Understanding your brand and understanding who your brand attracts are two different things. Many business leaders aren’t in tune with who their customers actually are and how they behave, which has a direct reflection on the success of your community and growth of your audience.

Being in-touch with your customer’s behavior helps you structure your business to be more effective. Here are a few ways to go about that as an entrepreneur:

Use all available data

There is a large amount of information that entrepreneurs simply do not have access to when establishing communication with their customers. Although, there are some costly analytic dashboards that can help define customer behavioral data, online/offline profitability, and other factors that define users.
Gaining all of the data available to help learn who your customers are and how they act is a necessity, especially for small businesses. Analyze website traffic, google analytics, social media conversions, and any other data that can help you in the process.

Utilize Your Early Stage Opportunities

Take advantage of the intimacy in a small business which ultimately makes for more personal communication with consumers and it allows you to make adjustments to the business to better cater towards them.
Small businesses should take the advantage they have when acting on insights and reacting to market trends. For large businesses, it’s hard to make pivots or readjustments to marketing or other strategies based on new insights. This is because those decisions have to be agreed upon by bigger teams, senior leaders and in-line with the already established brand.
Take advantage of your team’s flexibility and use data to better alter marketing campaigns because larger companies don’t tend to have that luxury.

Stand in their shoes

Often entrepreneurs are so involved with the business and their vision of it, they can’t empathize as a consumer. Standing in your customer’s shoes allows you to see where your company’s deficiencies might be from a user’s perspective. You also will have a better understanding of your user experience, the choices customers may have on your platform, as well as other decisions. Acting as a consumer can help you better understand how they behave and overall how your business profits from it.
Using data to become more familiar with your consumers is a pivotal part of your foundation for any entrepreneur and their business. Using all available data, utilizing your advantages as a small business, and empathizing as a consumer will help you get to know your audience much better than before.