Get To Know Your Customers Day sounds like something every business should take part in. Knowing more about your customers is vital to the success of your organisation, and it will help you to stand out from the crowd which, now that it is so much easier to set up and run a business, is large.
Get To Know Your Customers Day takes place on the third Thursday of each quarter, and the next event is going to be on 18th July. As a business owner, although there’s no law that says you have to join in, it could be a good move to do so. But just why is knowing your customers such a good idea?
Why Should You Know Your Customers?
There are a number of reasons why knowing your customers better is going to help you when it comes to building a more successful business.
1. You Can Help Them Better
When you really know your customers and understand what they want and need from you and your business, you can ensure that you tailor your offerings to them. This will help them more and make them keener not only to use you the first time, but to keep coming back whenever they need more help. It will also encourage them to tell their friends and family about you and the excellent products and services you offer; this kind of word of mouth advertising is priceless, and can do a lot more than anything you can pay for might do.
2. You Can Market More Effectively
Once you have carried out your market research to determine just who is most likely to want to buy from you and use your products and services, you can then market more effectively towards them. Knowing who you are trying to contact through your marketing will enable you to come up with (or engage a designer to come up with) something that will appeal to the right demographic.
Additionally, you can also market in the right places. Does you intended audience use social media a lot? In that case, social media is where to focus your campaign. Do they read magazines? Print might be the answer. Is radio their preferred medium? If so, that’s where you can consider spending your marketing budget.
How To Commemorate Get To Know Your Customers Day
Now that you know why it’s important to get to know your customers, and you know that you’ll have a specific day each quarter to do something special about this important task, here are some ideas on exactly what you can do.
1. Branding Exercises
No matter how new or well established your brand might be, performing regular branding exercises including assessments and reviews is important. Your brand can work wonderfully well for a long time, but that doesn’t mean that change isn’t good, and unless you take note of what is working and what isn’t, you’ll never know what to do about it. Don’t just assume that the same old branding is always going to bring the same results. Over time people change and the world changes with them, and your branding will need to be updated to reflect that.
2. Look Into Buying Habits
When you know who your audience is, you can then learn as much about them as possible – you must do this, in fact, in order to make the most of the information you have access to. One of the primary things to do is to look into specific buying habits. This can be done in the form of surveys, feedback forms, even focus groups. Use Get To Know Your Customers Day as a reminder to send out the forms and surveys, or to arrange a focus group. Understanding buying habits will ensure you are selling things in the way that people want to buy them.
3. Stay Up To Date
Talking to your customers is vital, as mentioned above, but it is not the only way that you can gain important information. You should also try to stay as up to date as possible when it comes to the market in general, and your sector and niche in particularly. Read trade publications and attend conferences and talks where possible. Gaining new insight into how you are working and deciding whether to make changes or not is something that all business owners will need to take into account from time to time. Get To Know Your Customers Day is the ideal time to remind yourself to get this done, to book things up, and to organise additional learning for you and for your team.
4. Be Personable
Not every business owner is comfortable making small talk, but it can make the difference between a positive customer experience and a negative one. If you are usually a shy, retiring type, take inspiration from the fact that it is Get To Know Your Customers Day and talk to them. Ask questions (although nothing too personal or you can turn a positive into a negative very easily), tell them about yourself (ditto), talk passionately about your business, your products, your services, offer to help them, and more. Be personable and polite and see the difference it will make.
Conclusion
Get To Know Your Customers Day may occur on the third Thursday of each quarter, but that doesn’t mean you have to limit your customer interaction to just four days a year. Take Get To Know Your Customers Day as a good start, something that will remind you that your customers are vitally important to your business, but then try to keep the momentum going throughout the year.
You can use each Get To Know Your Customers Day as a special event day, hosting sales or workshops or other events that your customers will enjoy, but in between make sure that you are always keeping them in your thoughts.
