Follow us on LinkedIn“The customer knows best.”
👆 A well-established expression for many companies – and for good reason. Ultimately, your customer is going to buy your product based on what they want, and they're looking for - not what you think will sell well.
Gathering these consumer insights is your opportunity to tailor your products – and how you market them – to their personalized needs, hopefully then bringing in those coveted sales.
But how can you do this successfully?
In this article, Aileen McGraw, Senior Product Marketing Manager at GoFundMe outlines the guiding principles of gathering consumer insights, focusing specifically on:
- What are consumer insights?
- B2B vs B2C consumer insights
- Quantitative vs. qualitative data in consumer insights
- How to gather consumer insights
- The most valuable tools for gathering consumer insights
What are consumer insights?
Consumer insights is a deceptively simple concept. It’s all about understanding your (and I'm stressing that word for a reason) customer and using that information to drive greater business impact. I think of the product marketer’s role within that as making a path to understanding our customers.
An insight is a combination of a few things. First of all, there are facts. Many of us have access in our roles to a lot of quantitative data, behavioral data, facts on the ground, market data, and data about our competitors.
Those are facts, and they can hint at decisions, but you'll be left wondering what all those numbers mean unless you can combine them with recommendations.
The other piece of the puzzle is more quantitative data about your customers. You want to find out what they’re doing on your platform, how often they're using various features, and what they might be missing that's a core part of your product or experience.
And then there's what your users say and more psychographic data – what's waking them up at night, but also inspiring them to get out of bed in the morning? Where else do they spend their time and money? What are their core values? What do they care about?
That all creates a really full picture that we can use alongside lots of quantitative insights to drive business decisions.
Is there a difference between B2B and B2C consumer insights?
Yes. The difference between B2B marketing and B2C is that oftentimes in B2B, your decision maker is different from your end user.
When I was a product marketer for developer services at Microsoft and I was thinking about the right insights to bring to the table, I would always have to keep in mind what devs care about.
I know they hate marketing, so I wasn’t going to use marketing terminology or anything like that. But at the same time, who in their organization is making the decision to use Azure? Not them, so we have to take the decision-maker into account too.
There are a lot of ways to think about what motivates decisions and the trends we see across the market on the decision-maker side. And then from the user’s side, we need to pay attention to the behavior we see when they're using our product and the features that provide them with the most value.
The luxury we have on the consumer side of product marketing is that our end user is also the decision maker.
If you want to use the magic of B2B in a consumer tech role, there are so many things that you can do. I know that stories are supposed to be short, but there are great reports with market data and white papers that you can really dive into. I wouldn't think of any kind of information as too corporate or too commercial to use in consumer product marketing.
On the B2B side of consumer insights, you want to have the scale and statistical significance for your findings, but it can be really helpful to get scrappy with things like quick surveys. There are tons of ways to get statistical significance really quickly with tools like Perksy or any gen pop surveying tool.
Quantitative data vs. qualitative data in consumer insights
When it comes to quantitative or qualitative consumer insights, the answer, of course, is that you need both. You can't drive a strategy without either. However, one thing you always want to find out when you’re gathering consumer insights is whether people do what they say.
I've been in plenty of user interviews and focus groups where people have been like, “I just wish you did this for us and made it easier to do this,” and then you look at their behavior in product and it doesn't match up with what they said they cared about.
You always want to ask yourself if you have enough behavioral data on activity in your product, and then you need to ensure you can compare that with qualitative data on what people are saying they care about. If there’s a Venn diagram where those overlap, that's fertile ground for insights.
I also think the most powerful insights come from taking a qualitative nugget and proving it at scale.
A really effective way of sharing insights with stakeholders is taking a potent quote and saying, “Guess what? This potent quote was seen in 83% of the respondents we surveyed.” Quantitative and qualitative data are a power couple, and they should always go hand in hand.
How do you gather consumer insights?
To be able to quickly gather quality consumer insights, building strong relationships with your legal team is really, really important. The superpower of product marketers is that we know our customers. We need to apply that internally and get to know our legal teams.
- What are their OKRs?
- What are their stressors?
- What brought them to your company?
- Why did they decide to work there?
Getting to know your cross-functional partners on a human level sounds fuzzy, but I’ve found it to be extremely helpful when I’m saying, “Remember when we both resonated with this challenge or users are facing? I want to know if that's true at scale, so we'd like to interview this set in this way. Here's the email I'm planning to send – can you review and approve it?”
Thinking about how to first collect all of this data, one of the most important parts of consumer insights is segmentation. I would say segment, segment, segment - and then segment again.
As you start to create your “why”, think about what you’re hoping to learn and who your audience is. That can ground your screening questions as you're sourcing interview candidates and stuff like that.
That could make the difference between talking to the general population and talking to people who have, say, donated to a GoFundMe campaign before. It's simple, but if I miss that, I have garbage data that won't influence decisions, or if it does, it's dangerous because I've included people who have never donated to a GoFundMe campaign and who might not have any motivation to do so.
Segmenting and honing in on your “why” also helps you figure out how many people you need to reach and if you need statistical significance for that.
Let’s say I need insights from small business owners – instead of doing a broad-gen pop survey, I’m going to use screening questions that'll allow me to target that audience. That way, I’m getting much richer and more specific insights because we did that segmentation and prioritization upfront.
How to gather consumer insights on a budget
Whatever the size of your team or your budget, you're gonna get the most actionable insights if you ask the same questions. Then you're not trying to extrapolate – it’s all there in black and white.
Also, don't be afraid to start small. Online tools make it easier to scale, but there's nothing wrong with starting with three people from the audience that you want to reach, looking for patterns in their answers to your questions, and then doing some desktop research.
By that, I just mean searching the web and even listening to relevant podcasts. I'm addicted to podcasts. They've truly informed my career as well. You can absolutely do this with little to no budget.
If your company is small to medium size, there are really effective ways to survey more people. Again, I'd recommend using standard questions. This is where you can also include screening questions, because it's a larger audience, to make sure you're capturing your segment.
I also really like using Perksy. Users get perks and points for completing your surveys, and you’d better bet I’m a Persky power user myself, trying to get those gift cards by completing surveys.
Also, customer service is your best friend. If you don't have an insights function or you don’t have the capacity to run user interviews, you can sit in on their calls. They’re talking to customers every day, so you should be able to plug in.
What are the most valuable tools for gathering consumer insights
I've really fallen in love with rapid-turnaround surveys. However, you can get garbage data almost out of anything, no matter how good the tool is. You need to know how to write non-leading questions.
If you need a gender, age, ethnicity, and geographically balanced survey, then you need to make sure that happens. If that's all done right, I would always have a tool where I can get a 24 to 48-hour turnaround on a survey to show me what users care about.
And, of course, I’ve already talked about Perksy, but what I didn’t mention is that it also has a really fun font selection.
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