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For small businesses, getting to know your clients or customers’ goals, values, and needs is mandatory when developing a great marketing strategy. While ‘Get to Know Your Customers Day’ is the perfect motivation to gear attention towards customers, it should be said that learning about your customers should be done regularly in order to maintain their satisfaction. 

Receiving feedback and information from customers can be used for insight for businesses to know where they need to implement processes towards growth. 

Get to Know Your Customers Day

Get to Know Your Customers Day takes place on the third Thursday of every quarter (January, April, July, and October), and is the perfect opportunity for businesses to focus on understanding their customers on a deeper level.

Think of it as a chance to step away from transactions and build a real connection. The purpose is simple – to learn more about the people who keep your business running. By understanding their needs, preferences, and even their hobbies, you gain valuable insights that can ultimately improve your products, services, and overall customer experience.

Why Getting to Know Your Customer is Necessary

As a small business grows, it’s not uncommon to put the concept of ‘get to know your customer’ to the side and begin to disconnect from its customers, as there are, many other responsibilities that are necessary to continue their business’s growth. Forgetting to take customer’s wants and needs into account when making business changes is detrimental and should continue to be prioritized regardless of the size of the business. 

When long-term customers feel like they’re no longer being considered in business decisions, trust that the business has previously worked hard to gain will begin to fall. When trust falls, so does a commitment to brand loyalty, allowing the risk of the long-term customer to stray to competitors. 

Customers are much more likely to remain loyal to a company when it seems like their goals and values align, so making sure to do research on your customers is the best way to make sure that the business isn’t updating its strategies too much, to the point of current customers no longer resonating with the company. 

How to Get to Know Your Customers 

The concept of ‘get to know your customers’ goes further than simply having a buyer persona. When a business has grown over the capacity of having consistent 1-2-1’s with their customers can be tricky, but there are still ways to continue to get to know their customers that don’t necessarily involve spending all business hours personally checking in. 

Get Social

Social media is known for its speed of reaching mass amounts of audiences at once. By using social media, a business can ask their customers about their current feelings regarding their services all at once. Polls are great and anonymous, making sure that customers don’t feel intimidated to answer honestly. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter can also be used for open responses on posts, serving as a great way to get to know your customers. This makes customers feel as though their opinions are valid, increasing the odds of brand loyalty. 

Get Analytical

Consumer data and analytics are decently easy to gain access to. From social media analytics to Google analytics and keyword research, though time-consuming, is a great way to get to know your customers through customer desires without conversations. This rings true for prospective customers who may not yet know about the business. By using analytics, getting to know your customers can be quite passive, letting technology do most of the work for you.

Respond to Reviews 

90% of customers admit that online reviews determine their buying decisions. Responding to customer reviews, both positive and negative, in a timely manner, is an amazing way to get to know your customers. Customers tend to only leave reviews if they are extremely happy with a service, or extremely disappointed in a service, making it a gold mine for learning what is working, and what needs to be altered. Customers want to feel noticed and responding to them directly makes it known that a business is committed to making them happy. 

Learn from Competitors 

It’s likely that direct competitors have at least basic insight into the minds of their customers, so doing competitor research by seeing what strategies are working for them is insightful when it’s time to get to know your customers. Read through their social media comments, check their online reviews, and take time to study up on their websites to find out what their customers are saying. 

How Often Should a Business Get to Know its Customers?

Receiving customer feedback in order to get to know your customers should be a consistent, ongoing process in a general sense. Customers love to provide feedback, so giving them the opportunity to let a business know how their services work for them should be a part of the staple in their marketing strategy. 

There’s a fine line between giving customers the opportunity to speak up about their opinions and allowing those opinions to become stressful. When attempting to implement ways to always keep every single customer over the moon, it can be damaging for a business. Making sure it’s apparent to customers that their opinions are always valid and considered while keeping the business’s core values in mind is crucial to maintaining control over the business. 

Don’t Do it All on Your Own

For ‘Get to Know Your Customer Day’ this year, start exploring new ways to implement customer opinions into your marketing strategy. 

If you’re looking to get to know your customers but feel as though you don’t have the bandwidth, reaching out to a third party, such as Vervology, to manage customer opinions and satisfaction rates of customers can be a game-changer.