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Do you know your customers?
Sunday, 04 November 2012
Do you know your customers?
One of the most important aspects of a successful marketing plan for a product, service or business involves knowing your customers. This means assessing who your potential customers are and what they value most about the product or service you are interested in promoting to them.
Performing such basic customer research can really pay off, especially in highly competitive markets, since a failed product promotion or business can be costly. Furthermore, identifying your target market is often considered part of the essential research included in most business plans, and failing to do so can result in various problems.
For example, a business might overprice their product, advertise in the wrong places, target a lukewarm market segment or otherwise misjudge their potential clientele’s interests if management has not taken the time to research their intended client base ahead of time.
Assessing your target market
The first step to take toward knowing your customers better typically involves performing some basic market research. For example, you could try thinking about what types of people might be interested in the product or service you are offering.
Often you will identify a primary customer group upon which you will target most of your marketing efforts. You might also identify one or more secondary customer groups that would be less likely to show an interest in your product, but which could still provide a profitable income stream.
You can then expand your efforts by performing well-crafted customer surveys to obtain more information about the markets you have identified. You can also offer samples to targeted clients and obtain feedback to better gauge their potential interest in purchasing.
The customer value proposition
A customer value proposition or CVP is a statement about why a customer should purchase a product or service. It typically consists of the benefits which a business assures its customer will receive for their money or other valuable consideration.
If you are planning on operating a business or marketing a product, you will ideally need to develop a customer value proposition that appeals to the primary target market you have identified.
Basically, your business needs to first add value and then aim to capture it from its potential customer base. Knowing your customers helps considerably in this important business planning process.
Consider offering value added services
Once you have identified what your target market is and what the people making the purchase decisions in that market are most likely to value, offering value added services that appeal to your customers can be a helpful way to add another revenue stream to your business quickly.
For example, offering value added foreign exchange tools and facilities - e.g. currency converter or live exchange rate widgets - can be useful to promote to individual clients on your website if they have a tendency to travel extensively to other countries, make foreign investments or own real estate overseas.
Furthermore, foreign exchange related services can appeal to customers such as small to medium sized online businesses. Such enterprises often have to deal with receiving or paying foreign currencies in order to expand the client base for their products abroad.
Another key market segment potentially interested in foreign exchange consists of those who engage in import or export activities for business purposes. Most such clients will benefit from having easy access to good quality foreign exchange services to facilitate their import/export transactions.
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This article is brought to you by OzForex Foreign Exchange Services. OzForex is one of the world’s leading foreign exchange companies, providing live exchange rates and focused on providing a smarter, online alternative to existing international money transfer services. Established in 1998 with the aim of giving individuals and corporate clients a better deal, OzForex has offices in Sydney, Toronto, London, Hong Kong, San Francisco and Auckland.
The OzForex Group includes OzForex, UKForex, Canadian Forex, USForex, NZForex, Tranzfers and ClearFX. It is a strategic investment of Macquarie Bank, Accel Partners and The Carlyle Group.
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