Here at Triggerfish we strive to help companies form a Marketing Operations mindset.
This means moving away from a project-driven or “set it and forget it” way of thinking and evolving your marketing function to operate on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis.
Your MarTech will never be “done”, so instead of reaching for the holy grail end result, think about identifying the right things to work on and making incremental progress over time.
To help organisations start thinking operationally with respect to their marketing function, or help them build a marketing operations team, we have created this 12-part blog series. We will be covering everything from Sales & Marketing alignment, growth marketing, digital strategy, creating ROI, cross-functional teams, and much more!
Today, Customer Insights
Getting first-party data and feedback from your customers is one of the cornerstones of marketing. You can’t really claim to understand your customer unless you have this information – and yet we find that many marketing and sales teams haven’t done this.
Done correctly, your customer insights will inform your understanding of:
- Your customer journey
- Your metrics for success
- What activated your customers
- What held them back from converting
These are all extremely enlightening things to know.
Customer Insights from a business needs perspective
If you don’t understand the needs of your customer or what they’re feeling when they start their customer journey, it can be very difficult to put a standout customer experience together. Conversely, if you do have access to first party data and research, you can put together a customer experience that is empathetic about their needs, struggles, and desires. This is a supreme competitive advantage. Not only does this provide a frictionless experience, it also creates a bond with the consumer.
We are in the age of the experience economy. The customer experience might be the only differentiator between you and your competitors.
What are the necessary processes to obtain Customer Insights?
Talking to customers is important – but don’t overlook the important factors of “who,” and “how many.”
B2B companies tend to have fewer customers than B2C, so you can talk to a relatively small number of people and still represent a relatively large portion of your customer base. The important thing is that you should gain an accurate cross-section of your purchasers. It’s more important to talk to ten different personas than it is to talk to the same persona ten times.
In addition, the questions you ask should be targeted to obtain good data. Record a question-lead conversation with your customer and then derive insights from the buying process as a result. This means that the customer can drive the conversation without becoming contaminated by your worldview.
Customers know how they're thinking about your process, and they've got a good contextual view of the world. The research process is all about their experience, how they've gone through things, issues and barriers that they've worked through.
If you don’t currently have a program for customer outreach, it’s best to start. Sometimes, marketers think that because salespeople are at the front lines talking to customers, the sales team has responsibility for customer insight. This is far from systematic. Ideally, you want to get both marketing context and sales context together by asking your customers the right questions questions.
We strive to provide companies with a best-in-class experience that can supercharge marketing efforts and realign them towards business goals. If you’d like to learn more about how we undertake customer interviews and uncover valuable insgihts, contact us today.