Improving your marketing means more than just buying more adverts or creating more content.

It’s about quality. High quality, targeted marketing (and product design) that resonates with your customers – will results in higher quality leads that are more likely to convert. Small increases in customer conversions can have a huge impact on your total sales & bring more passionate customers. Sound interesting? Here’s some ideas on how to research your audience & deliver higher quality marketing.

Customer Opinions (you need these)

Customer is king, but when was the last time you spoke to them? Do you know what your customers really think? The best opinion isn’t yours, or your bosses – it’s always going to be the customer’s opinion. A business that really cares about its people will always want to ensure that there are regular set-ups for getting this data. You can achieve this in a number of ways – from simple surveys to carrying out focus groups.

Focus groups are incredibly powerful, just remember to get a good representative set of your target audience. That should include prospective customers that are buying competitive solutions, not just your current customers.

The more customer opinions you are aware of, the better. Especially if you’re planning to launch a new product. Test your ideas & thoughts with your customers. Features you might have overlooked might be critical, things you thought were huge might be irrelevant. Mock-up & ask before you build. I used this extensively when writing my children’s books on diversity.

Trend data

There are trends in every industry, and it’s important to know what’s going on in your industry, as well as the world of marketing and business in general. Secondary research through industry reports, and industry forums can provide a really good view of general market direction and sentiment. These allow you to understand what features excite customers, what antagonizes them – and ultimately what’s going to build you evangelists (or haters).

Ethnographic research

This isn’t always easy. Studying your users in their natural environment as they use your product can be difficult to arrange. This type of research is great for very early customer behavior analysis, and early product marketing research. Potentially revealing interesting habits, use-cases and opportunities for your business. It’s unlikely to drive an immediate change in your outbound marketing (unless you discover a whole new use-case you didn’t know about). If this type of research is relevant to your business, you could do ethnographic research by Userzoom.

Numbers & quant marketing research

Qualitative research is great, but there’s nothing better than cold hard numbers & facts to make your case rock solid. It’s hard to argue when the numbers are clear.

There’s many sources of data to mine, and where to go really depends on your industry. Statista is an unbelievably great source of data, it’s packed with data from solid sources with citations. I’ve used for everything from my MBA project research to supporting my points in client presentations.

Garbage in. Garbage out.

The GIGO rule applies just as solidly to marketing research as it does programming computers. If you’re asking the wrong questions you’re going to get answers that don’t make sense. Research takes time & money – so breathe in, relax and think carefully about what you need.

I’d recommend starting with focus groups and getting in-person (video) customer opinions. You can then use that data to make a series of assumptions, and subsequently survey a wider audience and validate your hypothesis. Use industry trend & market data to put your findings into context/perspective of the environment (Is the video-conference rise directly related to the pandemic? Or another industry trend?…).

Good customer research, is going to help you better target your content production, outbound advertising & even product design. It’s well worth the effort and is something you should be doing regularly. Customer habits and opinions change. Put away your crystal ball (or computer), go and speak to your customers.