We’d like to tell you that DemandBrew is the best source for marketing advice and information available to you. But the truth is, it’s not.
Now, don’t get us wrong, we think DemandBrew is the best resource on the Web for proven B2B marketing tips and strategies. However, your very best source of marketing advice isn’t on the Web at all. Your very best source of marketing advice is your customers .
Many marketers intuitively understand the value of customer insights. After all, the simplest way to find out what people want is to ask them. As a thoughtful marketer who cares about getting results, you’re probably already speaking with customers and prospects whenever you have the chance. But if you’re like most B2B marketing practitioners, you probably have some room for improvement in the area of customer research.
Consider:
- Do you have a customer research process or do customer conversations happen haphazardly?
- Are you asking the right questions when you talk with customers and prospects? How would you know?
- Are the people you talk with representative of your target market or are they outliers with unusual needs?
- Do you have a formal method for analyzing customer research to determine what is significant and what isn’t?
- Do you have a system for sharing insights with your entire marketing team?
- Are you relying too much on surveys and not enough on actual conversations with people in your target market?
Acquiring solid, meaningful customer data isn’t difficult, but it does require some upfront planning and strategizing. You’re also going to have to talk to some people, and if those conversations are going to be useful at all, you’re going to need ways to analyze and share the information you gather.
One of the key steps in the process is developing your own interview guide. By arming your marketing team with the right questions and giving them guidance on the kinds of information you’re hoping to obtain, you can ensure that every customer conversation will be productive, no matter who is asking the questions.
The Marketing Research Interview Guide
Categories and sample questions for developing effective marketing research interview guides. A robust and well-rounded interview guide can be constructed by just developing one question in each category.
When conducting interviews, you’ll need to keep a few things in mind:
- Be polite and considerate of the interviewee’s time, and don’t forget to say thank you.
- Prepare for the interview ahead of time.
- Set aside your pre-conceived notions and listen to what the customer or prospect tells you.
- Ask open-ended questions rather than yes-no questions.
- Respond to what the interviewee says, but don’t be afraid of occasional silence.
- Ask “why?”
If you’re ready to take your customer research process to the next level, check out DemandBrew’s Step-by-Step Marketing Research Tutorial. It offers an eight-step process for setting up your own research project. If it’s been more than a year since your organization went through a process like this one, now is the time to get started.
Step-by-Step Marketing Research
In this step-by-step tutorial, learn how to conduct marketing research---the only reliable way to gain the meaningful and actionable insights you need for effective strategic marketing.
