Your Customers Have Changed. Have You Noticed?

When was the last time you took a good long look at your most valuable visitors? Are they all similar, dissimilar individuals, or are there distinctive segments that share similar characteristics? Can you picture them in your mind? How accurate is that picture? Can you describe them demographically? Do you know where they come from geographically and where to find more like them? What are their psychographic profiles? What keeps them up at night? What are the things they look for from and like to do at the destinations they choose? What are the attributes that drive their decision making and their purchase behaviors? Where do they get their information? How has this all changed since the last time you looked?

In this day and age, there is no excuse for not knowing your customer.

There are many ways to get to know your customer better. Some require little or no out-of-pocket expense; others offer a higher confidence level, but at a cost. Here are some of our favorites places to turn:

Social Networks

If your destination or resort is well enough known AND you have customers that take the time to comment on social networks, you can learn something about them just by listening. Search and monitor your brand name on Twitter, Facebook and TripAdvisor. Reach out to your customers on social networks and ask them what they think. You may be surprised what you find. While far from scientific or random, and hard to attribute findings across your entire customer base, participating in social networks can help you discover things about your customer and what they are telling others about your brand that you didn’t know. And the cost is negligible: it just takes time and patience.

Local Media

If you spend a lot in traditional media, you can often negotiate free research as part of your buy. If you can give them your customer demographics, or your database, they can often give you geographic data, psychographic information, rudimentary segmentation profiles, purchase behaviors, and media usage data. Depending on the sophistication of the people you are dealing with, the information may be difficult to translate into insight. And it is almost always limited to the geography served by the media, not by your destination. But be careful: you get what you pay for and the source has much to gain if they look good.

Online Surveys

If you have a database full of email addresses and/or many visitors to your website, online surveys are a great way to get customer feedback relatively quickly and inexpensively. Our preference right now is Survey Monkey. We also make sure we have a PhD check out every survey design: one poorly written question could throw off your results.

Off The Shelf Products

For those with a modest research budget, there are a number of off the shelf research products worth considering to study customer lifestyles, spending habits and learn how to find more people like them. The Wanderlust Visitor Profile™ and other similar tools paint a vivid portrait of the travelers most likely to patronize your destination: their income, buying and spending habits, travel preferences, media usage habits, and more. It also helps prioritize customer segments and identify specific markets where more travelers that fit your destination’s profiles can be found.

Custom Research

Custom consumer research isn’t cheap. But sometimes, when you have a lot of money on the line, its worth every penny. One-on-one interviews, focus groups, custom segmentation studies, and location-based analyses, while expensive, can save you tens of thousands of dollars in the long run and drive results. We love having this kind of information to work with. But more often than not, the cost outweighs the benefits.