One thing in business will never change: understanding your customers is the key to success.<\/p>\n
However, for many organizations, real customer analysis is easier said than done. Sometimes, customer research only scratches the surface and focuses on unnecessary information. Other times, teams work in silos, and the research they\u2019ve worked so hard to produce isn\u2019t actually used across the organization or in their marketing campaigns.<\/p>\n
Effective customer analysis is based on in-depth research, shared with the entire team, and focused on what really matters: customer pain points and goals \u2014 and insights on what influences their buying decisions.<\/p>\n
In this guide, we\u2019ll take you through how to do it step-by-step.<\/p>\n
Enhance Your Customer Analysis with Buyer Persona Research<\/p>\n
Try the free Semrush Persona tool: create winning buyer persona profiles for your business.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Customer analysis is the practice of using qualitative and quantitative data to gain insight into your customers. The goal is to understand their wants, needs, pain points, and objectives. At the same time, customer analysis helps us understand what drives people to make a purchase, how and when these purchases happen, the frequency of these purchases, and other relevant information.<\/p>\n
Organizations that conduct customer-centric data analysis use research methods like focus groups, in-depth interviews, social media analytics, existing customer feedback \u2014 and more \u2014 to understand their customer base. In turn, this allows them to adapt their business processes to meet their customers\u2019 real needs.<\/p>\n
Here are a few concrete reasons why you need to implement customer analysis, it:<\/p>\n
A\u00a0customer profile<\/a>\u00a0is a fictionalized description of your ideal client \u2014 the \u201cperfect\u201d fit for your business solutions. You may also have heard of\u00a0buyer persona<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 a closely linked concept that describes a range of\u00a0different types of client characteristics<\/a>. It might include information on your customer\u2019s demographics, professional status, purchasing habits, values and goals, influences, and challenges, and anything else that\u2019s relevant to your particular situation. Overall, the main goal of customer analysis is to create a customer profile and a range of buyer personas.<\/p>\n Customer profiles and buyer personas are also made to be shared across the entire organization \u2014 including with the sales, design, marketing, and product teams. So, they need to be concise and easy to understand.<\/p>\n For example, your team might not need to know if your ideal customer likes strawberry ice cream, wears orange socks, and is a Sagittarius. These assumptions won\u2019t help anyone make smarter business decisions. However, the real, in-depth insights we mention above will. Make sure to ask yourself (and your team) if the information you seek and include will have an impact on the way you are making decisions in the company.<\/p>\n So, how can you run an effective customer analysis? We\u2019ve got you covered. Here are 9 steps you need to take.<\/p>\n When you know what clients you already have, you can better understand what clients you would like to have. That\u2019s why one of the first steps in your customer research involves customer-based segmentation (i.e. grouping your clients by certain characteristics).<\/p>\n Segmentation depends on the goals you have as a company. For example, you don’t necessarily need to include demographics in a B2B scenario. Be sure to only include information that actually affects how you would market your product or service.<\/p>\n Brands often\u00a0segment their customers<\/a>\u00a0into the following groups (but don\u2019t feel like you need to stick to just these):<\/p>\n You can get some of this information from social media, your CRM (customer relationship management) tool, paid campaigns,\u00a0market research<\/a>, and other data sources. For example, the\u00a0Semrush Market Explorer<\/a>\u00a0tool can give you insight into market demographics in your sector: interests, social media consumption, and more.<\/p>\n But, there\u2019s probably nothing more effective than taking the time to speak with your customers in depth, especially if you offer a high-consideration product or service. This will allow you to ask follow-up questions, get an in-depth understanding of your clients\u2019 needs \u2014 and get to know them on a more emotional level. These are all things we go into below.<\/p>\n You can invest hours researching online. However, it\u2019s not until you speak to customers that you\u2019ll understand their true sentiments.<\/p>\n To conduct effective customer analysis, you need to invest the time in carrying out focus groups, surveys and in-depth interviews with clients and potential customers.<\/p>\n There are two principal types of research you can employ:<\/p>\n Quantitative research involves finding data. It can come from surveys, but also analytics harvested from your website, app, ecommerce store, third-party sites, CRM, etc. Statistics derived from your clients and target market can help segment audiences, predict trends, and help analysts uncover insights to make smart business decisions. This usually informs future qualitative market research, because from here you can better decide which questions to ask your target audience. It\u2019s also useful when you want to run an initial segmentation analysis, requiring statistically significant results.<\/p>\n Qualitative research involves finding your target market\u2019s opinions. You can do this in in-depth interviews and focus groups, among other formats. Insights from qualitative research can help you uncover people\u2019s motivations, challenges, opinions, etc. They also allow you to connect with your customers on a different level and ask follow-up questions, helping you to truly understand who they are. This is especially crucial for high-consideration products (e.g., in B2B markets), where the decision-making process can become complicated and take unexpected shapes.<\/p>\n With these, you shouldn\u2019t just be digging around for bits of random information. On the contrary, before you approach anyone, you need to understand what your end goal is. What do you want to find out?<\/p>\n But no matter how you\u2019re reaching customers \u2014 through focus groups, surveys or interviews \u2014 it\u2019s wise to keep the scope of things tight. That is, don\u2019t try to learn everything about how your customers feel in one sitting; you\u2019ll get more actionable information if you delve deeply into just one topic.<\/p>\n Customer analysis is meant to be an ongoing process, so you\u2019ll always have time to learn more as you continue on the journey. Plus, by only digging into one topic, you\u2019re more likely to encounter information about how people perceive your brand that you didn\u2019t expect to find (and that\u2019s always the best kind).<\/p>\n Customers already reach out to you when they need help, are happy with your product, or want to make a complaint. Paying attention to all this existing customer feedback and customer support requests can be incredibly valuable when it comes to understanding client pain points and goals. This is also called Voice of Customer (VoC) analysis.<\/p>\n Voice of Customer programs can help you analyze customer reviews on Google, Facebook, Twitter, the App Store, Google Play or any other public source will enable you to see where your brand goes right and wrong. Besides, tools like\u00a0Semrush Brand Monitoring<\/a>\u00a0can help you keep track of all mentions of your brand and product\/service in real-time.<\/p>\n In many cases, VoC data will give you insights into how your customers speak, write and even think. For example, why exactly did they ask for a refund? What features were they unhappy with, but didn\u2019t think were worth requesting a refund over? In what surprising ways has your product been useful for them or someone they know?<\/p>\n Everyone on your team may work for the same organization, but not everyone sees the same side of clients \u2014 and therefore what makes them tick. For example:<\/p>\n Compiling insights about customers as a team can be incredibly powerful, and enables a holistic approach to client analysis. One way to do this, for instance, is for marketers to take part in sales or CSM calls to get a better understanding of the users \u2014 and vice versa.<\/p>\n Doing so can also be useful for teams in which not everyone works with the same clients; for example, when it comes to working with large B2B accounts or clients from specific sectors.<\/p>\n Analytics can provide incredible\u00a0insight into customers and their behavior.<\/a>\u00a0If you use a customer relationship management tool, you may already have internal information about customer demographics and behavior, client profitability and value, as well as conversations with customers at your fingertips.<\/p>\n Google Analytics<\/a>\u00a0and Facebook Audience Insights (for example) can also be extremely useful. They let you learn more about how customers interact with your website and social accounts.<\/p>\n For example, you can see:<\/p>\n In turn, you can understand more about their habits, interests, and behaviors.<\/p>\n There are other tools generating analytics for specific marketing areas. For example,\u00a0ImpactHero<\/a>\u00a0is an advanced (AI) content analytics tool that helps you identify areas to improve in your content marketing, using a tracking code to scan and highlight\u00a0content funnel<\/a>\u00a0issues and website pages to enhance.<\/p>\n Now, it\u2019s time to put these research findings into action. Semrush\u2019s Head of Marketing (Market Research) Natalia Zhukova explains well how this fits into the analysis workflow in\u00a0her post on buyer personas<\/a>. She writes:<\/p>\n Amalgamating all of the data will help to identify patterns and similarities from interview answers, sales team feedback, and competitor insights. And from these commonalities, a buyer persona\u2019s portrait should become clear \u2014 all that\u2019s left to do is to document all the findings and share these personas with the rest of the company.<\/p>\n According to a\u00a0NetProspex case study<\/a>, their buyer persona marketing efforts resulted in a 900% increase in website visit duration and a 171% increase in marketing-generated ROI.<\/p>\n So, what should the persona look like? We recommend including the following:<\/p>\n Demographic information*, such as:<\/p>\n *More relevant to B2C<\/p>\n Professional information*, such as:<\/p>\n *More relevant to B2B<\/p>\n Also include their:<\/p>\n You may also like to include:<\/p>\n The\u00a0free Semrush Buyer Persona Template tool<\/a>\u00a0helps you make sure all the information you include is as helpful and usable for your organization as possible. The ready-made templates or customizable personas also help speed up the process of collating all your information.<\/p>\n Overall, it\u2019s a quick and effective way to organize your personas into an easy-to-read and share format.<\/p>\n How to use the Buyer Persona Templates:<\/p>\n Your customer analysis and buyer personas won\u2019t be very valuable if only used by a few select people at your organization. They need to be leveraged across the entire company, and this will enable you to keep your messaging consistent and effective.<\/p>\n We recommend getting buy-in and collaboration from every strategic and customer-facing department when creating these personas. Once completed, it\u2019s worth holding an all-hands meeting \u2014 or individual department workshops \u2014 to share the personas, describing how they can be used.<\/p>\n At the same time, give each team\u2019s head an objective to begin incorporating the insights you have uncovered in the research. Be sure to follow up on these and consistently update the personas with fresh information from each department as it becomes available.<\/p>\n Now, let\u2019s take a look at how buyer personas can be valuable to different teams:<\/p>\n Organizations re-brand all the time because their messaging or design doesn\u2019t attract the customers they want\/doesn\u2019t reflect the reality of their actual customer base. For example, Old Spice was viewed as old-fashioned\u00a0until the brand partnered with NFL Player Isaiah Mustafa<\/a>, who spoke in snappy sentences in popular and quirky TV commercials while topless. Buyer personas help you ensure that your messaging, brand, and, most importantly \u2014 your product \u2014 are actually tailored to the real customers you want to attract.<\/p>\n Now, the big question is: how should you decide which personas your brand should focus on?<\/p>\n Perhaps the most important metric to focus on is Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) \u2014 which is the average value a customer brings to your organization throughout the entire relationship. The buyer personas that increase your LTV, over time, are ones that would be smart to focus on.<\/p>\n It can also help to have a unique customer journey map for each persona. This map will determine how to attract, engage, convert and upsell specific personas and segments based on their challenges, questions, preferred platforms, and types of content at every step of the way.<\/p>\n Use your personas \u2014 and these customer journey maps \u2014 to determine the following:<\/p>\n Download the Free Content Mapping Template Kit that includes a Buyer’s Journey Map Template\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n Customers are constantly changing. Since the start of the pandemic, many people\u2019s preferred communication platforms have changed. Their demographics have changed, too; lots of people have moved out of cities and into the suburbs.<\/p>\n Even more, people\u2019s values have changed. For many, spending time with family and friends has become more important than working long hours or going after a big promotion.<\/p>\n In this evolving environment, collecting customer feedback is key. And you should undertake customer segmentation analysis and voice of customer analysis periodically to ensure your research and buyer personas are up to date. Otherwise, your messaging, marketing, pitches, and (even worse) products risk becoming stale.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve gone through how to carry out customer analysis. But keep in mind, your customers don\u2019t just need to be segmented into typical market segments based on geography, demographics, or behavior. Your business is unique, and, in turn, there are a number of unique ways to target clients. Here are some customer analysis examples:<\/p>\n This\u00a0Survicate<\/a>\u00a0blog outlines a few cool things companies have done. For example, the brand\u00a0TravelFreak\u00a0<\/a>segmented customers based on the number of places they\u2019ve visited, travel budget and distance traveled. Another brand, chatbot company\u00a0Tidio<\/a>, segmented customers based on the products they use, such as Shopify and WordPress (and then saw one blog convert at nearly 50%).<\/p>\n The moral of the story? With customer analysis, it can pay off to color outside the lines \u2014 and be creative to find what works best for your particular brand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Complete Guide to (Effective) Customer Analysis One thing in business will never change: understanding your customers is the key to success. However, for many organizations, real customer analysis is easier said than done. Sometimes, customer research only scratches the\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}9 Steps to Running an Effective Target Customer Analysis<\/h2>\n
1. Segment the Customers You Already Have<\/h3>\n
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2. Talk to Customers to Find Out what Makes Them Tick<\/h3>\n
Quantitative Research<\/h4>\n
Qualitative Research<\/h4>\n
3. Use Existing Customer Feedback<\/h3>\n
4. Communicate with Your Team<\/h3>\n
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5. Leverage Analytics<\/h3>\n
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6. Create Buyer Personas<\/h3>\n
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Using the Buyer Persona Templates<\/h3>\n
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7. Use the Customer Analysis Results and Your Personas Across the Entire Company<\/h3>\n
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8. Based on the Research, Decide which Segments and Personas Should Be Your Focus<\/h3>\n
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9. Remember that This Is an Evolving Environment<\/h3>\n
Unique Customer Data Analysis Examples<\/h2>\n