How to Make Your Customers Love You

Co-authored by Elena Foley

You may think you’ve captured your customer through a persona that you have developed, but how much do you really understand your base?  When we talk about building customer love, we’re not talking about starry-eyed romance as much as providing a really great experience that draws your customers in and makes them want to do business with you. This experience can be applied to any customer touch point, including: social media, mobile responsiveness, ecommerce, user experience, or even web design. What’s underneath, however, is a really solid understanding of who your customers are and what they need from you.

How can you deliver a great experience for your customers? Sure, it may vary for your business—depending, of course, on what space you occupy within your industry—but the art and science of branding are assuredly consistent when narrowed down to these two essential components: empathy and data.

First, build empathy

Let’s first focus on the art. With the wealth of research methodologies available to you (demographic information, statistics, market research, etc.) it’s tempting to stop at an aggregated stereotype. But take the time to really understand who your customers are. For example, consider their pain points, their motivations, their daily interactions and their passions. Walk a mile in their shoes. By using an empathetic lens, you can build a personal connection with your customer and better meet them wherever they are in their buyer’s journey.

Case study:

At Mambo, we had the opportunity to work with a renewable energy firm that wanted to build a stronger culture for their service technicians. We started this process with little data, but a lot of interest. The lack of existing data meant that we needed to talk to our target audience to better understand them, and more importantly: we had to listen. We met one-on-one with a lot of these technicians and learned the ins and outs of their jobs. They spent a lot of time 300 feet in the air, working on turbines, sprinkled throughout rural communities across the country. They spent much of their day paired with only one or two other people. Yet, there was an inherent community among them—almost in the vein of firefighters, they worked dangerous jobs and had unique shared experiences.

What we gleaned from our conversations with these technicians was that they need a stronger communication platform, so that they had an outlet for interacting with and learning from each other from up in the sky and across the country. They needed WiFi access in their towers. The platform that they needed to develop, in this case a mobile app, would give the technicians a sense of culture they otherwise would struggle to create. Because we were able to apply empathy to our methodology, we found a solution that was personal and authentic.

Now, you can leverage your data

By nurturing this initial art of empathy, you are now able to better build on and leverage the science of data. Thanks to marketing automation and digital marketing analytic platforms, customer data should be an essential part of your strategy. Use it! Track your customers’ habits to better understand what type of content is most influential at different stages. Gather thoughts, capture trends, and distill each metric so that when you are compiling strategy, you are always bringing in your assumed customer’s perspective. Work towards a robust customer database to understand trends and cluster characteristics of your top performers, those most ripe for re-engagement, and who isn’t ready for the investment. Just remember: data will tell you what is happening, but your empathy will tell you why it’s happening.

Interested in better understanding your target audience? Contact Mambo for a free consultation.