For a local business, understanding the customer base has always been the best way to stay competitive. This has traditionally involved methods like checking customer reviews, sending out surveys, and even just word of mouth speaking with customers or clients to get their feedback.
All of that is helpful, but it’s very time-consuming.
This is where automation comes in. While it might take days or weeks for a marketing team to sift through emails, survey responses, and customer reviews in order to come up with an actionable plan, automation tools can accomplish this in hours. For a business trying to keep up with a rapidly fluctuating local market, this can be a make or break difference.
Why Local Market Research Matters More Than Ever
Customers have preferences, and those preferences don’t stay static. The way people feel about your business can change in an instant.
Something as small as a delayed order, too long of a response time to an email, or a competing business with a great new angle can cause a hit to your numbers. If you aren’t staying in touch with the experiences your customers are having with both you and other businesses, you are running the risk of falling behind.
As a local business, you are particularly vulnerable to these shifts. Local businesses rely more heavily on reputation such as word-of-mouth, online reviews, and community feedback. One bad experience shared online by an upset customer can have a lasting impact, while one glowing review can help to send customers your way.
The problem with traditional research methods is that they’re too slow. By the time you notice a trend, there’s a chance that it may already be impacting your business. What you need is a system that will continuously monitor customer sentiment, but not require you to handle it manually.
How Automation Simplifies Feedback Collection
The biggest advantage that automation can offer you is the ability to eliminate tedious, repetitive tasks like gathering feedback. With automation, instead of manually sending out surveys, following up with customers for reviews, or compiling the responses from different platforms, you can let automated tools do this for you.
For example, if you run a local service, every time you complete a job you can set automation to trigger a follow-up email or send a text asking the customer for feedback. If the customer doesn’t respond, the automated tool can have the system send a polite reminder. If that customer does respond, the feedback they give can be automatically collected, organized, and stored. You can use software like Chekkit to make this process even smoother. Chekkit and similar automation tools work by managing customer communication for you. These tools are capable of gathering reviews across platforms and giving you a clear, centralized view of what people are saying about your business.
Key Benefits of Automated Market Research
When a business adopts automated tools for local market research, it can enjoy benefits that surpass just saving time. Automation has the power to fundamentally change the way you can understand your customers.
Here are some of the key advantages you can enjoy by using automation for your local market research.
- Faster identification of trends and issues from customers
- Less time spent manually gathering data
- Higher response rates from automated outreach as opposed to human response rates
- Improved organization of feedback by storing it in one centralized system
- Smarter and more data-driven decisions that can improve service and customer experience
The combination of all these factors can help you accomplish a shift in marketing style that many local businesses need. Instead of spending your time reacting to problems after they’ve already become an issue, you can focus instead on identifying and solving them before they have a chance to grow.
Turning Insights into Actionable Strategies
Learning what automation can do and utilizing it to collect data can only take you so far. At a certain point, you need to use this information to implement marketing strategies that will turn feedback and information into concrete sales improvements.
A big part of this is using your automation tools to identify patterns in your customer feedback. It could be that you see a number of customers have the same complaint, like long wait times at specific hours of the day. You can use that information to adjust your staffing schedules and allow for more manpower during high traffic windows.
It isn’t all about negative patterns and feedback. Getting positive responses can be just as informative. If customers respond particularly well to how a specific employee engages with them, you can highlight that employee for excelling and have them instruct others on how to improve. The same goes for marketing tactics. If you see that people are giving you solid responses to a specific tactic, you can more heavily implement it.
Turning automated market research into positive change results in a business that’s known for being up to date on what their customers need. These kinds of improvements inspire customer loyalty and ultimately help sustain your growth.
Final Thoughts
Traditional market research techniques might have worked well in the past and given a business everything it needed to know. Unfortunately, we don’t live in the past. Today’s world operates on a high-speed wavelength. We’re used to fast connections, answers at our fingertips, and companies that don’t make us sit around waiting. This gives customers the expectation that a business will understand their needs and adapt to them at a pace never previously experienced.
Automation ensures feedback collection happens with consistency and accuracy. That means there shouldn’t be any gaps where weeks or months go by without any input or response from a business. With the ability to rely on constant, real-time data, you can identify issues early, respond to trends faster, and make better decisions based on what your customers are actually saying. You might even end up knowing what they need before they do.