Get To Know What Your Client Wants

"Our target audience,” - Phew! - We can serve everyone! Everybody needs our product!"

"We know our clients well and do not need any further details!” 

"A single ad campaign will be just enough for us. We do not need any additional research that is time-consuming and expensive…”

This is a typical reasoning voiced by our clients. If you think alike - it is high time you changed your mind. In this blog post, Kateryna Husachenko, Marketing Strategist at Promodo, reveals why is it important to know your customers. Our expert will also prove that such biases on the client's end are at least erroneous. Eventually, such perceptions result in ineffective spending of marketing budgets. 

Let's now dive deeper into customer needs and wants analysis.

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Your Marketing Strategy Is All About Purchasing Decisions

Your marketing strategy will be insufficient without a proper understanding of how your customers make purchasing decisions. Getting to know your client comes as a strategic marketing must-have, therefore. 

Among the major challenges faced by businesses is the prediction of customer behavioral patterns. High on today’s marketing agenda is your understanding of how to get to know your customers. 

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Why is it Important to Understand Customer Needs?

Understanding customer needs is crucial for the success of any business because it serves as the foundation for delivering value and building strong, lasting relationships with customers. When businesses accurately identify and understand the desires, pain points, and expectations of their target audience, they can create products, services, and experiences that directly address those needs. This not only enhances customer satisfaction but also drives loyalty and repeat business.

First, understanding customer needs allows businesses to tailor their offerings. This leads to better product development, improved service delivery, and more relevant marketing strategies. When businesses are aligned with what customers truly want, they can differentiate themselves from competitors, offering solutions that are perceived as more valuable or effective.

Second, understanding customer needs improves customer retention. Satisfied customers are more likely to return, share positive feedback, and recommend the business to others. By continuously gathering and analyzing customer feedback, businesses can adapt to changing preferences and anticipate shifts in demand. This helps prevent businesses from becoming stagnant or out of touch with their market.

Third, businesses that understand their customers’ needs are better equipped to innovate. Instead of guessing or making assumptions about what customers want, businesses can rely on data-driven insights to drive innovation and new product development. This reduces the risk of investing in ideas that do not resonate with the target market.

Lastly, understanding customer needs fosters a customer-centric culture within an organization. It encourages employees to focus on delivering value and building relationships, which can improve overall performance and morale. In the long run, businesses that prioritize customer needs are more likely to sustain growth and thrive in competitive markets.

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Once focused on customer needs and wants, it is vital to understand:

• Purchasing power
• The shifts among your target audience
• Geolocation
• Individual preferences, 
• Price sensitivity, and 
• The nature of customer purchasing choices. 

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With this data at hand, companies actualize their customer profiles and come up with the best-fit offers that resonate with immediate customer needs and preferences. Knowing what customers expect is essential for your marketing performance.

A customer profile embraces the features of fictional characters who encompass the features of a target audience segment. The portrait is at the heart of the marketing effort. If you lack this essential component, you’ll be unable to elaborate an effective marketing strategy. Neither will you know what the customer really wanted.

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‍Target audience profile entails:

• Psychographic data
• Needs and/or problems
• Barriers and drivers
• Factors that impact purchasing decisions
• Communication touchpoints (where customers seek information)
• The process of purchasing
• Purchasing triggers
• User experience with offered product or service.

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To customize a customer profile that will help you better reach your target audience, we've tailored two samples you may adopt in your niche

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Client Profile Example #1

Preferred customer for the grand retailer network of building stores that aims to expand its online presence:

• Age 40

• Two schoolchildren

• Lives in the suburbs

• Annual income: 360 000 UAH

• College or higher education

Interests & behavioral patterns

• Family-focused

• Prefers active leisure

• Trusts immediate referrals

• Prone to spontaneous decisions

Information sources

• Actively uses social media networks (from desktop)

• Browses on Google before buying

• Seeks sales and promo offers

Content preferences

• Videos with training, adventures, and active leisure

• Useful tips on repairs, gardening, and building

• Movies online (detectives, thrillers, sci-fi).

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Client Profile Example #2

A preferred customer for the domestic apparel producer that aims to expand its online market for customers aged 18-22 and focused on university students:  

• Age 18-22

• University student

• Single

• Works part-time

• Annual income: 72 000 UAH

Interests & behavioral patterns

• Prefers active leisure

• Lacks time work-life balance

• Loves music and movies

• Prone to spontaneous decisions

Information sources

• Actively uses social media networks (from mobile)

• Follows trends, though does not represent any premium brand

• Considers 5-7 offers from apparel stores before buying

Content preferences

• Entertainment content (TikTok, Instagram)

• Humorous channels & podcasts

• Trends in movies and series.

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What are the Most Common Customer Needs?

The most common customer needs can be categorized into several key areas that reflect fundamental human desires and expectations when engaging with businesses. Understanding these needs helps companies tailor their offerings and deliver superior customer experiences:

1. Quality: Customers expect products or services to meet certain standards of quality. This includes durability, reliability, performance, and consistency. A product that consistently delivers what it promises builds trust and encourages repeat purchases.
2. Value for Money: Customers seek good value for the price they pay. This doesn't always mean the lowest price, but rather a fair exchange for the quality and benefits they receive. People want to feel that their money is well-spent, whether through competitive pricing, discounts, or the long-term value of a product.
3. Convenience: Convenience is a major driver of customer satisfaction. Customers appreciate easy-to-use products, straightforward purchasing processes, and accessible services. This can also include factors like fast shipping, mobile-friendly websites, and 24/7 customer support. Time-saving solutions often lead to increased loyalty.
4. Personalization: Customers increasingly want personalized experiences that cater to their specific preferences and needs. This could involve tailored recommendations, customized products, or communication that speaks directly to them as individuals. Personalization enhances the feeling of being understood and valued.
5. Trust and Transparency: Customers value businesses that are honest, transparent, and reliable. Clear communication about pricing, policies, and product details builds confidence, while ethical practices such as sustainability and data privacy are becoming increasingly important.
6. Customer Support: Effective, responsive, and friendly customer service is a core need. Whether resolving issues, answering questions, or providing assistance, customers want quick and helpful support when they encounter problems.

Considering ever-changing trends and individual customer preferences, it is vital to update your target audience profile continuously. This way, you’ll know how to identify client needs. While the nature of your business performance shapes over time, there are simultaneous changes among your target audience: age, habits, hobbies, customer wants and needs, etc. 

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More often than not, companies describe their ideal customer as a 25-45-year-old female with higher education and an above-average income, married with two children, and likes fitness and adventures. At Promodo, we call such a mystical person ‘the Queen of Marketing.’ However, there’s no such customer at all. Generalized data like this deprives businesses of real-to-life approaches to best target their audience. This means you should be getting to know your customers with the utmost precision, Kateryna Husachenko, Marketing Strategist at Promodo.

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An in-depth analysis of a character as a typical representative of a certain market segment will help you focus on what the customer wants by:

• Elaborating the right direction of product development 
• Including additional services 
• Boosting ad campaign communication with resonating messages 
• Creating best-fit content
• Engaging new audiences
• Coping with new customers 
• Retaining existing audiences.

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Know Your Customers To Earn More

At the core of any business venture is a customer who pays money to satisfy their own needs. This rings the bell of what is the first thing the customer wants. In times of an overwhelming amount of data, many companies downplay a genuine comprehension of their customers. Few marketers are capable of diving deep into their customer profiles continuously. Subsequently, they lack an understanding of what their customers need most.

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If you lack time to make an in-depth analysis of your target audience, we suggest starting small. Digital marketing involves analytics and data received from ad managers. In this vein, SimilarWeb is your reliable tool to retrieve a substantial amount of data about customer wants and needs and your closest competitors, Kateryna Husachenko, Marketing Strategist at Promodo.

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With sufficient data at hand, you'll be able to detect core points for your business growth. In one of our corporate cases with agro-business, we benefited from analytical sources to define shifts in behavioral patterns among the client’s customers:

• All the competitors received stable regional traffic, while our client did not.
• Gender distinction across the niche marked 70% males and 30% females, whereas the client’s target audience was the opposite. 
• While competitors targeted males aged 18-24, our client strategically focused on females aged 34-35.

The analysis led to a relevant hypothesis on how to adapt the product and adjust ad communication. Notwithstanding, we were still left with an open question of why the client’s target audience is so different from its niche competitors, considering that the client sells unified products. The solution was in a robust qualitative and quantitative research оf the client’s audience. 

Simple as that, no one would tell you more about your customers than your customers. The client needs analysis will help you explore a customer’s path to purchase. Individual customer experiences will help you scrutinize your audience segmentation. In this vein, we suggest using the 5W method, or Jobs To Be Done (JTBD). 

5W segmentation will help you know your customers better, detect the audience who most needs your products, and understand the most resonating communication channel.

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A deeper understanding customer needs and wants will let you:

• Spot additional sales channels
• Define focal promotion channels
• Create ad messages for multiple target segments
• Arrange communication flow with multiple segments through "flights" to optimize marketing budgets.

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5W is extremely beneficial for customer need analysis providing you already work with your target audience. Still, if you are up to attracting more users, launching a product, or penetrating a new market, JTBD will serve you best.

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‍JTBD provides a detailed customer profile. The approach will help you get to know your customers better and determine customer needs by seeking insights into your targeted audience, people’s daily habits and routines, and the products they consume. Unlike 5W which shows how your consumers use certain products, JTBD will tell you why consumers ‘hire products.’

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In most cases, qualitative research is primary to identify customer requirements. Once you work out the initial qualitative data, you’ll continue with quantitative methods. The latter will provide you with digital data on an actual and potential market capacity and your share thereof. 

At Promodo, we use customer profiles as an essential marketing tool that affects pricing, promotions, and market positioning. Knowing your customers is among the success keys to reaching an enhanced business performance and effective marketing strategy. 

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