How To Find Out Exactly What Your Customers Want (4 Market Research Tips)

Summary

In this insightful session, discover effective market research strategies to understand customer needs better. Learn to minimize investment risks and identify emerging trends and customer pain points with five essential steps from HubSpot's experts. Gain unique insights into how to create personas, set research objectives, craft precise questions, and summarize findings efficiently. Enhance your marketing capabilities by understanding your audience deeply and using tools like HubSpot's persona generator and research kits to gain valuable consumer insights.

Highlights

• Create fictional personas to better understand customer needs! 👤
• Dive into customer mindset, not just demographics. Deep insights matter! 😎
• Define clear research objectives to focus your strategies. 📌
• Ask important questions first in a structured survey! Orchestrate your inquiries thoughtfully. 🎤
• Use sociology and psychology insights to craft better surveys. 📚
• Summarize market data in easy formats for actionable insights! 💼

Key Takeaways

• Understand your customers by creating detailed personas! 👥
• Set clear research objectives to guide your market study. 🎯
• Craft effective research questions and test them beforehand! ❓
• Summarize findings into an easy-to-digest format using templates. 📊
• Market research helps spot trends and minimize business risks. 🚀

Overview

HubSpot Marketing shares a comprehensive approach to uncovering the hidden desires of your customer base through market research. By following their expert tips, you can build a more resilient business strategy. Start by crafting personas to depict your ideal customer. By stepping into their shoes, you can gather insights that transcend mere demographics and capture their true motivations and challenges!

Once you've sketched out who your customers are, set your research objectives. Ask yourself what exactly you want to learn about your customers, and let that guide your approach. Whether it's understanding consumer insights through interviews or assessing product usability, your research objective will dictate your methodology. HubSpot suggests aligning stakeholders to ensure the process and goals are clearly defined, eliminating confusion down the line.

Finally, HubSpot emphasizes the importance of well-crafted research questions. Place the most crucial questions upfront and test your survey to ensure clarity for the target persona. This method ensures you gather the most valuable data without bias. And don't forget to compile your data into easy-to-read summaries! HubSpot's tools and templates facilitate this process, making it accessible for any business looking to strengthen their market insights.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Market Research In the introduction to market research, the importance of understanding customer needs is highlighted as a way to minimize risk, spot trends, and identify customer pain points. The chapter outlines five steps for successful market research, with the first being the definition of customer personas. These personas are fictional representations of ideal customers, which help in understanding them before addressing their issues. The chapter references HubSpot's head of market research, Amy Maret, for expert insights into this process.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Creating Buyer Personas The chapter 'Creating Buyer Personas' begins with a powerful tip: immerse yourself into the persona's perspective as much as possible. Amy emphasizes the need to understand buyers not just by demographics but by delving deeper into their thoughts, values, struggles, and motivations. By thoroughly grasping these elements, businesses can create products, experiences, and messages that truly address customer problems and connect with them personally. The use of a persona generator tool is recommended to explore beyond demographics, offering a structured seven-step process to develop comprehensive buyer personas.
• 01:00 - 01:30: Research Objectives The chapter titled 'Research Objectives' focuses on understanding industry professionals by analyzing various aspects of their job roles. To compile detailed consumer insights, one must assess the industry and job type, the obstacles and objectives faced by professionals, the tools necessary for achieving their goals, and their information consumption patterns. The ultimate aim is to determine what contributes to their success and what they should be cautious about, in order to offer tailored solutions. Importantly, the chapter emphasizes the necessity of defining clear research objectives by starting with the question 'why'. Knowing the main objectives of research helps guide the methodology, such as focusing on consumer insights as a potential goal.
• 01:30 - 03:00: Formulating Research Questions The chapter "Formulating Research Questions" centers around the importance of aligning research methods with the intended goals. It discusses different approaches for collecting data, such as interviews, customer satisfaction surveys, and usability testing, depending on the research objectives. A key point made is that the purpose of the research ('why') should guide the method ('how'). Despite this, misalignments can occur. Amy, a figure in the text, shares her experience of how she encounters challenges due to misalignments between research design and stakeholder needs.
• 03:00 - 04:00: Summarizing Research Findings The chapter 'Summarizing Research Findings' discusses the importance of involving stakeholders in the research process to clarify project objectives and scope. It also emphasizes developing a list of research questions, such as understanding customer awareness, preferred features, and convenience of use, which can be addressed through various research methods like focus groups, online surveys, or interviews. These questions help in identifying customer needs and solutions.
• 04:00 - 05:00: Conclusion In the conclusion, it is highlighted by market research analyst Max that when preparing research questions, the sequence of questions is crucial. Max advises asking the most important questions first, as earlier questions may impact responses to later ones. For instance, if respondents are first asked about their daily time spent on social media, their answers to subsequent questions about its effects on their mental health might be influenced by their previous reflections.
• 05:00 - 05:30: HubSpot CRM Promotion The chapter titled 'HubSpot CRM Promotion' focuses on effective survey creation and its importance in marketing. It suggests testing surveys before going live and understanding the mindset of different target personas. It highlights the necessity for respondents to have relevant knowledge to provide meaningful answers, using an example from marketing. The chapter advocates reading materials in sociology and psychology to gain insights into human behavior, which can enhance the survey writing process by inspiring creative question development.

How To Find Out Exactly What Your Customers Want (4 Market Research Tips) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 - Today, I'm gonna teach you how to do market research, AKA how to find out exactly what your customer wants. If you do this correctly, it'll minimize investment risk, helping spotting emergent trends, and identify potential pain points for customers. Let's get into it. When it comes to conducting successful market research according to HubSpot's own market researchers, there are five steps you need to follow. One, define your persona. Personas are fictional generalized representations of your ideal customers. Before you jump into solving their problems. This is what helps you understand who they are. According to HubSpot's head of market research, Amy Maret,
• 00:30 - 01:00 the best tip when creating a buyer persona is to put yourself in the shoes of that person, as much as possible. - [Amy] You want to understand who they are on a deep level not just their demographics, though that can certainly be helpful to know, but more importantly, how they think, what they care about, what they struggle with, and what energizes them. Then you can more effectively craft experiences, products, messaging, et cetera, that actually solve their problems, and resonate with your target customer. - With a tool like our persona generator diving deep beyond just demographics is made easy. Within seven steps you'll cover demographic traits,
• 01:00 - 01:30 what industry they work in, what job they do, the goals/challenges of that job, what tools they need to reach those goals, and their consumption habits. Where are they gaining the information to perform their job? With that info, you can start to figure out what makes them successful, and what they might need to be worried about. Use these details to provide solutions that are catered specifically to them. Number two, define your research objective. Always start with your, why. Ask yourself what the main objective of your research is. What do you wanna know about your customer, and let that guide your process. For example, if your goal is consumer insights,
• 01:30 - 02:00 then you may want to go with more interviews and customer satisfaction survey research. If you're looking for something geared more towards collecting customer reviews after using your physical product, website, or app, then you wanna explore usability testing. In other words, your why will dictate your how. But even with a clear goal sometimes misalignment can still take place. When I asked Amy what her biggest challenge was when it came to market research, she said "It was often misalignment between the resource design and the objectives and needs of her stakeholders." - [Amy] I solved this problem
• 02:00 - 02:30 by embedding key touchpoints into my project plans. Where I get all the stakeholders together to brainstorm objectives and information needs. And then I follow it up with a clear plan. What's in and out of scope for the project, that we can all align on and point back to anytime questions come up along the way. - Number three, research questions. How did you hear about us? What features do you like most about our product or service? Is our product convenient to use? Whether it's for a focus group, online survey, or an interview, questions like these serve your purpose to finding out who your customer is and what you can immediately solve for them.
• 02:30 - 03:00 According to our own market research analyst Max, when it comes to preparing those research questions there are three points you should keep in mind. The order you ask questions in is very important. - [Max] Ask the most important questions first. And remember that previous questions will always influence answers to later ones. For example, if you ask how long a respondent spends on social media every day, and then follow it up with a question about how social media affects their mental health. Having just thought about how they spent four hours scrolling through TikTok the night before
• 03:00 - 03:30 might bias their answer. - Test your survey before taking it live, try to get into the mind frame of the different personas your survey targets. Make sure that they're equipped with the knowledge to answer the questions that you're asking them. You wouldn't wanna ask someone who just started in marketing in 2022, about how marketing changed since COVID began. - [Max] Read books about sociology, psychology. Read ethnographies. These will teach you lessons about human behavior that you can apply to your survey writing process. And they'll often reference other research studies that help you come up with creative questions.
• 03:30 - 04:00 - Lastly, summarize your findings. After you've run your research, you need to compile all of that information into an easily digestible form. We happen to offer a super easy market research kit that does exactly that. It comes with focus group and survey templates. This is where you'll include info on why you're doing this research, how you gathered your information, key findings, and your recommendations. There you have it, tips and strategies on market research from our own market researchers. Remember, market research can help with understanding your target market, pricing strategies,
• 04:00 - 04:30 and overall strengthens your business. As always if you like what you heard and you want to hear more, like, comment, and subscribe down below to hear more. 'Til next time. - I can't find this client info. - Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned, no out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. - [Announcer] HubSpot, grow better.