DMN3 Blog

Insight about both existing and targeted customers is extremely important to your success. Here are some marketing research strategies you can use to become better informed about your customers and what motivates them to buy…

The premise of my previous post, Customer Insight: Why A Little Research Pays You Big Dividends, is that customer insight is the key to successful marketing.

Here are some things you can do to get a better understanding of your customers. The strategies are listed in order of relative complexity.

• Document What You Already Know
• Talk To Current Customers
• Consult With Your Employees
• Gain Intelligence from Websites
• Use Third Party Research
• Perform Your Own Research
• Utilize Focus Groups
• Test Using Targeted Customers

Document What You Already Know: Unless you are launching a brand new business, you should already know a lot about your customers. That information just needs to be documented and segmented so it can be more meaningful and useful to you. This is the best place to begin with your marketing research. You might end up being surprised by how much or how little you know about your customer base. If you aren't already, you should be capturing geographic, demographic and psychographic information. The latter can be extrapolated from occupation, user experience data, campaign data, etc.

Talk to Current Customers: You should have a number of customers that you know well enough to ask them some fundamental questions: What problem or need did your product or service address? Why did they choose your company? What benefit was the most persuasive in convincing them to take action. Why did they buy when they did? How could you have made the product or sales process better? You get the point. There is a lot to be learned from your current customers. The more of them you ask, the greater the confidence you can have in the results. Talking to enough customers may enable you to see if there are themes that come through in the interview process.

Consult with Your Employees: There is a lot of information in the minds of the employees who interact with your customers. Talk to your sales people if you have them. Customer service personnel are critical to this process as well. They have an important perspective on the issues of customers after they have purchased your product or service. Anyone who interacts routinely with the customer should be considered for interviews. Find out why customers buy and what issues concern them about your product or service.

Gain Intelligence from Websites: Websites can be a good source of intelligence. If you already have a website and have enough traffic, there are tools you can use to gain insight into the people who visit it. You should definitely be using web analytics tools on your website.

These analytics applications can provide a lot of information about the source of your traffic. If you have website goals, it can also help you identify from where the most qualified traffic is coming. Customer insight can also be gleaned from the search keywords that resulted in visitors to your site. Once at the website, what were visitors looking for; what did visitors search for (site search); and what content did they interact with while on the website. All can provide valuable insight about your customers.

Use Third Party Research: If there are resources that already provide insight into your target market, don’t reinvent the wheel. There are many organizations that provide both demographic and psychographic information about a particular target market profile. These reports can be purchased and may cost several thousand dollars. Many times a brief synopsis of the paid report is available and that in itself may be valuable. There are also a myriad of free resources. One that should be always addressed for demographic information is the Census data from the federal government.

Perform Your Own Research: You can create your own questionnaire to survey current customers. If you have a large enough sample and have surveyed all of them or a random sample of them in an unbiased way, you can have confidence in the results. This is “primary marketing research” because you are conducting your own research. The difference from simply interviewing selected customers is that you are surveying a much larger sample and are using research protocols that can provide you information with “confidence limits” associated with it.

Utilize Focus Groups: Focus groups are a tried and true way of interacting with probable customers to gain information that will help us define our product, price, marketing message, marketing strategies, etc. Focus Groups are both an interviewing and brainstorming process involving group dynamics that you don’t get in a one-to-one interview.  Outcomes are better if whoever conducts the session is trained in leading focus groups.

Test Using Targeted Customers: Whether it is a website design or some other marketing campaign, soliciting feedback from existing or probable customers as you develop the website or campaign will result in a better website or campaign. It is hard to understand why it isn’t done more often by organizations. An effective campaign or website requires that you involve your targeted market profile in its development by “running it by them” in a structured (testing) way.

If you do the above, you are well on your way to becoming a more successful marketer!