Starting A Business Abroad: How To Get To Know Your Clients

Posted on 27. Jan, 2010 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Entrepreneurs
2 comments

You’d like to advertise, but you don’t know where to run your ads. You want to make the right design choices for your website, but will your visitors like the layout you picked? You’d love to partner up with another blogger, but how to be sure you’re targeting the right readers?

Argh! It would be so much easier if you knew your clients better! Unfortunately, you have only worked with a handful of local people so far – and you can’t afford to do extensive market research to learn about their tastes, their behaviours and their habits.

Think that only big businesses with massive marketing budgets can gather detailed data about their customers? Not anymore. All the information is out there, and it’s absolutely free.

All you have to do is eavesdrop.

I know, I know – your mother taught you that it’s rude to eavesdrop. But I’m in no way advising you to go spy on your clients. You don’t need to, because every day, hundreds if not thousands of your potential clients are choosing to make their conversations public through social media.

It’s simply a matter of paying attention to what they have to say.

Being in the right place at the right time

So how does this eavesdropping thing work?

It’s straightforward: go to one of the major social media platforms – the popularity of these sites varies by country, but Twitter and Facebook are always safe bets. You can also try LinkedIn Answers, if you’re selling to other businesses or professionals.

Next, search for people who belong to your target market, and follow their conversations for a few days.

What do you notice? What do these people have in common? What are they interested in? Who are they connected to?

What to listen for

You can learn pretty much everything you need to know for your marketing plan through this technique.

Here are a few examples of what your clients’ conversations can teach you:

- Where to find them (what message boards do they frequent? What do they do with their spare time?)
- How to best meet their needs (what services or product features do they wish for? Do they have complaints about your competition?)
- What you can teach them (what kind of questions do they ask? What puzzles them?)
- How to relate to them (what music, celebrities, hobbies, etc, do they like? Do they have their own lingo? What is their tone like – businesslike, casual, creative, irreverent?)
- Where to advertise (what blogs, websites or newspapers do they read?)
- How to get referrals (who are they talking to? What authors, experts or bloggers do they trust?)

Not bad for a free tool, is it?

What I like best about it is that you’re getting candid information, since at this stage you’re simply listening to your potential clients, without interfering with their train of thoughts in any way. If only things were this simple with formal market research… but that’s a subject for another day.

Was this post useful? Subscribe to the newsletter to get more expat tips and resources, delivered straight to your inbox!

Emmanuelle

Images via The Vigilante Photographer (top) and Marc Wathieu (bottom), via Flickr Creative Commons