Know your customers

This task seems simple enough, but knowing your customers can be complicated. Why do you need to know your customers? Because they will lead you to others just like them. Knowing your customers will help you understand their buying patterns, where to place your advertising, which method of advertising they prefer, etc. There are two kinds of information you want to know about: demographics and psychographics. Demographics include age, gender, income, region of the country, etc. Psychographics include people's attitudes, behaviors (what they purchase with expendable income), and opinions. So how do you figure this stuff out?

Let's say you sell grills and as an example, the life of a grill is about five years. The following questions bear that in mind:

-Do you have repeat customers (once the five year life is up)?
-Do they purchase accessories on a regular basis?
-What is their annual household income?
-Do they recommend your grills to their friends, family, co-workers?
-Are they customers because: of the business' reputation, excellent customer service, competitive prices?
-Do more males than females make the decision to purchase a grill?
-Are more customers from the north, south, east, west part of town, or is there an equal distribution?
-What do your customers do in their spare time?
-What types of activities do your customers have in common (working on their cars, yard work, home improvement, etc.)?
-Do they prefer gas or charcoal grills?
-How often do they grill?
-Do they live in a part of the country that has 100+ days of sunshine per year? 200+? 300+?
-What television shows do they watch?
-What radio stations do they listen to?
-Are they exposed to billboards on a daily basis?

The list of questions is endless.

Sometimes, gathering this information can be difficult especially if you have a brick and mortar store. Some businesses get this information by asking for a ZIP code from the customer at check out. Then you can compare purchasing habits by region that the customer lives in. Another way to gather information is by conducting a survey. A free online survey can be created on the Survey Monkey Web site. (The basic features are free.)

By knowing everything about your customer, you can more effectively place advertisements in places where your customers already look or listen. That way, you can attract people just like them, people that purchase your products and services.