Understanding your customers intimately: A day in their shoes

So, you've done the basics of marketing. You've identified your customers’ real needs and how your awesome product or service will make their lives easier. But in this fast-paced marketing landscape, can you confidently, 100%, hand on heart, say you understand all there is to know about your customers?

Sure, there are demographics. But understanding goes much deeper than mere age and gender status. That’s just scratching the surface. Proper understanding requires diving headfirst into their daily lives—their routines, quirks, and unspoken yearnings. To grasp all that, I suggest you spend a day in their shoes. It starts at the very beginning of the day. Imagine waking up as one of your customers. From dawn till dusk, you inhabit their skin, thoughts, and choices.

Below, I unpack why understanding your customers intimately is the cornerstone of effective marketing and how walking a day in their shoes can transform your strategies.

Morning musings: Priorities unveiled

What’s their first move? Coffee or meditation? Inbox or Instagram? These seemingly mundane decisions reveal their priorities. Their morning rituals set the tone for the day. As marketers, understanding these subtle cues can inform our messaging and timing.

It provides insight into what is a priority and what isn’t. You could argue that someone who goes straight for the Instagram feed might be easier to target than someone who prioritises solitude and peace first thing in the morning.

But these priorities shape when, how and where to target them. You might target the yogi at a different time of day than the Instagram surfer. Or the coffee lover to align with their mid-morning coffee fix. Understanding their daily routines and habits helps better inform us on the when, how and where. 

Decision crossroads: Navigating choices

Throughout the day, your customers stand at a crossroads. Should they hit the gym or grab a pastry? Opt for the car, public transport, or exercise their way to the office? Each choice feeds into other decisions made throughout the day.

Answers to how they evaluate options will inadvertently impact other choices. What nudges them toward a verdict? These micro-decisions shape their journey. When you navigate a choice, you’ll assess the pros and cons. Taking the car to work might help me avoid the rain, but I must pay for parking. If I walk, I’ll get some good exercise in, but I’ll need to be much more prepared with a change of clothes and leave home earlier.

Working through these options can tell us how much thought goes into navigating purchase choices. Those options also impact when and how they interact with our marketing messages. If they walk, they’ll have more time to digest a giant billboard. If they drive, they’ll only have a few seconds. Choices always impact somewhere, so think hard about everyday choices and their potential impact.

Insights from commitments

Meetings, deadlines, family gatherings, kids, school things. For some, it’s a big list of commitments. We all have obligations and can all sympathise with how challenging it can be navigating all that we place on ourselves and the commitments we agree to for others. Commitments provide a glimpse into the world our customers need to prioritise. Who depends on them? Whose trust do they carry? As marketers, aligning our campaigns with their life events can create resonance. 

Understanding this helps create content a customer can easily digest during fast-paced times of commitment. With this in mind, you might consider messaging that hits the mark earlier, or that speaks to the busy, overly committed parent in a fashion that doesn’t make them feel guilty. All those commitments matter as customers navigate their day around them, and our marketing content needs to work around them. 

Goals and Aspirations

How does understanding customer goals and aspirations help with marketing my product or service to them? This is more than just thinking of something obvious, like a customer having a fitness goal, so my fitness centre is in a position to talk to them.

When you deeply understand your customers, you’re getting better informed to connect with them on a level they understand and 'get'. When you ‘get’ their goals and aspirations, you’re in a position to talk to them in a language that aligns with that. 

What does that mean?

Okay. For example, suppose a customer has big goals and aspirations to be the best they can be, which might look like upskilling, personal growth, and further developing their knowledge in any particular area. In that case, they are highly motivated to seek out brands representing that. 

Products or services that position themselves as progressive, confident, and positive leaders are likelier to align with customers with goals that seek to be the ‘best of the best’.

It’s not just about data; it’s about empathy and informed decisions.

Making informed marketing decisions comes down to more than just the data. We’re talking about emotions that shape our decisions, which come from life commitments, life choices, expectations, and goals.

Understanding your customers isn’t a checkbox; it’s an ongoing journey. One that you adapt to as their life choices, commitments, goals and aspirations dictate. That's why when you spend a day in their shoes and their lives, you can shape your marketing approach to suit and better align and talk to them. After all, the best campaigns resonate because they speak to real people, not faceless statistics.