3 Ways To Eavesdrop Your Customers' Needs and Wants

However good your products or services are, they won’t have any chance if they don’t meet your potential customers’ needs and wants. Customers are not what they used to be, easily convinced buyers are a thing of the past. Thanks to significant breakthroughs in the field of informatics, such as Social Media development, it is far more easy for customers to access information about the products and services they consider to buy.

But are these breakthroughs just provide the power of knowledge and information to your customers? Can these be used the other way round as a powerful monitoring tool for a brand to “eavesdrop” their needs?

The answer is a definite YES, you just have to know the right tools to do it!

Let’s find out 3 ways that can give valuable information about your targeted customers:

1. Organize a (Web) Survey

A widely known way to learn what are your customers’ opinions about your products is carrying out surveys. Maybe the most traditional way to get the pulse of public opinion, but still one of the most effective ways to do it.

There are many types of surveys like Face-to-Face Interviews, Phone Interviews and Written Questionnaires being the most frequently used types. All types of surveys are evaluated by their effectiveness in line with their cost per respondent. The ideal types of surveys are these that combine high rate of effectiveness with low cost per respondent.

A survey type that is encountering both evaluating terms at an optimal level are Web Surveys. Regarding their effectiveness, web surveys are providing a huge and easily accessible audience while they are characterized by fast data processing. In an age that everything turns electronic, web surveys are a powerful and reliable tool.

But are surveys the optimal tool to monitor your customers or there are more detailed and flexible tools?

2. Monitor them yourself (for free!)

“Monitor them yourself”, it may sounds a bit difficult. Some of your first thoughts could be, “is there any way to monitor them myself?” or “do I have the knowledge?”. The answer to both is, “YES”.
Did you ever see your gadgets (pc, tablet etc.) or your web browser as monitoring tool?
No?
Well, you should!

Some of the most “complex” processes are hidden in simple habits of everyday life. According to researches the average person has five social media accounts and spends around 1 hour and 40 minutes browsing these networks every day. Moreover, if we take into account another 2-3 hours of general use per day, we reach to a conclusion that finding and monitoring potential customers is far more easy than you thought, as they are these simple users. Your results will not be as much accurate and numerous as they would be if you use a specialized Web & Social Media Monitoring Tool, but you export significant results about your customers’ needs.

A good start would be twitter search, facebook search and google alerts.

Learn more about Monitoring Customers Yourself :
How to monitor your brand or products’ web mentions for free

3. Use a Web & Social Media Listening tool

You can always let others do the hard work for you. There are specialized tools out there that can do the research for you! You can simply provide a number of keywords and you just have to wait for the results.

Lately, new ways that help in acquiring knowledge about customers’ needs were created, with Social Media Listening tools enjoying great popularity among digital marketers. These solutions, also known as Social Media Monitoring tools, is a process in which mentions are identified, assessed and collected from the internet and its applications based on specific keywords. These keywords, can be your company’s name, a product or anything else someone wants to monitor in the internet, even a competitor. You can also use a more general keyword describing your market for market research.

Web & Social Media Monitoring process is being undertaken by specialized monitoring companies. The feedback they get for you, is a high analysis report which contains every mention on your targeted keywords with detailed statistical representation. The best part, you can interact with your potential customers, comment and like their posts or even follow them.