When customers discover your business, it’s usually because they are searching for information surrounding the products you sell, or about your business itself.
The questions you must ask yourself are:
- What are they looking for?
- Can you provide answers to their questions?
Below we will work through what your customers are after when they’re searching for your business as well as how to use these facts to help boost your online presence too.
Primary and Secondary Information
Customers look at both primary and secondary information when making a decision about your business.
What is primary information?
These are the crucial facts customers need when choosing a business.
Examples of these are:
- Price
- Products
- Services
- Location
- Customer service
The above primary information is quite self-explanatory and is very subjective depending on the type of business you are running.
Making sure that your primary information is easily accessible on your website as well as business listings is necessary for making your business found by your potential customers.
What is secondary information?
This is supporting facts that can be a determining factor in choosing a business.
Although most customers look more at primary information than secondary, both can be determining factors in the purchase decision.
Secondary information are factors like:
- Coupons and Offers: Sales and offers like this are great for incentivising sales to your business.
- Testimonials and Reviews: Reviews are one of the most important parts of secondary information about your business. Reviews work to make your brand more trustworthy. You shouldn’t ignore negative reviews either as 45% of consumers are more likely to visit a business if it responds to negative reviews.
- Family and friend testimonials: Although you may privilege reviews over the word of mouth recommendations, customers still take into account these sorts of testimonials. A great way of developing word of mouth reviews online is via social media such as Facebook recommendations.
- About Us or History: These sort of facts should be available on your website. It can be very brief, but it allows your customers to know the history of your business as well as give your customers trust in your business too.
- Photos: Having high-quality photos is essential not only on your website but on your business listings too. This establishes trust for your customers and develops a visual brand for your business too.
- Logo/ recognisable design: Building a strong brand image via a recognisable logo and other visuals associates your brand with your products.
So, what should I do about my customer searches?
In conclusion, the facts that your customers are seeking about your brand/business is so much more than just the primary information such as name, address, telephone number etc.
Secondary information is just as important in gaining your customer’s trust as well as providing them with the facts that they are searching for too.
Secondary information can be persuasive to enable your customers to purchase products and/or services with you. This means that secondary information is an important part of your marketing strategy.
You must provide both primary and secondary information for your customers on your website and business listings. This will work to provide a well-rounded marketing strategy and build trust with your customers every set of the way.
