Getting the Insights You Need: How to Conduct Customer Research for a Business

What could be more refreshing than knowing your customers so well that you can predict their next move? As a marketer or a business owner, you know it is time-consuming to conduct customer research. And it could be costly depending on your research methodology. But you can't put off customer research, as it is crucial to growing and scaling your business.

Customer research helps to root out your customers' struggles, identify where they turn to for information when trying to solve their problems, identify their concerns regarding your product or service, and ultimately guide you on how to address these problems to increase conversion. In essence, customer research opens the door to happier customers, better products or services, and a thriving business.

Without thorough research, your marketing efforts wouldn't reach your ideal audience, and this hurts your business. Surface-level tips about conducting customer research aren't helping anymore. You long to see what actually works in simple steps and how to apply it to your business.

In this article, I'll walk you through six ways to conduct customer research and why it is worthwhile to identify your true customers.

Why Is Customer Research Important?

Customer research predicts the success of businesses, whether startups or existing ones. It is a crucial determinant of the extent to which your business would convert its target audience. It paves the way for the right content, offer, and ultimately scale your business. Customer research answers the question, “How can we serve our customers better?” It helps you do away with assumptions by obtaining real data on customers that are useful for growing the business. The result of this seemingly rigorous exercise is a product or service with the right content that deeply serves the needs of your ideal customer.

Undoubtedly, customer research can be time-consuming, but it can also reduce spending money and time on marketing campaigns that don't appeal to your target audience. It is easy to mess up your campaign efforts if you don't know who your ideal audience is, what they want, and where to reach them.

Conducting customer research will help identify your true target audience, and you may be amazed to see you didn't have it clearly defined. The insights you gather from surveying potential and existing customers will help shape your marketing initiatives, ensuring that your business delivers what people want and not what you think they want. You will discover the hidden problems of your customers and realize how to erase their pain with your product or service. This prevents targeting the wrong demographics and losing out on conversions in the days to come.

The additional benefits you will derive from conducting customer research are:

• Create relevant content that resolves the customer pain: Knowing who your ideal audience is leads to crafting messages that move them to action. At this point, you are certain of the person you want to attract to your website and no longer waste time on producing content that yields no result.
• Understand the customer's buying intent: Customer research lets you understand the buying intent of your customers. Are they looking for information about your offer? Are they comparison shopping? Are they interested in how to use a certain feature of your product?
• Identify their preferred content format: Researching your target audience reveals how best they consume content. Do they prefer video to text? Are they interested in audio content like podcasts? Or do they prefer text content with visuals? Do they prefer both text and video to podcasts?
• Improve customer experience: Customers do value personalized experiences. They want to feel heard and understood through the content you produce. By consuming your content, they want to feel a sense of understanding towards their needs and struggles.
• Improve your product or service: The findings from customer research reveal areas for improvement in your product or service.

6 Ways to Conduct Customer Research (Plus Examples)

While the idea of running customer research can be daunting, understanding your target audience is the cheat code to knowing how to grab their attention and convert them to loyal customers. I explained six easy-to-follow ways to conduct customer research below. So, stay with me.

1. Define Research Objectives

First of all, you need to set the objectives for your research. Why do you want to conduct this research? What do you hope to accomplish at the end of the study? For instance, when I set out to research the target audience for my freelance writing business, I had two objectives.

• To craft personalized content that resonates and solves my audience's problems.
• To draft my buyer persona.

So, what are you looking to achieve at the end of the day?

2. Identify Your Target Audience

The next step is to define your target audience. You want to narrow down who you are targeting as much as you can and explore everything from your customer's demographics to their inner struggles and desires.

As a freelance writer specializing in the SaaS industry, my target audience is a B2C SaaS CMO, a SaaS senior content chief, and a fellow freelance writer, leaving me with three buyer personas. I could have naively considered John, a 35-year-old Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) residing in the United States, my target audience. While that is not entirely wrong, it lacks one thing- clarity. There is a likelihood of missing one of John’s deepest pains as the CMO of a SaaS company as compared to the general struggle of CMOs. The industry your customer works in contributes to the unique challenges they will encounter on a daily.  Therefore, create a detailed buyer persona and fill in the following sections to identify your target audience.

Here are key questions to answer in your buyer persona:

• Demographics: Age, professional title, location, income level, industry, personality
• Psychographics: Beliefs/values, personal goals. Professional goals.
• What are my customers' pain points?
• What are their desires?
• What product/service are they using right now?
• What do they mostly enjoy in my product or service?
• What features would they like to see in my product or service?
• On which channels do they spend most of their time?
• Where do they turn to for information?
• How do they like to consume marketing messages?

You see the pain points section? Take it very seriously. One general rule for businesses is to increase conversions. And to achieve that, your marketing messaging must captivate the right attention. Only then can you attract qualified leads that will be moved to take action.

3. Identify the Best Way to Reach Your Customers

Where do they spend the most time? Do they spend most of their time on social media? Which social media platform do they often use? Is it Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram? Are they spending more time on forums like Quora and Reddit? Are they more glued to their TVs? For an existing business, do you have a mailing list of your customers? Will they agree to an interview, or are they okay with completing a survey to aid your research?

Realizing these things will help you figure out where to reach your customers to garner insights. Before launching my blog, I painstakingly took the time to identify my audience and drafted a detailed buyer persona. From the findings, I discovered that my target audience spends time reading SaaS and marketing blogs. They are active on platforms like LinkedIn and X. They are curiosity-driven individuals who are always on the lookout for novel information and industry trends. They also enjoy attending webinars to gain insights into their industry.

Once you've identified the channels to reach them, you've practically completed one-third of the research journey.

Let's look at a few examples.

A freelance writer like me would be interested in topics like how to build a writing portfolio, so I added it to the topic section of my content strategy. Notice how websites like Blurb, indeed, CopyBlogger, and Upwork are ranking for these keywords, signifying that the topic would interest my ideal customer if I publish it on my blog and share it on LinkedIn and X to enhance my reach.

Using an SEO tool like SEMrush will further strengthen my findings by revealing the search volume behind this topic. It shows a 31% keyword difficulty and a search volume of 480. Likewise, it suggests other topic ideas relating to the keyword.

A senior content marketing manager of a SaaS company would be interested in reading about how to increase the conversion rate for their client's SaaS website. With a simple Google search, I can see other websites ranking for this keyword, signifying that readers are looking to obtain information about this.

4. Select the Best Customer Research Method

The next action is to select the customer research method that best suits your needs, budget, and research goals. Use popular methods like interviews, questionnaires, surveys, and online reviews to obtain data.

Carefully select the method you want and begin preparations for how to collect data. If you’ve chosen to conduct interviews with existing and potential customers, contact those on your list and get their consent. Make the customers comfortable during the interview. Listen more and speak less, and refrain from judging their responses to prevent being biased.

But if you’ve chosen to disseminate questionnaires and surveys to customers, think of the appropriate distribution channel (social media, email, landing page, etc.) to get the research questions to them.

5. Ask the Right Questions

Ask open-ended questions that allow the customer to express their thoughts and feelings. You want them to talk without outrightly answering with a “Yes or No.”  To get the right responses, prepare a list of questions you would like to ask.

Here are examples of questions to ask your target audience:

• How did you discover our product/service or company?

This explains how your customers learned about your company or product. It will illuminate the channel that attracts the most leads and help you realize where to focus.

• What do you enjoy about using our product?

This enables them to express their opinion about what they saw in your product that prompted them to patronize you.

• What would you use as an alternative to our product/service if we didn't exist?

This lets you in on your competitors. You get to discover alternatives to your product or service. And you get to take advantage of that to run a competitive analysis to identify gaps you can leverage to stay ahead.

• What would you like us to improve to serve you better?

Your customer's response will reveal the things that are lacking in your product or service. That way, you can work on them to make your offer more appealing.

6. Analyze and Interpret Data

Once you have gathered satisfactory data, analyze and interpret it to decode the customer's needs. Look for patterns in their answers, note them, and take the necessary action.

However, note that customer research is not a once-and-done-forever task, you should consistently conduct research either quarterly, semi-annually, or annually, depending on what you think it's best for your business.

Final Thoughts

Whether you are a marketer, business owner, or writer, conducting customer research is the bedrock of launching a successful business or career. The steps highlighted in this article will help you kickstart the customer research journey and ultimately collect useful information. And the result? Better product or service, tailored content, and happier customers.