Identifying and understanding the customer's needs and expectations is crucial for the success of any business. Irrespective of how good products or services are, if marketers don’t realize what their respective customers are looking for, they will have a hard time persuading the people to make a purchase. However, when products are designed as per the current needs of the targeted audience, then marketers have a clear path where they can reach out to the customers with effective solutions.
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The more a business knows about its audience, the better its sales opportunities. When it comes to understanding the audience, marketers must get an answer to some preeminent questions like-
Who are they?
What they Buy?
Why they Buy?
What do they expect?
How much money are they willing to spend?
One of the conventional and effective ways of knowing the customers is to have direct communication with them. Marketers should always make it a point to positively interact with the customers and understand why they are buying and why they aren’t or what they expect to buy in the near future that will serve their needs. The foundation of a marketing strategy should benefit the product or service it delivers to the customers. When advertisers know the key challenges of their audience, they can formulate an effective strategy to present them with the solution.
Keyword research is the underlying structure of online marketing campaigns. When starting to build keyword lists, it is important to classify the keywords in different categories (with respect to their relevance) which makes it easier to identify the ones that match the campaign objectives. Tools such as Google AdWords Keyword Planner, Bing Webmaster, Google Search Console, SEMrush, etc. can be helpful in identifying potential keywords.
Google Analytics is always helpful in providing valuable insights on how visitors are engaging with a website. While it doesn’t provide precise audience intent, it does offer valuable quantitative data. Basically, Google Analytics can tell you what and how people are looking for but it doesn’t answer why. Nevertheless, the insights can be put to good use and help understand the behavioural flow of the audience and search terms that got you there.
Effective tools like Hotjar, Mouseflow, Inspectlet, Smartlook, etc. offer useful recordings which enable marketers to replay how visitors have navigated through websites. This can help understand the intent by looking at the content visitors spend more time viewing and where they navigated to on the site.
There are many tools including Jotform Survey Maker, SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Google Forms, etc. that helps to create a qualitative survey. This will allow you to directly ask insightful questions to the audience about their experiences with you, future expectations, and challenges they have encountered. The survey results are a straightforward way of understanding the search intent and implying it in the product design.
The devices individuals use while searching for a particular product or service impact the keywords they use. According to Google, people searching on mobile typically use shorter phrases or brand terms. This means people at times search with the intent to make a purchase however since they are on mobile they use keywords that can be mistaken for research keywords.
For example- An individual may search for buy leather pants on their desktop but when they are on mobile they might simply search leather pants. Thankfully, there are forecasting tools in-built into the Google Keyword Planner to understand performance on various devices.
Companies that know their customer’s needs and expectations can seamlessly create a product design that guarantees sales. Simply extending the length of interaction with the customers will offer prolific opportunities to generate a product line that is directly in line with customer’s needs, thus offering companies competitive advantages.
