Do
you know who your clients are? 1/3 of
businesses don't. Learn about your
customers, strategically
market your business and effectively use your sales money.
Do you
know who your customers are?
When
starting an analysis
of each of my business clients, one of the first questions is
“Who is your
customer?” Now of days, 1/3 of the
businesses
that I speak with can’t give me this information. They
honestly don’t know who’s coming through
their doors, when they’re coming nor do they know what customers
are buying.
As
a consultant, most businesses
contact me because they want to improve their sales, they need more
customers. They don’t know who has
come their before,
how much they’ve spent, when did they come or how they heard
about them – they want
more sales.
It’s
hard to hearing that
you need to take a step back and do some research to put a plan of
action into
place, and more forward. Business is
like the GPS in your car. You need to
know where you are, to get the best directions to where you need to be.
The first step to developing a business
plan
and marketing strategy is finding out who your customer are, if not
then your spending
money blindly to attract new customers.
A
great suggestion that I
give to businesses is to implement a survey on their sales receipts. In addition, throw in an incentive such as a
discount, a gift certificate, a promotional item, etc to give them a
reason to
fill out the survey and come back to your store to shop again.
You can use surveys for:
Capturing demographic information about
your clients
Capture
client information to add to your marketing efforts
See how
your
company is doing on a specific issue or overall (example testing a new
product)
Capture
information about the promotions your company is offering.
Get
referrals
from current clients
Find out
if
your staff is doing what they are supposed to be doing
See if
your
clients think your prices are correct and competitive with your
competitors
Find out
where your customers heard about you
Find out
what
your customers think about you
I highly
suggest business
researching on-line survey companies to see what companies would best
suite your
companies needs. If you’re just
getting
started or if you are a business with a small marketing budget, a great
and tool
is www.surveymonkey.com, it’s FREE.
SurveyMonkey.com:
Helps
you build your survey
– helps by selecting from over a dozen type of
questions (multiple choice, rating scales, drop-down menus, etc). It also can help you control the flow of your
survey with custom skip logic and help you to randomize your answer
choices.
You control the look - Survey monkey when allows you to
have creative
control over the look of your survey. You
can upload your businesses logo and use custom color themes. Most importantly you can upgrade to not have
any advertisements so your surveys are clean and professional.
Choose where your
survey will be -
You choose how you collect your information
(via email, a link on your blog, your website, etc.) You even control
when you
can start and stop your survey.
Send it in an email - You can also choose to send out your
survey via
email and track who responds to the survey and send follow-up reminders
to
those who don’t.
Analyze Results – Collect data in real time and
translate
information directly into charts, allowing you to analyze your data
Download Results – you can download all of your
data to spreadsheets
in Excel.
To
rate this article and
find out more about www.SurveyMonkey.com,
please click the link below
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=G1NQdWQ8_2fIIpt7LYjDeo_2bQ_3d_3d
THIS
ARTICLE CAN BE REPRINTED AS LONG AS THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION IS
INCLUDED:
*Laura
Baker is a professional business consultant with Lasara Management
Group. For more information visit www.LasaraMgmtGroup.com or
email Laura@lasaramgmtgroup.com
