Identify customer needs: survival of a new business

Understanding customer needs and expectations can push the new business going up quickly.

To know what the guests want is not easy. But, you have to know and need to learn about it.

When starting new entrepreneurs, many beginners often ignore this step and they fall in the fail soon.

Thus, to get success, you may read the way to identify customer requirements below.

Importance of understanding customer needs and wants

Knowing the needs and wants of clients is a vital stage before starting a business officially. It largely determines the success or failure of business online or offline nowadays.

Finding the needs of customers sound like not challenges. In fact, there have many been startuppers who realized their deviation after a few experiences. It’s because they can not catch up with the requests of users.

Many beginners often research online business ideas with new and unique products and services, which always becomes the priority of their time. But, are all of these ideas really effective?

The practical results of the answer depend on the market and the consumers’ demand, not the ideas.

For example, today you go to the supermarket, you will buy foods like fish, meat, vegetables, and fruit. It’s simply because your family needs them. If you see a brand-new product of seaweed vermicelli, you will prioritize choosing it immediately or hesitating for a few seconds of thinking. I am sure you re-think what you can use with this seaweed vermicelli bags because you do not want it now.

In the same way, to think about your product to start a business, clients are always ready to pay for the goods they want. Possibly, they do not regret spending more on the products they like.

As a businessman, understanding what the users need is the key to success, because all businesses need the source of consumption.

The first saying of business people is always: “Sell what people need, don’t sell what you have.” However, when starting a new business, plenty of startuppers forget this original guideline.

So, what do customers need and want?

The needs and wants are often solutions to problems.

For example, someone needs a website to showcase their products. However, designing a website is generally quite expensive. If you are a startup specializing in technology, you offer cheap web design services but still ensure quality. At this point, you go on the right way to fulfill the needs of owning a website. The next step to success depends on offline and online marketing capabilities as well as the quality of your services.

If you set a high price for designing a site, the guests will go away. It is

because they do not want a big expensive web, they just want a nice simple website with the purpose of adding credibility to their products. So, a high-priced website is not on their wants.

As the example of the seaweed vermicelli above, although it has beautiful

packages, you do not need it. The money, therefore, is still in your pocket.

These examples show that selling what customers need is always a lot simpler than offering what the owners have. And, you are a beginner, there is no reason to lead you to the difficult work.

How can you find customer needs?

Conducting market surveys always brings remarkable results.

In fact, not many startups do this. So what did they do? Close your eyes and take risks, then open a new entrepreneur. Or, many beginners are eager to do a new thing, so they think that in the big society, nine people have ten ideas, who knows where to go, do it and fix it later…

This is a skillfully disguised trap for everyone for the first time to open their own business. The trap lacks direction.

Internet development, especially the explosion of social networks, has opened a convenient way for businessmen. In which, understanding buyers’ needs is no longer a problem. Please try:

Method 1: Take a quick look through forums, social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest… you will realize which issues are common things of interest for many people.

Then, select which products or services the community cares about and asks the most questions. In that jumble, what can you provide? After answering this question, it seems that you have taken a safe step towards a successful business. 

Method 2: Amazon.com, alibaba.com, ebay.com,… are good places that give you a lot of “quality” suggestions about the products that you will choose to open a business.

The procedure is very simple. Take the time to filter out which products receive the most interest, comments, reviews, or best sellers on these busy online sites. From there, draw out your own products for the business plan.

Method 3: The third way is to use the Google search engine. A special keyword planner tool will give you the most perfect results.

When you type in keywords, Google will estimate the number of monthly searches. That is a useful basis for you to find out the true needs of customers.

For example, you want to know how many people care about leather shoes or footwear. You type “leather shoes” or “footwear” keywords into Google keyword planner. The result is between 10,000 and 100,000 searches per month for each type. The numbers are impressive.

Google is a great tool that many online business experts recommend to search for customer needs for starters.

If using method 1 and 2, you can identify the needs of customers, and Google planner will help you estimate the number of what products and services you should choose for a successful start-up.

It is because with the Google tool you can find a product or service with a high search volume that corresponds to the interest of customers for that product. That means the opportunity for you to start a new business is clearer when knowing the volume of the market.

In conclusion, identifying customer needs and expectations is the first win for a new business. Searching this thing carefully opens the right way to go into the competitive world.

The most important key is to find correct needs based on segmentation, which helps beginners go faster and easier to get successful.

However, this step is the first one, a lot of work is waiting for startups to have effective results. It all depends on your try.