Customer Research for Go-to-Market Strategy

Understanding Your Customer Before Hiring a Marketer

Prior to engaging a full-time marketing professional, a thorough understanding of your prospective customer is essential. Identifying the circumstances and motivations that lead them to consider your offerings is paramount.

Gaining clarity in the following areas will significantly improve your decision-making process when determining the appropriate marketing resources to invest in.

Key Customer Insights

• What value proposition compels a customer to subscribe to your product or service?
• What specific factors ultimately drive a customer’s decision to choose your product over alternatives?
• Who represents your competitive landscape, and what are their strengths and weaknesses?

We will explore three frameworks designed to provide answers to these crucial questions. These frameworks will also demonstrate how to translate these insights into effective marketing strategies and unlock valuable learning opportunities.

The process of deeply understanding your customer is further detailed in a dedicated resource: How to talk to people and land your first customer.

Successfully identifying customer needs and triggers is fundamental to effective marketing. It allows for targeted messaging and resource allocation.

Analyzing your competition provides context and helps differentiate your offerings. This understanding is vital for crafting a compelling market position.

Understanding Customer Motivations for Product Subscription

The concept of Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) is frequently discussed within marketing circles. Essentially, JTBD provides a framework for discerning the underlying goals a customer seeks to fulfill when choosing a particular product.

Consider a straightforward illustration: a hammer isn't selected simply to drive a nail; it's chosen to facilitate hanging a picture, ultimately enhancing the aesthetic appeal of a room. The hammer serves a larger purpose – improving the room's appearance, potentially for resale, or to create a more stylish and impressive environment.

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This principle extends to technology products as well. It’s crucial to determine the outcomes your product enables customers to realize.

The Methodology:

Effective customer interviews are paramount. Questions should focus on the customer’s ultimate objectives, such as, ‘What are you hoping to accomplish?’ or ‘What initial steps will you take?’ Inquire if they’ve attempted self-service solutions and, if so, which products they’ve combined.

While crafting these questions requires skill, the primary focus should remain on what the customer is striving to achieve. Recognize that this is often a time-consuming process, demanding in-depth interviews, but the resulting insights are invaluable.

Implementing JTBD in Your Startup's Marketing Strategy:

This understanding can significantly refine your customer targeting efforts. You may discover multiple potential ‘jobs’ your product can address. Prioritize the segment willing to pay the most for the most effective solution to their ‘job.’ This can accelerate sales or reveal more profitable customer segments.

Identifying the Decisive Factor in Customer Choice

Numerous frameworks exist to guide customer research, but the most impactful are largely rooted in the principles established by Moesta. His model proposes that a customer progresses through six distinct phases during a purchasing journey: initial consideration, passive exploration, active investigation, decision-making, onboarding, and continued utilization.

Understanding the Customer Journey:

Customers are primarily focused on resolving their needs, rather than engaging with specific brands. Indeed, your company may not have initially been considered as a potential solution when their exploration began. The core objective of this research is to conduct customer interviews to uncover their actions and the resources they consulted while evaluating alternatives.

Purchasing decisions aren't impulsive; several forces influence a customer’s advancement through the buying cycle. Your goal is to conduct interviews, documenting the specific processes, websites, influencers, and motivations that propelled them forward.

Leveraging Insights for Startup Marketing:

After identifying your customers’ key trigger points, you gain valuable insight into optimal brand positioning, content placement, and product presentation. Essentially, you are constructing the foundational elements of your go-to-market strategy.

It’s crucial to understand precisely how your customer seeks out and acquires a product like yours, ensuring your presence at the most relevant moments. This understanding allows for targeted and effective marketing efforts.

These interviews will reveal the underlying emotions, motivations, and sentiments experienced by customers. This qualitative data is highly valuable and can inform both the creative direction of your advertising campaigns and the messaging used throughout the entire customer experience.

Furthermore, this information can help determine whether a sales-driven or product-driven approach is more suitable for your business. Inquiring about the sign-up experience, potential questions, and perceived complexities provides critical considerations for strategy development.

Identifying Your Competitive Landscape

When assessing market position, it's crucial to recognize the various forms of competition. These can be broadly categorized into three distinct types: direct, indirect, and replacement competitors.

• Direct competitors are businesses offering products or services that are very similar to yours, within the same market segment.
• Indirect competitors provide comparable solutions, but operate within a different product category.
• Replacement competitors offer entirely different products that still address the same underlying customer need.

The Investigation Process:

The primary goal is to gather comprehensive data regarding businesses vying for the same customers. This information can be obtained through customer interviews, as well as through the implementation of pop-up surveys and interactive engagement tools.

Begin by compiling a list of both direct and indirect competitors. Insights can be gleaned from analyzing lost sales opportunities and identifying businesses bidding on similar keywords in search engine results. Determining replacement competitors requires a deep understanding of your customers’ core motivations and desired outcomes.

Consider Zoom as an illustrative example. MS Teams represents a direct competitor, while smartphone video calling functions as an indirect alternative. Interestingly, a flight to conduct an in-person meeting could be considered a replacement competitor.

Practical Marketing Applications for Startups:

For early-stage startups lacking clarity on optimal customer acquisition strategies, analyzing competitor activities can provide valuable direction. Observing their approaches offers insights into potential customer purchasing behaviors.

Effective positioning is paramount. Once you have a clear understanding of your true competitive set and target customer segments, you can refine your positioning strategy. What unique strength does your company possess? How can this be leveraged to differentiate yourself from the competition? This understanding will shape your overall strategy and influence your website messaging and marketing choices.

Understanding the Next Steps After Information Gathering

Having gathered insights from the three key areas of customer research, the subsequent step involves constructing a Voice of Customer document. This document serves to highlight the discrepancies between what customers anticipate and their actual experiences.

Identifying this gap is crucial, as it can underpin your startup’s customer-led growth strategy – a methodology pioneered by the founders of Forget the Funnel.

The process can be undertaken independently, with the assistance of a consultant specializing in unbiased data extraction, or collaboratively with your team.

However, the most vital aspect is to translate these findings into actionable strategies.

Numerous frameworks and theories exist to facilitate a deeper understanding of your target audience and propel you towards acquiring your initial customer base.

Further resources are available detailing startup customer validation procedures, potential pitfalls, and methods for accurately identifying your competitive landscape.

Regularly revisiting this process is essential. Customer perceptions of value evolve over time.

Shifting personal circumstances – including employment, housing, and lifestyle – can prompt customers to re-evaluate their subscriptions and product choices.

This proactive approach enables you to anticipate future trends and maintain a customer-centric focus.