Understanding your visitors is the key to successful marketing and delivering good service.
There are different types of information that you could gather about your visitor that would help your business and marketing plan including:
- Profile: The more you know about your visitors, the easier it can be to market to them. The type of information you may think about collecting is age, gender, life stage, location, spending habits and income. Profiling existing customers makes it easier to find new ones, as you can use it to look for similar prospects.
- Motivation and behaviour: Understanding why your visitors choose your business can help you understand what is special about what you have to offer and, therefore, help you decide what key messages you should lead on in your marketing to attract others. If you know what your visitor is interested in and what they do when they visit, you can package your offer to appeal more to them and encourage them to spend more with you. It will also help you identify other businesses to work in partnership with that will interest your market. A joined up offer will have stronger appeal.
- Perception: Understanding the perception visitors and potential visitors have of your business provides direction to your marketing. We all think we know what makes our business great or unique, but we often find that those things are not resonating with visitors. Armed with this information, we can make decisions about whether the perception visitors have is acceptable, or whether we want to change peoples’ perceptions.
- Marketing effectiveness: Finding out where your visitor heard about you will help you evaluate your marketing activity and ascertain which communication channels are most effective for you.
- Satisfaction: Retaining existing customers is cheaper than acquiring new ones, so ensuring that you are not just meeting but exceeding your customers’ expectations is important. Feedback on your business and how you can improve will ensure that you identify any potential problems before they become a big issue, and that you remain competitive.
The first step is to think about what you need to know and then ask yourself:
- Do you gather any information on visitors already that would meet your need?
- Does this information exist elsewhere?
- If you have information that does not specifically address your needs, what questions need to be asked to specifically address what you want to know?
Carrying out visitor research can be daunting, but you probably are already collecting a range of useful data through chatting to your visitors, listening to customer comments, the booking process and website analytics. This could tell you where your visitors live, when and what they book, and what information they are interested in. Don’t forget that TripAdvisor ratings and comments on social media are a good indication of the types of things people think about your business.
Start by pulling together what you already have and look to see what this tells you. Could you gather this information in a more structured way that enables you to analyse what it means?
Then identify any gaps and information you would still like to know. Whether you are conducting research in-house or contracting out, you need to prepare a brief so that you know what information you want to gather and why.
