How to Leverage Tech to Learn More About Your Customers
Get Smart with What You Have
The biggest way to make an impact with your customers and ensure their loyalty is to offer a product or service that speaks to them. To do that, a big part of your social media plan should be to utilize keywords and hashtags to identify your target audience, but to also take it a step further and find out what type of customer would be interested in your product.
[Tweet “Utilizing keywords & hashtags should be part of #socialmedia plan to find audience! @smarthustlemag”]By identifying your customers’ core demographic (and on a deeper level, psychographic) traits, you can begin to expand your reach to others who share those same traits. Spending at least an hour a day engaging your audience on social media and reading/sharing their posts is a great way to stay personable and fresh.
Further, you don’t want to be that user who constantly spams their audience with advertorial posts and promotions. A good rule of thumb when marketing your content is to practice a good share ratio of various content. Balancing advertorial posts with engagement posts may not make much sense when you’re trying to turn clicks into conversions in the short run, but makes all the difference in the world long-term.
By simply paying attention to your target audience’s posts, you can learn quite a bit about their spending habits and beliefs, which are all critical in creating a predictive plan that will get you loyal conversions. Though concrete evidence still needs to be presented on how demographics, psychographics and social media translates to sales, some businesses see its practicality in brand awareness and predictive analysis enough to integrate it into their current strategy.
Why Predictive Analysis is Important
Here is where a lot of fledgling businesses get it wrong. Knee-jerk reactions to catastrophes not only leaves your team constantly scrambling to put out fires, but also reduces your customers’ confidence in your business. So, imagine being able to not only know what your customers want, but also being able to see where your target market is going. If you’re in a niche with heavy competition, being able to make informed decisions based off of that information will give you a competitive advantage.
There are tools available, some of them open source that provide data mining and predictive analytic services. Some of these include:
- Pentaho – provides business analytics, data integration, report designer and community plugins.
- RapidMiner – platform for data mining, machine learning and predictive analytics.
- SpagoBI – 100% open source, complete business intelligence suite.
By observing past and current trends, business owners and marketers can leverage this information to target the best possible prospects. Whether you’re interested in growth or long-term sustainability, looking into predictive analytics just makes sense. Whatever tool or software you happen to use, it’s important to ensure that they’re flexible enough to work for your business now and in the future.
Pulling it All Together
When you take all of these numbers, posts and sensor information and put them into one document, it can seem unapproachable, or even outright intimidating. With the growth of the Internet, social media and wearable tech, the landscape of business has definitely changed from the days of cold-calls and door-to-door surveys.
Even if you have a small business, leveraging the big data will help your business be more efficient and better prepared for market downturns. A major component of a good hustle is to be ready when the market weather takes a turn for the worst, so get out there and connect, observe and adjust accordingly.
[author image=”https://smarthustle.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/RobertConrad.png”]Robert Conrad is a former Business Student with experience in Kickstarter campaign management and content sharing. When he’s not trying to blow up the Internet, he can be found furiously pushing buttons in front of his Nintendo Entertainment System. You can follow him on Twitter.[/author]