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When it comes to market research not only can you understand who your customers are but you can also start to understand and identify their needs. 

The issue that most businesses have is not considering themselves as the customer and instead they just take a simplistic view of what their customer’s need. Ie. ‘my customer is looking for a decorator’. But this isn’t true.  your customer is actually looking for a dream home,  they are looking for inspiration for what to do with a home,  they are looking for someone 10 can decorate the home with summer colours,  they are looking for someone that can decorate the home with minimal disruption to their lives. 

Market research involves many different factors, anything from getting feedback from exisiting to asking customer surveys to potential customers.  You can also include monitoring website traffic, looking for competitor information using analytical tools from Google, Moz, SEMrush  and other such sites.  To make market research work you need to make sure that you can collect the information.

Let’s start with what you consider it is that your customer looks for when shopping for a decorator?

One of the easiest ways to know who your target audience is analyse Google and Facebook.  Both have the analytic tools to show you who is interacting with your Facebook business page and Google my business.  We just need to make sure that both are set up correctly.

Taking this one step further you can also setup the integration tools that allow both Facebook and Google to monitor your website.  For me Facebook is really good at this because they will break down the age range, the demographic, the location, how people came about finding your website with easy-to-understand analytical tools.

To do this let’s start by installing your Facebook pixel onto your webpage. 

Videos:

1. Creating a Facebook Ad account
2. How to change the settings to include your brand name and add payment information
3. How to create your pixel and add to your website
4. The new Facebook Ad Manager

Now you’ve got your pixel installed Facebook will begin to collect the data. Using your Facebook business page you can start to track the people that click on it and breakdown their demographics.  for me age and location is always a key demographic that I’m looking for because it allows me to understand the type of content or approach to sales I should be using.

As I mentioned before there are a lot of SEO tools that allow you to monitor traffic and find keywords that your audience would search for,  most cost a lot of money and rightfully so for the data they provide.  But there is still a way to search for free using the Google search bar.

Google is a very powerful search engine that allows you to search and monitor the top Ranking keywords within your area but it also takes into account your search history, so to make this work you need to use incognito mode on Chrome.

Video: How to use Google to search for keywords

Not enough businesses engage with the current social media following  which is strange because you’ve got a ready-made audience in which you can ask questions off.  so post questions,  ask your audience,  get them involved.   The type of questions you can ask your audience using your social media posts and then continue to engage with them in the comments to get more information are:

1. What questions would you ask a decorator before employing them to paint your home?
2.  If you’ve ever employed a decorator did you have a budget in mind or where you guided by their cost?
3.  How much would you expect it to cost to paint your kitchen?
4.  Did you know that you can spray paint kitchen cabinets rather than renewing them?
5.  If you are going to employ a decorator would you want them to be on Checkatrade and other trade websites?
6.  How long do you spend speaking to a decorator to build that trust before taking them on board to decorate your home?

There are so many tools out there that you can look at to gain reviews.  Facebook, Google, trustpilot, reviews.io, LinkedIn, directly on your website.  you can create surveys using surveymonkey, MailChimp, Google forms.  There are so many tools that you can use but you need to prioritise the one that is going to gain you the most visibility, provide you with the most data and is easy for both you and your customers to use.

We are going to, over the next few weeks, break down how you can easily collect reviews and use those reviews to build an audience and gain further leads.

Together, over the next few weeks, we’ll understand more around the perfect persona and how this will transform your sales and marketing approach.