Acting as the Growth Hub for businesses in Oxfordshire, OxLEP Business is here to support organisations within the county to start-up, grow and thrive through a vast support offering.
One of the most common areas businesses underestimate is the importance of knowing their customer. Simple as it may sound, merely having a powerful business idea, financial backing and a strong route to market is not enough to ensure anyone is interested in what you are offering – or if they are, that you can reach them effectively.
A useful starting point is through customer profiling. It is important before you start selling to ensure you have a full picture of who your customer is, what influences their buying behaviours, what their engagement preferences look like and how you can improve your selling and marketing techniques to cater to them.
Customer profiles can be built in numerous ways, utilising everything from focus groups to detailed demographic breakdowns – with understanding the different audiences that exist and how to engage them key to creating your customer pipeline, and then retaining them.
Our webinar on 23 May, titled ‘Attract and Keep the Customers you Love’ is aimed at established and ambitious businesses who want to attract and retain more customers. Delegates will develop their understanding of different types of customers, the customer lifecycle, your ideal client and what makes them tick, and actions you can take to ‘love your customer’.
For those just starting out, the second in our ‘Start-Up Bootcamp’ taking place on 21 May – ‘Your Value Proposition and Your Customers’, will help attendees to look at the value you create for your customers. Your value proposition will be improved by considering how it helps customers and how you can use that new found knowledge to attract, nurture and convert more prospects into customers.
There are countless ways to engage your customer through social media, utilising tools such as polls to gauge audience interest, tailoring follow-up posts as an essential pipeline to your offering and utilising lead generation forms to capture your customer’s data.
Sign up to our live webinar, ‘Nurturing Clients and Prospects on LinkedIn’ on 30 May as we delve into the art of cultivating meaningful relationships with your clients and prospects through LinkedIn.
Another way of getting to know your customer, how to catch their attention, engage them and ultimately seal the deal – whether purchasing your goods or utilising your services – is by utilising your peers.
Whether you have got very different USPs within the same sector, they are your closest competitor in an already concentrated market, or the most you’ve got in common is your status as an Oxfordshire SME – networking and sharing your processes, top tips for engagement and sticking points with industry peers offers the opportunity to connect, problem-solve and create useful contacts.
Looking to build your business network? Sign up to ‘OxBOoSt’, the number one regular meet-up for Oxfordshire businesses who want to connect, collaborate and exchange ideas.
Another benefit of networking is contacting fellow businesses you can signpost to and ‘shout about’ where your customer is looking for multiple services, with word-of-mouth the most trusted way your customer can find exactly what they are looking for. Apply to our Business Directory for a free spot on our online platform.
‘Getting to know your customer’ is not merely a one-time activity in the ever-changing business world, your business – and your target customer – will continue to evolve as you continue to grow. Our ‘CXO Masterclass’ on 28 May will focus on maximising customer experience to deliver value for your business by being customer aware and customer focussed.
This masterclass will help you to look at your business with fresh eyes and develop a sixth sense to maximise your customer experience, and to use technology that is both sophisticated and accessible, to optimise your ROI.
‘Knowing your customer’ is key to a considered approach to your business – unless you can target and engage the right individuals in the right way, your efforts elsewhere will be wasted. Sign up to one of our events to ensuring you are hitting the mark for business success.
For your bespoke business support action plan, details of what business support might be available to you and the chance to speak to one of our business support experts (where applicable) for 1:1 support on how you can get to know your customer, fill out our online Business Support Tool.
