How to really understand your customers - marketing advice for manufacturers

The first step in creating marketing, that delivers a profit, is to understand your customers.

If, as a manufacturing business, you really want to understand customers - the first thing you need to understand is who are they?

Specifically, who are the users, the specifiers, and the buyers of products and services like yours? 

Perspective

Understanding who they are and what their perspective is enables you to understand their point of view, the problems they face, the challenges they have and any aspirations that they have within their role, their business or personally.

It helps you understand why they buy what they do. It helps clarify what matters to them when it comes to making the decisions on what they buy, how they buy it and who they buy it from.

When you're selling to a finance director or the c-suite, a very different set of messages and a different understanding is required when compared to a factory manager or a user of a particular piece of equipment

Learning

The first step in understanding customers is knowing where to find them so you can learn more about them. You can do this by identifying them by their role, company type, sectors of interest and then digging deeper into groups they are a member of, the magazines that they read, the email subscriptions that they take and the events that they attend. I call this "watering holes".

Paying attention and identifying trends is gold dust. Find out what is going on in your target customer watering holes by reading and analysing articles, talks, other published and promoted material, group discussions and more.

Insight

This material tells you everything you need to know about what matters most to the people you want to influence. This is crucial insight that can be used to inform your own marketing communications efforts.

Understanding customers in manufacturing sectors comes down to understanding what makes them tick, what makes them make the decisions they make and how we can position our products and services to best meet their needs so that problems are resolved or aspirations are realised.

What information sources and tools can you draw on to get better insight into what makes your target customers tick?

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