How To Do Customer Research And Improve Your Content Marketing ROI
It’s easier to get the right results from content marketing when the first part of your strategy is solid.
Two core elements impact this first stage:
A detailed SWOT analysis of your existing content assets and website
Deep customer research
Here’s the thing.
It’s easy to assume you know everything about your customer.
But, assumptions lead to misconceptions.
And misconceptions lead to you spending money on marketing that won’t deliver results.
So, you have to push your assumptions aside.
That’s when you’ll understand how to do customer research effectively.
You see, the right customer research techniques will help you get into your customers’ minds.
Surface-level knowledge about your customers won’t cut it!
Doing customer research the right way will help you create great content for each stage of the customer’s journey.
Key Takeaways
There are four ways to do customer research, but customer interviews can have the greatest impact.
Customer research takes time and requires effective analysis.
Emotions impact your customers’ decisions. Customer research helps you clearly pinpoint the emotions that drive your customers so that you can use that language in your content.
Asking the right questions is crucial for getting the right data from customer interviews and surveys.
Putting a customer research team together can help you maximize the effectiveness of your customer research.
You can use the Table of Contents below to help you find what you need in this article.
Table of Contents
3 Effective Customer Research Techniques
What Questions Should You Ask During Customer Research?
What Does The Customer Research Process Look Like?
What Customer Research Technology Can Support Your Process?
What Is Customer Research?
Let’s start by looking at what customer research is not. It’s not:
Asking your friends and relatives for feedback. Are they even your customers?
Playing copycat with your competitor’s content
Thinking that you know everything there is to know about your customer based on your observations
Solely about your customer’s demographic information (age, gender, location etc.)
Customer research is the process of understanding why people buy and how they make purchase decisions. It dives deeper into the emotions that influence your customers.
Understanding these emotions is a big deal. Think about it. Does a brand you love provide a solution that makes you feel relieved, excited, empowered…or any of those other wonderful emotions we like to feel?
Canva is a great example for me. I have zero design skills. Nada. Zilch. I’m terrible. But, Canva gives me the power to create attractive designs with no stress. I use Canva because of the results I can get and how Canva makes me feel.
I feel like Wonder Woman!
I've Got the Power! Wonder Woman GIF.gif
You can create winning content if you understand how to appeal to these emotions. The best content makes customers believe you understand them and can speak directly to their concerns.
It helps your customers say, “Hey! That’s me! I’m going through that. This looks like something that can help me.”
Why Do Customer Research?
Talia Wolf, founder of GetUplift, answered this question well in an interview I did with her recently. She’s a conversion rate optimization specialist. But, she and her team were having challenges a few years ago getting the conversion results they hoped for their clients.
They were basing their decisions on things they:
Believed were right
Saw in other places
Tested
There initially was no focus on getting insights directly from customers. But, things changed significantly when they decided to focus on customer research. This shift led to dramatic increases in leads and sales for their clients.
Customer research helps you understand how people make decisions. That information provides immense value in helping you create content that results in more leads and more sales.
Here’s what she said.
3 Effective Customer Research Techniques
1. Customer Interviews
Customer interviews are the best way to get detailed, first-hand information about your customers. But, customer interviews aren’t just about asking a bunch of questions. They require:
Outreach
Preparation
An understanding of how to ask questions
Active listening
Avoiding interviewer bias
Analysis of interview transcripts
Presentation of findings
I had a conversation with Ryan Gibson, founder of Content Lift, recently. He’s an expert at conducting customer interviews for marketing teams.
You can watch my interview with him by clicking the button below. He clearly explains what should be done to conduct an effective customer interview.
Here’s what he had to say about why customer interviews are important.
Ryan Gibson explaining why do customer interviews
Here are some tips from this interview that can help you better manage each stage of the customer interview process.
Before The Interview
Clearly outline your objective. What are you trying to learn more about in this interview?
Have a conversation with the sales team to pinpoint anything they would like to learn more about.
Research the person you’re talking to so that you can make the conversation personalized.
Have your outline and objectives in front of you when you’re conducting the interview so that you can keep track.
Identify the customers you should invite to the interview.*
Reach out to these customers.
*The customers you invite to the interview will differ from one company to the next. Brands with an established customer base may invite customers who have low customer acquisition costs or who bring in the most revenue over time.
You may not have an established customer base. Probably you just have a few customers trickling in. That’s okay. Your group of customers can be people who recently purchased from you.
Invite 8 to 10 of your customers to these interviews. Ryan has found that this is the best number of customers to work with based on his experience.
During the Interview
Ensure that you have the right interview recording software.
Ask one question at a time.
Dig into vague statements.
Ask the customer to rephrase an answer you may not understand.
Practice active listening.
Don’t badger the customer with “why” questions.
Avoid interviewer bias. You can learn more about interviewer bias by listening to the interview.
After the Interview
Send a “Thank You” message to the customer.
Don’t jump to conclusions. Let the interview transcript rest for a day before you begin analyzing it.
Group answers from all the interviews into recurring themes.
Use that data to arrive at factual conclusions.
2. Surveys
You can use surveys with either your website visitors or existing customers (or both). For your existing customers, the survey can either be sent to your email subscriber list or directly to their inboxes (if you don’t have an email subscriber list).
The website pop-up survey can be a bit tricky. Google has started to penalize websites with obstructive pop-ups. So, having a pop-up on your website could affect your search engine rankings.
You can get around this by embedding the survey directly onto your webpage. I recommend putting the survey somewhere in the middle where it makes sense since few people are likely to scroll all the way to the end of the webpage.
There are three things that you should bear in mind when creating surveys. The first is that you don’t want to make them long and difficult. Stick to no more than five questions that can be completed in less than two minutes.
You also should pay attention to how you introduce the survey to your audience. Saying, “Fill out this survey” and leaving it at that won’t help. Here’s an example of a message that you could try.
For Existing Customers
“Hi [insert name here],
Thank you for being a great customer. We’re trying to improve what we do here at [insert company’s name here]. So, we’d love your input.
Can you spare two minutes to complete this survey? Your input will help us provide you with an even better experience.”
For Website Visitors
“Hi there,
Thank you for visiting our website. We’re happy you’re here! We’re trying to improve what we do here at [insert company’s name here]. So, we’d love your input.
Can you spare two minutes to complete this survey? Your input will help us provide you with an even better experience.”
Finally, make use of the “Thank You” page. It’s a good place to include links to some of your most relevant and helpful content. Doing this increases the chances of someone engaging with your content and spending more time on your website.
A week is a fairly good amount of time to put out a survey. The size of your business will dictate the number of responses you should expect. Smaller businesses will get fewer responses than larger businesses.
Regardless, it’s always a good idea to supplement surveys with customer interviews. Those interviews will really help you do a deep dive into the emotions that drive purchasing decisions.
3. Review Mining
Customer reviews can provide rich insights into how people think and feel about your product or service. You could approach review mining from either the perspective of social listening or by actually combing through reviews all over the internet.
Social listening helps you discover what people are saying about your brand on social media. You’ll see the posts and comments where your brand is mentioned.
You can find brand/product reviews:
On e-commerce websites where your product is sold (if you own an e-commerce store)
Google My Business
Any website where your business may be listed, such as Angie’s List or Business.com
Also, don’t focus solely on reviews about your product or service. You may even be in a situation where your brand is new and doesn’t have any reviews yet. So, you can also use customer reviews of products or services similar to yours. Identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Here are some tips to help you get the best results from review mining. These tips apply to both social listening and looking at reviews.
Remove your emotions and biases. You won’t like everything that you see.
Respond professionally to reviews (both good and bad).
Resolve customers’ issues (where possible) as quickly as you can.
Look for common themes amongst the reviews. Group the reviews based on those themes and identify the:
Type of language people use (how they speak)
Emotions people express
Misconceptions people have
Sentiments towards your competitor
Sentiments towards your brand
What Questions Should You Ask During Your Customer Research?
Here are some suggestions for questions that you can ask your customers. Some of these suggestions come from my interview with Talia Wolf.
What was happening in your life when you were searching for this solution?
Did you try anything before that didn’t work?
What would you miss the most if you could no longer use this solution?
How does using this solution make you feel?
Is there anything that you would change about the solution?
What Does the Customer Research Process Look Like?
Get someone to do the research. Customer research requires a lot of time and effort. It shouldn’t be an add-on responsibility for someone on your team.
Work with this person to identify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and whether you have enough people in your existing customer base to do the research.
The person conducts the research using customer interviews and either surveys or review mining. Using all three customer research techniques would be ideal.
The qualitative and quantitative data from the research are analyzed and a report is provided.
This report can then be used to inform your content marketing strategy.
What Customer Research Technology Can Support Your Process?
Getting To Know Each Customer Before An Interview
CheetahIQ is a sales research aggregation tool. It pulls all information available online about a prospect so that you get a full picture of the person’s background. Having a complete picture helps you make each customer interview personalized.
Recording Customer Interviews
Several audio-visual recording software platforms exist. Zoom is one of the most popular. But, using Zoom means that you’ll have to transcribe the file so that you can better analyze the interview.
Two software platforms offer better alternatives: Reduct.video and Descript. Reduct.video highlights and tags areas of your video in real-time while you’re recording. This can help you better organize responses post-interview.
Both Reduct.video and Descript provide instant transcriptions thus greatly simplifying the post-interview process.
Reduct.video Screenshot.png
Final Words
Customer research is integral to the success of your content marketing strategy. It’ll help you achieve your business goals because you’ll create content that resonates with your target audience.
Remember:
Customer research helps you understand what drives your customers to make decisions.
There are three core customer research techniques: customer interviews, surveys, and review mining.
It’s best to have someone on your team specifically charged with the responsibility of doing customer research.
Use the results from your customer interviews to get content ideas and ensure that the language of your target customer is represented.
I’m a content marketer who believes strongly in customer research. When you hire me, I’ll do the customer research necessary to inform your content strategy. I’ll also help you execute that content strategy so that you can get results.
Book a call with me and let’s discuss how I can help you.