When asked who their customer is, aspiring entrepreneurs often say “anyone”. This could not be further from the truth. This free online course will help you understand how you can use primary and secondary research to identify the right customer and design engagement strategies to attract and retain them.

About the course

This course will introduce you to how, where, and why to gather data and how to use it to create customer personas and marketing strategies.

You will understand how to develop market analysis strategies and show you how to develop a marketing strategy to guide you towards implementation.

This course is one of four in the Online Business Success programme from RMIT University. On every course, you will be guided by academics from the College of Business and the Business Enterprise Unit. In addition, you will hear from successful online entrepreneurs about how they targeted the most valuable customers for their business.

During the course you will cover the following topics:

  • The role demographic, psychographic, and behavioural characteristics play when layered together to inform the market profile.
  • The level of involvement and associated risks applied to online customers that business owners will need to reduce.
  • Segmentation techniques to target the right customer base.
  • The opportunities that an online entrepreneur would need to identify to grow or enhance current target markets.
  • The comparison between difference types of research and the role each one plays together when developing a research plan.
  • The types of customer persona tools available when building a visual representation of a typical customer.
  • The distinction between the types of customer journeys, current, and future state experience, and the service blueprint to inform the path to purchase.
  • The marketing attribution which identifies how the marketing messages contribute to the decision when buying a product or service.

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What you will learn

By the end of this course you will be able to:

  • Identify who your customers/consumers are by analysing their characteristics, and prepare this information for further research;
  • Compare the level of involvement and types of purchase, to predict the impact it may have on customer purchase behavior;
  • Apply primary and secondary research methods to create a market research plan which better identifies buyer's needs, motivations, and reasons to purchase specific products or services;
  • Design and construct a customer journey map to describe the process a buyer takes when deciding upon a purchase, by generating customer personas.

Requirements

This course is targeted at learners who have a small business or are considering setting up an online business and wish to understand the principles of market analysis and customer profiling, through a series of examples, learning theory, and activities.

About the instructor

Brett Stavenuiter is an entrepreneur, business owner, and business consultant with 25 years of experience assisting over 5000 successful entrepreneurial business startups in Australia and Indonesia.

Starting date: 11 September, 2017

Duration: 4 weeks, 2 hours per week

Language: English

Instructors: Brett Stavenuiter

Institution: RMIT University

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