Customers are the raison d’être of your B2B company. As such, customer research should be the foundation of your marketing strategy.
Now, customer research is often mistaken for something else (and oftentimes, something boring and unnecessary).
The word ‘research’ connotes a large-scale, tedious investigation process of gathering data. This connotation is likely to come from the phrase ‘research and development’ recorded in 1923 for work on a large scale to drive innovation.
So if you think you need to seek out research companies, or 200 customers, to conduct customer research to get information, you’re not alone.
Etymologically, the word ‘research’ simply refers to the act of searching closely for a (ONE!) specific person or thing — let that sink in for a bit.
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Here’s what customer research really is: It’s a conversation in which you have a clear goal(s) on a specific topic you need information on.
From a marketing standpoint, customer research is a conversation about understanding the proper motivation and values that your customers are experiencing from using your product. It also helps to identify your ideal and not-so-ideal customer segments.
You don’t need to talk to hundreds of customers to do it; that would only complicate the process. You only need to talk to five to six people to identify a pattern that will validate your assumptions about your customers.
Building a marketing strategy based on wrong information is setting yourself up for failure. And we don’t want that.
In short, any customer research is better than no customer research at all (because you don’t live in their heads and, therefore, can’t speak on their behalf).
Customer research is not just for marketing. It can be utilized throughout the entire company. For example:
The only way to know all that? Talk to your customers about their experience.
Customer research is not just about finding new customers.
It’s about finding the right customers AND retaining your existing customers — it’s the basis of the big growth game plan.
Here are some of the discoveries our customers made from conducting customer research.
In this particular case of having multiple SaaS products, our customer discovered that their main product wasn’t generating as much revenue as they’d assumed.
After having spoken to their customers, we found that there was a larger ideal customer segment for one of their smaller products — one that was not given much attention but was generating the most leads out of and required the least outbound efforts.
Customer research is greaaaat for customer segmentation. In this case, we partnered up with a time management SaaS company. Their biggest challenge was not knowing their best customer segment with the longest lifetime. Churn was becoming an increasingly concerning problem, and their customer success team was using a fair amount of time on customers who were churning.
Our research found that the churn rate was more significant among their larger customers because the product wasn’t meeting their needs.
In contrast, customers with a standard subscription package have a longer lifetime because it was exactly what they needed.
Many of our customers find it challenging to nail down their ICP properly. Due to that, they often end up in front of the wrong audience — it’s like talking to a brick wall! You know how frustrating that is. Not to mention expensive too (oh hello, customer acquisitions costs!
We had narrowed down ICPs for many of our customers using our customer research framework. Based on the information we gathered, we were able to tailor our messaging according to their needs.
In this case, we partnered up with a company specializing in water efficiency.
They’d initially thought that their value proposition lies in helping their customers be more cost-efficient by being water-efficient. But our customer research revealed that it was otherwise.
Remember we mentioned that customer research is not just for marketing? This is one of those cases. Our customer was ready to enter a new market segment after successfully selling accounting software to enterprises in the past.
They assumed their new target customers would want the same thing or have the exact needs for product features as their existing customers. However, the findings from the customer research showed otherwise — their new target customers wanted something else.
What would you do if you were standing at a crossroad like that?
Even the most adventurous of us know never to wander into the wild without a map and a compass. As this was a very recent finding, we’re still in the midst of helping our customers decide the next feasible go-to-market actions — to develop desired features before the new target group market entry or to implement a new packaging or productization.
It is only by talking to a customer, an actual person you want to sell to, that you’ll gain the contextual value of what they want and are willing to pay for. Having that knowledge is king!
In the case of helping a HR management SaaS customer reach their growth targets, we found out that many of their customers didn’t realize they needed a HR management software until a salesperson reached out to them.
It turns out, a company should already invest in a HR management software when they have 30 or more employees.
During customer research, you’ll gain an understanding of your customers’ buyer experience — the way they buy the product, how they make comparisons between service providers, and how they compare the brand, features, and pricing.
This is exceptionally so when you have a complex product. Any kind of friction such as difficulties in getting information is a risk of losing that customer. And you won’t know about it unless you talk to your customer.
The highlight of our customer research framework is that you get to truly understand your brand and tone of voice from your customer’s perspective. When you get to hear (firsthand!) your customers speak about the products in their own words and what kind of challenges they face, you’re golden. Why?
1) You no longer need to guess what kind of content to create when nurturing them.
2) You get endorsements and quotes you can use in your marketing game plan. Your customers are your brand ambassadors!
There are two types of customer research: qualitative and quantitative. In this particular case, there were still gaps of missing information despite having existing brand research.
Remember when we said ‘any customer research is better than no customer research at all’? This is it. Their existing research allowed us to identify themes that we then incorporated into our very own customer research framework.
It was also an eye-opener for their product team. They gained a thorough understanding of how the team should develop the product and features that were particularly valuable to their target customer segment.
You know how frustrating it is when you don’t get to say what you want to say, and you don’t feel heard. Customers are the same. And their breakup with you comes in the form of the dreaded churn. Throughout our journey with customer research, we've learned that they appreciate being heard!
A piece of advice for marketers? Talk to your customers.
Customer research really isn’t as daunting as it sounds. Here are five things about customer research to take away from this piece:
As to when’s the best time to do customer research? In most cases, customer research is needed when:
If you find yourself trying to figure out your next steps towards growth and don’t have an immediate answer to that, then the answer is: It’s time for customer research.
Customer research is always part of our strategic marketing strategy, but we also happen to offer it as a single project. So, quite logically, at this point, we suggest you take a closer look at either our marketing services or customer research as a project pages for more details! Talk to you soon!