Understanding your customer

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Understanding your customer

- A pivotal component to growth-hacking is understanding your customer. It would be a waste of time to pursue the wrong audience and doing so might cause you to make product decisions that put you even further behind. In addition to guiding your product development, your audience will provide you with the lens in which to interpret your data. You'll need to put yourself in the shoes of your target market when you review that data. The reason a twenty-something text savvy user abandons a checkout page can be very different than why a forty-something parent abandons the checkout. If you're seeing a particular pattern in your data, knowing who your customer is will help you decipher that information.

The best audience is one that needs your category of product and they might not be actively looking, but you know that if they stumble upon your product it'll flip the light switch. They'll be engaged with learning what you have to offer. Growth-hacking is built around this type of audience. It's easier to grow around a market that wants a product like yours, than to create demand for something people don't need. When I start any marketing endeavor, I like to outline the type of customer I'm targeting. And you can do this by creating descriptive personas. There's a lot of ways you can go about deciphering the personas of you're users.

If you've got an existing customer base, you can conduct surveys and mine new data for patterns, but if you're just starting out, you'll have to make some educated assumptions. To do that, let's start with a simple exercise. We're going to outline three desired or typical customers of yours. So pull out a piece of paper and then close your eyes and picture three different customers interacting with your product. Now write down the three names that come to your mind when you see their faces. Next, describe each person at a broad level. How old are they? What is their gender? And what type of education do they have? Next, write down some career facts about these people.

What is their profession? How long have they been working there? And is their career motivating them to use your product? From here, let's talk about the technological traits of this customer. What technology do they use daily? How do they access the web? How much time are they dedicating to the Internet? Now, you'll write a short biography for each of these people. You could also pretend that you're introducing them to a friend. What would you say? What things will you highlight? So at this point, you've got a rough sketch of these people, but you'll want to take it even further and put yourself in their shoes.

Assume their identity. Imagine their day to day and then answer these four questions. What are they motivated by? Where do they spend most of their time? Why are they interested in your product? And finally, what will convince them to buy? At the end of that exercise, you should have some very clear personas. As you collect your data, you can tweak the personas to align with your findings. You'll use these personas to build a better product and to establish the right method for your growth-hacking.

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/marketing-foundations-growth-hacking/understanding-your-customer