Finding Out Who Your Buyer Is

Doing some research on your typical buyer will go a long way toward deciding what kind of marketing strategies are going to have the greatest success. That doesn't mean that you need to pay a large marketing firm for this information. You can do a great job of gathering this research yourself, setting up online surveys and sending an e-mail to your customers to take them.

You basically want to know a couple of things. First, you'll want to know how they found your business. Then you'll want to know about their most recent purchase with you. You should try to find out about what drove their decisions to do business with you. This is important because you'll get a sense of how you're getting people to come to your location (or website) and make the decision to buy.

In addition to getting information on their decision-making, you'll also want to know who your buyer is. Finding out their age and gender is often key to being able to discern some of their preferences.

While this information won't be an exact predictor of future buying decisions, you will be able to learn from trends and patterns as more of your buyers return surveys to you. The downside to this, of course, is that you may never get a significant number of your customers to return your surveys.  This will delay you in getting the help you need to tweak your marketing campaigns.

Working with Professionals

One shortcut to getting the kind of information that is typically gathered by large research firms, is to work with people who have access to large scale marketing studies and information. Industry professionals often subscribe to research firms whose job it is to find out what goes into buyer decisions.  These research firms survey millions of different kinds of buyers and then report this data the industry professionals that subscribe.  Local marketing consultants and their companies (like ours) often subscribe to multiple services that provide this kind of information.

By working with local marketing consultants, you can often get access to some of this valuable information without having to pay the exorbitant fee that a research firm would charge you. In addition to this, most marketing consultants will help you to bring context to the statistics. In other words, they will help you to apply the information from the research firm to your individual business.

For more information go to:

Local Marketing Muscle