How to Understand What Your Customers Are Doing: A Marketing Guide

Why Do You Need Customer Insights?

Customer knowledge forms the foundation of any effective sales and marketing strategy, especially in the B2B sector, where decision-making processes are more complex and involve multiple stakeholders. Understanding who your customers are, their needs, challenges, and goals allows you to create more precise and impactful strategies that deliver measurable results.

Benefits of Understanding Your Customers:

1. Tailored Offers
By deeply understanding your customers, you can develop products and services that perfectly match their needs. You'll know which features are critical, which problems they want to solve, and what expectations they have of their suppliers. Precise targeting increases conversion rates and builds trust in your brand.

2. Improved Communication
Customers expect you to understand their needs and speak their language. Knowing your audience helps you tailor your tone, marketing content, and communication channels. This enhances campaign effectiveness and creates positive customer experiences.

3. More Effective Segmentation
Detailed knowledge about various customer groups enables better segmentation of your contact database. This allows you to deliver personalized offers and content that are more relevant and engaging, making your marketing budget more efficient by targeting key groups.

4. Increased Customer Loyalty
Customers who feel understood and well-served are more likely to stay loyal. Knowing your customers helps you proactively address their needs, solve issues, and build trust-based relationships.

5. Identifying Your Most Valuable Customers
Not all customers bring the same value to your business. In-depth analysis of customer behavior and needs helps identify the most profitable ones and focus your efforts on them, building relationships that yield long-term returns.

How to Achieve These Goals? Follow These 5 Steps:

1. Ideal Customer Profile

The process of understanding your customers begins with creating an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This is a detailed description of a company that is likely to benefit from your products or services while also being a valuable client for your business, which is particularly critical in B2B sales.

To create an Ideal Customer Profile, consider answering the following questions:

• What industry does my ideal customer operate in?
• What business challenges does my ideal customer face that my products/services can solve?
• What are the typical characteristics of the company—size, location, resources?

Answering these questions will narrow down your search to companies that best fit your customer profile. This is essentially the fundamental element of market segmentation. As a result, your marketing efforts will become more precise and effective.

Learn more about building an Ideal Customer Profile in our article: Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) – What, Why, and How?

2. Buyer Persona

Once you have your Ideal Customer Profile, the next step is to create a Buyer Persona—a fictional yet detailed profile of the client representative responsible for purchase decisions within companies matching your ICP. A buyer persona includes specific demographic data, goals, motivations, challenges, and preferences of that person.

For example: Your buyer persona might be “Anna, a procurement manager at a mid-sized factory, aged 40, looking for solutions that save time in the production process.”

It’s important to remember that in B2B purchasing, decisions are often not made by one person but by a buying committee—a group of individuals within an organization who formally or informally influence the decision to purchase a product or service by issuing a positive or negative recommendation.

Research shows that a B2B buying committee typically consists of 6–8 people. Each member may have different priorities and concerns, which further complicates the sales process. Therefore, it is crucial to identify key decision-makers and tailor your communication to their needs.

To create a precise buyer persona, answer these questions:

• What are the professional priorities of the decision-maker?
• What challenges does this person face daily in their role?
• What communication channels do they prefer, and where do they seek information?
• What could convince them to make a purchase?

Building a buyer persona requires analysis and research, which can be conducted through surveys, customer interviews, or data analysis from various marketing channels. A well-defined buyer persona helps you better understand your customer, significantly improving the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.

3. Customer Journey Mapping

The next step is mapping the customer journey, which helps you understand the purchasing process and every touchpoint a customer has with your company. In the B2B sector, the purchasing journey is often complex, involving detailed research, long decision-making periods, and consultations with technical experts.

To map the customer journey, break it into three main stages:

• Awareness – The customer becomes aware of a need and begins seeking information.
• Consideration – The customer evaluates available options and analyzes competitor products.
• Decision – The customer decides to make a purchase and selects a supplier.

Sometimes, it’s worth including post-purchase stages, such as implementation, which can be critical for customer loyalty.

It’s essential to understand what information the customer seeks at each stage, their objections, and what could encourage them to choose your product. Effective customer journey mapping helps tailor your content and communication to meet the customer’s needs at every stage.

CRM tools like HubSpot can assist with journey mapping by collecting customer data, allowing you to monitor where customers encounter purchasing barriers.

4. Attracting Leads with Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are highly effective tools for attracting potential customers today. They are also essential for collecting data in a simple, legal, and cost-effective way, enabling you to monitor lead behavior effectively.

What is a lead magnet? It’s a valuable piece of content or tool offered in exchange for the customer’s contact information. The goal of a lead magnet is to attract the customer’s attention during the awareness or consideration stage, enabling further marketing efforts, such as sending educational materials or offers tailored to their interests.

Examples of lead magnets include:

• A free market research report.
• Industry-specific case studies.
• A cost-calculation tool.
• A webinar sharing expert knowledge.

When creating lead magnets, it’s essential to:

• Focus on solving a specific customer problem.
• Offer practical and easy-to-implement solutions.
• Simplify access to the lead magnet, e.g., through a form on your website.

5. Digital Body Language

The final but crucial step in understanding your customers is monitoring their digital body language—analyzing actions taken by customers on your website, social media, or e-commerce platforms. Marketing automation tools like HubSpot CRM allow you to collect and analyze user behavior data at various stages of their purchasing journey, enabling you to adjust your communication to meet customer needs more precisely.

By monitoring customers’ digital body language, you can:

• Observe which content generates the most interest.
• Track how long users spend on specific pages and which products or services capture their attention.
• Identify the steps customers take before making a purchase, helping predict the moment they are ready to buy.

This data allows you to create personalized product recommendations and special offers, increasing conversion chances. Comprehensive growth platforms like HubSpot consolidate all this information in one place, simplifying analysis and marketing decision-making. Your marketing and sales teams can also monitor campaign effectiveness, adjust actions in real time, and respond quickly to customer needs.

How to Better Understand Your Customers?

Understanding customer needs and behavior is a critical element of an effective marketing strategy. This process—starting with building an Ideal Customer Profile and creating detailed buyer personas, mapping customer journeys, using lead magnets, and monitoring digital body language—enables you not only to know your customers better but also to tailor your offerings to their expectations, increasing the likelihood of sales.

The role of buying committees further highlights the importance of personalized communication. In B2B sales, decisions are made by multiple individuals with varying needs and expectations. Crafting a strategy that addresses all committee members’ perspectives can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your actions.

Strategic efforts from the ground up are essential to understanding your customers, supported by well-selected and implemented tools, including growth platforms like HubSpot. With advanced features such as monitoring user activity on your website, marketing automation, and CRM analytics, HubSpot allows you to track customers’ digital body language throughout their purchasing journey.

If you’d like to learn more about effective sales and marketing strategies, need support in building a successful marketing campaign, or want to leverage HubSpot’s full potential, contact our team. Together, we’ll help you better understand your customers and maximize the opportunities offered by digital B2B sales.