perceive yourself (especially when you are drunk on the company kool-aid), is invaluable. It may validate your positioning and creative approach. It may provide tough to hear but insightful feedback. Sometimes what Marketing thinks and what Customer Service teams hear is wildly, disturbingly different.

So how do you get to the heart of what your customer is thinking and feeling? Larger companies benefit from surveys provided as a service to complement their ad dollars from behemoths such as Facebook, and Twitter. However, if you are operating on a startup budget the easiest thing to do is create listening opportunities on your own in one of two ways.

First, you can go into your customer database and select a representative sample (at least 15-20) customers and contact them to ask if they will participate in 20 minute interview or focus group. You can offer a gift card, or a special discount or benefit in exchange for their time. Come up with a checklist of what you want to learn, a list of the questions you want to ask, a script for your phone interview and creative samples if you want feedback on messaging or advertising visuals. It’s also good practice to have some documentation about confidentiality and sessions being recorded for note-taking purposes, so that participants feel comfortable about being candid and you have their signoff from a legal perspective.Second, you can host a facilitated community social gathering with a slate of topics. The last of the topics can be “what do you think about X that we are doing” or “do you have any feedback about what you’d like to see from us?” People love to be helpful or share their opinions — or both! In covid times, virtual mixers have been a great way to keep people connected and empathizing and to solicit feedback.

After you have gone through one or both of these exercises and gotten enough data points (enough interviews to be representative of your customer base as a whole), analyze all of the feedback. What personas or segments seem to be emerging within your customer base? If you look at the rest of your customer base, who would map to these personas and does your theory hold up? How does what you’ve learned change how you might approach customers and the messaging and offers you might use with each group? Remember that the perspectives and opinions of current customers will be different from those of lapsed customers (whom it might be possible to recoup, with some extra work) and new customers.Hopefully you’ll have actionable takeaways after doing all of this analysis. For example, specific proof points or offers that you can use in highly targeted ad campaigns. Or winning concepts for visuals or influencers that will relate at a brand or content level. 

Another bonus is quotes that you can use as testimonials about your product. If you heard some high praise, ask if you can use it along with their name (usually first name, last initial) or even a headshot for marketing purposes. Lip service from actual customers or “people like me” from the prospective buyer’s perspective can be hugely compelling.

If you always put yourself in your customer’s shoes and keep their behaviors and attitudes top of mind, you will have a much better chance of building a brand people will love and generating growth for your company.