Children have a natural curiosity and they ask questions, lots of questions. As we grow up we sometimes forget to retain this curiosity and therefore stop asking questions. In marketing, questions are an important part of the process when building and strengthening customer relationships.
Without asking questions, it is a lot harder to see opportunities, uncover customer needs, problems and desires and make the right marketing decisions for your business.
There are 3 words that can help you ask the important questions:
Why?
If you have children you will know this can be a favourite word. “Why is the sky blue?” “Why can’t I have ice cream for dinner?”, “Why does a dog bark?”
In marketing you can use the “Why” word to help you understand about your market, customer attitudes and behaviour and competitors.
Examples of questions are:
- Why are my customers not buying any more?
- Why are my competitors more successful?
- Why did I not attract customers with my marketing campaign?
One trick is to keep asking why until you find the answer and this can also lead to better conversations with your customers.
How?
Children want to know how to do things such as how to ride a bike. In marketing we want to know how events or activities will affect our customer relationships and therefore our business. This is important especially when we select marketing tactics to spend our time and money on.
Examples of questions are:
- How will an email campaign strengthen my relationship with key customers?
- How will a price discount affect my profit?
- How will my new service help my customers?
What?
Children often think about what they have to do to get something they want. For example they may realise that they have to eat their vegetables if they want to eat ice cream later. For the context of this post I am using ‘What’ as in what do I have to do in order to build and strengthen my customer relationships?
Examples of questions are:
- What changes do I need to make to my customer service program?
- What training do my employees need to improve their marketing skills?
- What social media tools should I use to strengthen my customer relationships?
When marketing your business, questions are important, so perhaps it is time to rekindle the curiosity that you had when you were a child.
[...] but we rarely consider the validity of a child’s curiosity. In a recent blog post, Learn About Marketing From Children, Susan Oakes writes that we can learn a lot about marketing from the simple questions people are [...]