Fess up: you don’t know how your customers or prospects originally find your brand/products.

I posed this simple question on my blog several months ago: How Do Your Customers Search And Find?

It should be a simple question to answer, but it isn’t. That’s because customers use many resources to discover and research a brand or product. Google, family recommendations, social media, professional reviews — there are so many places for us to first discover a product or service.

The good news? We just released a piece of research diving into this exact topic. We had two over-arching findings from the research:

  • Customer acquisition strategies aren’t aligned with customer behavior. Search marketing is the primary strategy to enable customer discovery. But most search marketers tend to think when people have a question, problem, or need they go to Google, type in a query, click through to a website, and get the answer to their question or buy a solution to their problem. But that is not the case. Customers find on any and all platforms available to them and it is usually based on what’s most convenient. The most common? Traditional search engines, non-traditional search engines (i.e., Amazon, TripAdvisor), social media, family/friend recommendations, or seeing a product in a store.
  • Marketers should identify and prioritize the places customers discover them in. Marketers focused on acquiring new customers are missing a huge opportunity by not determining the most important places for their brand and products to be discovered in. In the research, we recommend five items for marketers to do to identify and prioritize channels their customers discover. For example, dive into understanding your customer’s journey, which a large CPG company did with their multi-touch attribution model.

The report gets into many more specifics, which you can read here.