The key to any successful retail marketing strategy comes down to understanding the end customers. Only after you understand your target customers can you formulate effective strategies for attracting them.
Learn What’s Important to Your Customers
Here are some of the questions you can explore to better understand your customers:
- What are the primary needs and wants that your customers have which you hope to fulfill?
- What are the problems or tensions your customers have that your products or services can resolve? (What problems can they resolve now? What could they resolve in the future?)
- At present, how do your customers currently resolve these problems or tensions? Where do they go? Who do they go to? What do they do to solve these problems?
- How can you do a better job resolving these problems or tensions for your customers?
- Where do your target customers spend their time? How can you reach them? Are they online? Do they commute to work? Do they read magazines or e-zines? Can you engage them on social media?
The fundamental idea behind this line of questioning is to get to the hearts and minds of your customers. The goal is to learn what’s important to your customers. You want to understand their motivations and to better appreciate the role your business can and does play in their lives.
The Value of Customer Psychology
Perhaps it isn’t abundantly clear why this line of questioning is so important for effective retail marketing. After all, you’re just trying to sell people stuff, right?
Well, it turns out that if you want to sell people stuff in a competitive marketplace you need to understand why people buy your stuff in the first place. If your competitors have this knowledge, they will outpace you. If you possess this knowledge, you can effectively compete. It’s that simple.
Businesses that just focus on generating the next transaction shy away from mining too deeply into customer psychology; they are mainly interested in converting the next sale.
In contrast, brands that take a relational mindset to their customers and value cultivating long-term customer loyalty tend to appreciate customer behavior and seek to better understand it.
And perhaps it goes without saying, but brands with customer loyalty have a better chance of being in business a year from now or twenty years from now. Understanding consumer psychology is important for any long-term effective retail marketing strategy.