How to keep in touch with your customer needs? Make them a priority.

Having a good understanding of our customers is essential if we are to effectively develop, market, and sell our products and services. 

We can achieve this by understanding how our ideal customers view their environment before understanding their experience with us.

We need to identify how much we know about our customers, identifying areas of further research. At the same time, we can draw out what we know, or assume, how our customers behave. 

An excellent starting point is creating a “customer profile”, helping us develop meaningful value propositions and effective communication channels that will be most effective in developing the customer relationship that we need.

This method allows us to empathize with our customers by considering the following aspects.

• How do they think and feel? 
• What is important to them? 
• What might be their aspirations? 
• What do they see? 
• What do their friends have? 
• What is their environment, and what marketing messages are they exposed to? 
• What does their previous experience with us look like? 
• What do they hear? 
• Who is influencing them? 
• What media are they listening to?
• How do they act in public? 

Next, we consider their pains and potential gains.

• What are their fears, problems, challenges, or frustrations that they have? What obstacles might be getting in their way?
•  What is it that they want to achieve? How do they measure success?
•  What might they be doing to achieve their goals?

Firstly, list your customer segments. Each segment should have a need that requires a special offer, different distribution channels, or alternative customer relationships. Select the one that you want to focus on.

Next, give your customer a name and define their demographic status. List key characteristics such as their age, marital status, number of children, job type, and income. Using a whiteboard, or sheet of flip chart paper, draw your customer empathy map placing their key demographic characteristics in the center circle.

Then, build your ideal customer profile for your chosen segment by exploring each area in the map and answering the questions outlined earlier.

Put your responses on Post-it Notes and stick them to the map. The technique works best when you get input from a group of colleagues who work in various business parts, each with different touchpoints in the customer experience. By collecting and collating the information from multiple individuals, we start to develop a rounded and balanced view of what our ideal customer looks like.

Going beyond just the demographic characteristics helps us better understand their environment, behavior, concerns, and aspirations.

However, if you do not have a team, you can also get good results by working through the technique on your own and then testing some of your assumptions through conversations with one or two of your best customers. 

Ultimately, we can get a much better understanding of our customers and how we engage with them.

It allows us to generate insights into potential needs that the customer might have that we are not currently serving. 

It will allow us to identify where they are likely to see value in our product offerings.

 reach out if you want to create a detailed map for your customers, improve your positioning and build laser-focused targeting of customer segments. All this translates into more significant revenues from better alignment with consumers and distribution channels.