Knowing your customers is essential when it comes to smarter marketing. Here’s why and how to utilise this for your small business .
How Many Businesses Are There In The UK?
Let’s look at how many businesses there are in the UK. According to Government statistics, there are approximately 5.6 million businesses in the UK. Of these, 99% are small businesses with less than 50 employees.
Based on my years in marketing, I estimate that over 70% of small businesses don’t know their target market. This is an important element of your small business marketing strategy. After all, if you don’t know your customer how can you possibly understand their requirements? Furthermore, your can’t tailor your marketing message so that your potential customers can resonate with what you’re products or services.
Why Is Knowing Your Customer Important?
When focusing on why knowing your customer is important there are a few crucial things that I’d like to share with you. Firstly, there are many business owners who start marketing with a lack of knowledge about their target market. When I was being trained by Anthony Robins back in 2006, one of the things I remember him saying was, “Where your focus goes your energy flows”. It’s the same with marketing. What you focus on will determine the types of customers that your attract.
Inefficient marketing with a scattergun approach could put a strain on vital resources like finance, employees, your time and technology. Take the time to truly get to know your customer. This can be by learning to tap into your customer base or by producing a profile of potential customers. Either way, knowing your customer is a must for successful marketing and winning marketing strategies.
How To Get To Know Your Customer
Here are a few techniques to help you learn how to get to know your customer. Produce a customer avatar, because this will help you really get to know who your ideal customer is. As a result, your marketing activities will be focused and yield a greater return for you and your business. When I’m running my Strategy Cycle™ Programs or mentoring my business owner clients, I’m constantly banging the drum about how important this is. Moreoer, when I’m advising my marketing consultancy clients about marketing planning, this is one of the most important strategy foundations that we work on. Marketing and networking success relies on reaching the right people, so building customer avatar will help massively. Essentially, it’s like building a fictitious representation of your ideal customer so that you can develop appropriate marketing messages that will influence buyer behaviour.
Use you customer database to explore any similarities with your customers too. This is a great way of establishing similarites that will help your marketing efforts. For sure, it’s definitely worth taking the time to do this. Largely because the results you get may be totally different to what your expectations are right now. This means, you will avoid unecessary spend on inefficient marketing and make certain you’re targeting the right target audience. It’s not uncommon for my clients to be dumfounded once we’ve analysed their customer base together.
What Customer Commonalities To Look For
To give you an idea of what customer commonalities to look for when profiling your customers, here are few lists of things that may help:
General Things To Identify
- Popular products or services bought
- Why customers chose to do business with you
- What product or service they bought first
- What product or services you upsold
- Frequency of purchase
- What forms of marketing communications attracted them to you
- Any concerns they had about doing business with you
- How long the buying decision took
- What phases of your sales cycle they went through before buying
- What problem you solved
- Any other elements of buyer behaviour that’s relevant to your business
- What forms of marketing worked to attract them to your business.
- Price sensitivity levels.
Business To Business Customers (B2B)
- Geography
- Type (sole trader, partnership or Limited company)
- Time in business
- What part of the business lifecycle are they
- Industry or business sector.
Business To Business Consumer Customers (B2C)
- Demographic
- Household decision maker
- Profession
- Salary bracket
- Where on their lifecycle they are.
AI and Customer Insights For Smarter Marketing Decisions
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the way businesses understand their customers. By analysing vast amounts of data, AI can identify behavioural patterns, buying habits, and engagement trends, providing businesses with deeper insights than ever before. With the right AI training, AI-powered tools can track customer preferences in real time, predict future purchasing behaviours, and even personalise marketing messages to increase conversions.
However, while AI presents incredible opportunities, businesses must prioritise ethics and legal compliance when handling customer data. Regulations such as GDPR require transparency, ensuring that customer data is collected, stored, and used responsibly. Gaining explicit consent, safeguarding personal information, and offering opt-out options are all critical to maintaining trust. AI should be used to enhance customer relationships, not exploit them, reinforcing the importance of balancing innovation with ethical responsibility. As you put the results together you will be forming your customer avatar, which can then be used as part of developing your marketing strategy. If you’re looking for ways to incorporate AI Marketing into your business, make sure you get expert advice and guidance from a qualified and certified AI Marketing specialist like me.
About The Knowing Your Customers: The Key to Smarter Marketing Author: Tracy Heatley
To find out more about the author of this blog, Certified AI Marketing Specialist, Chartered Marketer Tracy Heatley, everything you need is all right here. If you would like to contact Tracy Heatley or find out more about her Marketing Services, Strategy Cycle™ Program, AI Marketing Services, Or AI Training services, feel free to contact her. Additionally, there are lots of other free resources available for you including blogs and podcasts.
