How To Discover Your Potential Clients’ Biggest Challenges…

Marketing that speaks directly to your prospects’ biggest problems is key to pulling in new clients, but before you can talk about those problems, you need to know what they are. Effective customer interaction can help you find out.

Check the Data

Market research data on construction and real estate can give you a bird’s-eye view of the challenges people in your target market are dealing with. Buying data from a market research firm is the fastest way to get the exact data you need, but don’t over look free sources such as economic data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the SizeUp tool from the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Data from your own clients is even more valuable. Compiling and analyzing data on projects that were delayed, came in over-budget or ran into other complications can help you zero in on your clients’ most common frustrations. Data on your rejected proposals can help you spot the challenges your prospects’ might feel you didn’t address as well as your competition. Even tracking which blog posts your visitors read most often can tell you about the problems they’re trying to solve.

Strike Up a Conversation

Data can guide you in the right direction, but because your target market is particular to your business, the only real way to find out what your ideal clients think is to ask them. Holding conversations with your existing and potential clients about the challenges they face is an integral part of effective customer interaction. It provides you with valuable insight, while also showing your clients you’re truly interested in understanding and meeting their needs.

There are multiple ways you can get this done. Send out an email survey, pose questions to your social media followers, gather a focus group or invite some of your best clients to one-on-one lunches on you. Customer relationship management software with data analytics features will let you process the information you gather more efficiently.