Many of our articles are focused on using your CRM to help you get more customers and close sales faster. This article will be no different, although there will be a stronger marketing emphasis. As business owners, you know the importance of identifying your target audience. If you do not have a target audience and you market to everyone, your unqualified leads will choke out the qualified leads.
When you have your target audience identified, you can use your CRM as a tool to reach and nurture your audience. We have several articles that speak to this. Here are just a few:
- Build customer loyalty and increased revenue using your CRMs email drip campaign
- More Sales Less Effort
- 4 things a small business website must have to convert sales
- The Sales Funnel: How to Get Marketing and Sales on the Same Page
Identifying your audience is key to attracting qualified leads. However, your goal is to get the most qualified customers to buy, but not everyone in your audience responds the same way. Your audience may respond differently based on demographics, product needs, or another variable. At the same time, there may people within your audience who are not qualified. How do you know which ones are qualified? How do you know how they respond? What can you do about this?
This is where your CRM can be a valuable asset as a business intelligence tool to help you understand your audience. Let’s look at three ways to understand your target audience so you can attract better leads.
Create or revisit your persona
A persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. Personas help business owners stay focused on their customer’s needs. They also help you understand your customer’s personality traits, interests, and buying behavior. Personas provide guidance when you are creating email drip campaigns, landing pages with calls to action, and automated messages in your CRM. If you do not have personas for your audience, it is a good idea to make one. At the same time, if you do have personas, customers change over time so it is a good idea to revisit your personas at least once a year. Hubspot has a nice persona maker that you can use online at https://www.hubspot.com/make-my-persona.
Analyze your customer activity in your CRM
Understanding when, why, and how customers buy can be the difference between closing a sale and losing a sale or retaining a customer and losing a customer. Not all customers respond the same and not all customers are the best fit. Analyzing your customer data in your CRM will help you find answers. Here are two metrics to analyze:
- Length of buy cycle – If you need to close a sale within a week to make a profit margin, look at the characteristics and patterns of those who purchase within that timeframe. At the same time, look at the patterns of those who take a longer time to make a decision. What are the common denominators for both? Look at the patterns of those who purchase quickly and target like-minded customers.
- Communication method – Look at the response rate for each communication method as well as conversions from each method for each segment within your audience. This is where it is important to understand how each segment in your audience responds. Using the wrong communication method can be the difference between closing a sale and losing a sale.
There are other metrics that you can analyze in your CRM to help you understand your customer’s activity. Analyzing your customer activity will help you attract better leads and reduce follow up fatigue.
Focus on your champion
A champion is a customer who is loyal and is an advocate of your brand. They are the ones that tell family and friends to buy your product or service. They are repeat buyers. Because the champion is your ideal customer, you want more like them, so you want to nurture them. When they are telling family and friends about you, they are helping you sell your product or service. You can help them sell by creating a referral program through your CRM. Referral programs are a great way to reward the champion, and it makes it easy for them to connect you with the referral.
While you are focusing on your champion, you can take the time to understand why they are advocates. What is it that is important to them? Why are they loyal to your brand? Using these insights, you can market to like-minded people. Growing a customer base of champions is what every business owner wants.
Conclusion
When it comes to understanding your customers, your CRM is probably your biggest asset. Every time someone fills out a lead-gen form or you enter data about a customer, you are collecting data in your CRM. That data is priceless when it comes to understanding your customer and attracting better leads.
If you are not currently using a CRM or you are thinking about switching to a new CRM, contact us at 301-332-0613 or fill out the form, to request a demo of X2CRM. As an X2CRM partner, we deliver powerful tools, configured based on your business goals, and train you how to use them, so you are ready to go full speed on day one.
