Let’s start with a simple question: why do you need a customer strategy after all? Well, there are three main reasons:

• To reach the correct audience; obviously, you don’t want to waste your time pursuing the wrong audience and more importantly, the perfect, well-targeted audience will always have the best ROI.

• To perfectly understand your target audience; you’ll have to find out what it is that truly motivates them. Aalso, the better you understand your customers the smarter you will be about knowing what types of leads convert best.

• To understand where they are coming from; it’s very important to define the best marketing channels that you can efficiently leverage to connect them with.

Yeah, yeah … A bunch of other cliches … And a bunch of other, undeniable truths. How you will sale whatever you are selling, will be determined by who you are going to sell it to, and what will persuade them to actually make a purchase. This is why is extremely important to put yourself in the shoes of your customers in order to understand their needs, expectations, hopes, fears, motivations, etc.

Yes, you are going to need a healthy dose of empathy and to do some well-grounded research, but that’s all you really need. Again, here is my almost usual self-questioning method … In order to outline a fundamental customer strategy, ask yourself a few elementary questions about your target audience:

• Who are they?

• What are tho most relevant and important demographics?

• What does a typical customer look like?

• What are their most relevant behavioral or psychological characteristics?

• What are their needs?

• What are they looking to accomplish?

• What do these individuals value? What is really important for them?

• What unique preferences do they have?

• What is their decision making process?

• What products or services are they currently using?

• Why would they buy your products or services?

• How can you overcome their natural hesitations?

• What possible objections they might have?

• How do they buy?

• What communication channels are they using?

• What are the best avenues to start a conversation with them?

• What are your business goals for a particular audience segment?

• Where are the overlapping areas between your goals and their needs?

• What will it take to transform them into paying customers?

• How can you convince them to make new, repeated purchases over time?

• What are the best ways to earn their trust?

• What are their most frequent and important questions?

• How can you efficiently educate them? What content will help them more to understand your products or services?

• How can you transform them into loyal brand advocates?

If you want, you can create even a customer research document for every major audience segment targeted by you using the answers from the above questions. The point: find a concise, realistic and data-driven answer to each question, put all the the answers in one document and … there it is, you have have your own basic customer strategy template.

Also, you should consider using a free Google tool called Consumer Barometer:

This awesome free tool covers 45 countries and ten product categories. It will help you to understand internet usage and attitudes across different devices and more importantly, to discover the role online sources play in a customer’s journey from consideration to purchase.

OK. Knowing your customers has one more major benefit: you’ll be able to develop data-driven customer journeys which eventually will help you to create truly efficient sales funnels. So, let’s take a closer look at the whole “sales funnels for beginners” topic, to see what a sales funnel is and how it works …