Katelyn Bourgoin has launched three startups in the past ten years. Through that, she's learned the best way to grow quickly is to get obsessed with customer feedback. Now, she helps product and marketing teams make qualitative research a habit and grow 2-3x faster because of it. This week on Awkward Silences, Erin and JH talked to her about how to make qualitative research your marketing team's competitive advantage.
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Why your marketing team needs qualitative research
As a growth strategist, Katelyn has helped tons of teams take their marketing from zero to hero by adding one simple ingredient: customer research.
Oftentimes, marketers are expected to learn everything they need to know about customers from observing and gathering second hand information. This can include sitting in on sales calls, reading through customer support tickets, or analyzing quantitative data. While all of these things can be helpful, they’re no replacement for actually going out and talking to customers.
When Katelyn starts working with a new client, typically their marketing teams aren’t doing qualitative research for one big reason:
They’re afraid.
In Seth Godin’s book, This is Marketing, he says that when people don’t act as you expect them to, look for the angry bear. What he means by this is, nobody makes rational decisions when they’re afraid of dire consequences, like being eaten by a bear.
Katelyn sees this a lot with startups and businesses that scaled quickly. In the beginning, they didn’t focus on qualitative research because they were just trying to stay alive. Nobody had time to think about doing research on top of that.
Bigger businesses have this problem too. In many companies, customers come with big dollar signs attached. And with those big accounts comes a potential liability that can be pretty scary. What if you allow your team to do research with someone who is a key account holder and they’re put off by your questions and leave?
The good news is, these are just fears. In reality, qualitative research can help you improve your processes and actually make better choices that move your team forward, out of the bear’s reach. And your customers don’t have to be scary, they’re just people, paying you, they’re awesome!
Doing great qualitative interviews as a marketer
As marketers, we need to get people to want what we’re selling. A big part of that is understanding how your customers feel about your product. To do truly great qualitative research for marketing, Katelyn has two rules you should try to follow:
Learn about your customer’s past behaviors
If you want to learn about how people think about weight loss, you could ask them about their habits in two ways—
“What do you plan on doing to lose weight?” or
“What were your diet and exercise habits in the past month?”
You’ll likely get two very different answers. The first question elicits a more aspirational response, your customer may say something along the lines of, “well, I’ll eat a salad for lunch and go to the gym.''
While your customer’s hopes for the next month are admirable, they may not be a good indicator of what will actually happen.
The second question, asking about past habits, is probably a better indicator of how they’ll actually end up doing in the coming months. If your customer says something like, “well, I ate a bunch of hamburgers and hung out in my house,” it’s more likely that’s what they’ll end up doing in the future.
Moral of the story? You’ll learn more about your customers by asking them to describe what they’ve done in the past and the emotions that led them to those decisions. Encourage them to tell stories about what they’ve done in the past and how they came to choose your product.
Talk to people who have the problem you want to solve
Katelyn sees people make this mistake all too often. When you’re looking into a specific campaign or feature promotion, talk to people who are your target audience for that specific thing. If you want to learn more about churn, talk to people who have recently left your product. If you want to learn about new customers, talk to people who have recently signed up for your product.
1. Learn more about your buyer’s journey
To learn more about your customer’s buying journey, Katelyn recommends conducting “switch interviews.” These have their roots in the jobs-to-be-done framework, which asserts that all customers are looking to complete a specific job, and they hire your product to do that job.
You do switch interviews with customers who have recently made the switch to your product from another solution. That could be a competitive offering or a hacked together workflow they built on their own. The important thing is that they recently experienced a push to leave their old solution and a pull to convert to yours. In the switch interview, you’ll ask them about that push and pull relationship. Keep in mind that no matter how strong your pull is, they’ll need that original push to actually start looking for a new solution in the first place.
In the switch interview, your objectives are to…
- Learn about the solution they were using before, and what pushed them to look for a new one
- Learn about how they researched new solutions (Did they Google it? Did a friend recommend something? Did they read something somewhere?)
- Learn about their anxieties around making the switch from their old solution to your new one (Did they have to change programs? Did it require additional training? Were those things a big part of their decision to make a switch?)
Once you’ve completed your switch interviews, you can make better marketing decisions for campaigns in each stage of the buyer’s journey. Depending on what you learned, this could be anything from deciding where to allocate resources for promotion to changing your messaging around a certain feature. If you learned that most of the customers who recently switched heard about your product through a blog post, you may choose to ramp up your organic content outreach. You could also learn about a big pain point, like the difficulty to import data from their old solution to your product, and promote workarounds or potentially work that feature into your product roadmap.
2. Improve retention
You shouldn’t only be talking to people who had a great experience with your product. To improve retention, you’ll also need to talk to people who have recently churned from your product. Acquiring new customers is 5-25x more expensive than keeping the ones you already have, so having a plan to keep current customers engaged and happy is pretty important.
Finding recently churned customers can be a struggle, but genuine outreach efforts and a little bit of an incentive can go a long way. It may be tempting to go into these interviews with the idea that you could win this customer back. While that’s possible, you’ll learn the most if approach these interviews with learning from your customers as the main goal.
In churn interviews, your objectives are to…
- Learn about the emotions that led them to leave your product. (Were they frustrated with the way it worked? Or maybe they were just drawn to a solution that worked better for them?)
- Learn about any friction they experienced while using your product.
- Learn about what they’re using to solve that problem now
Once you’ve learned a bit more about the emotions that make your customers leave your product, you can take steps to improve the experience of the customers who are still actively engaged. If your customers are feeling disconnected from your brand, you can look into creating great content and email campaigns that humanize you a little bit. If they don’t feel like they had access to the support they needed to use your product best, make sure existing customers know how to get in touch with your support team.
3. Write better copy
According to a study by Braze and Forrester, 57% of customers say that human connection would increase their brand loyalty. The easiest way to communicate that you, a real live human being, are behind your brand’s messaging is to write better and more human copy. Copy that lets your customers know that you get them.
When Katelyn’s doing research, she keeps a swipe file of all the best little moments from her interviews. You know, those moments when a customer says something better than you ever could have? Keeping and cataloging all of those little moments can help you build a brand voice that’s more real, and most importantly, more human.
Katelyn's swipe file lives in the form of an Airtable base with a form view. She created a shortcut to the form on her desktop and on her phone, so she can access it in seconds.
4. Create better marketing personas
Personas are a mainstay of many marketing practices. It’s important to know who you’re talking to and why they might buy your product.
In many cases, marketing personas are very focused on demographic information. I don’t buy Rothy’s flats because I’m a 25 year old female, I buy them because I’m sick and tired of worrying about my flats stinking and I like the fact that they’re washable. Your customers will also have specific motivations behind their purchasing decisions, so building out personas based solely on demographic information won’t get you very far.
Katelyn loves the Jobs to be Done framework for thinking about personas. What are they trying to accomplish? Where does your product fit into that? What is the emotional payoff behind your product?
When building out personas, qualitative research can help you learn more about what your user wants to accomplish with your product and how they feel about that outcome. They don’t care that your product has titanium hardware, they care that they’re getting a smoother ride on their skateboard.
Take your marketing to the next level
Qualitative research isn’t just a one and done activity. In order for it to have a real effect on the way your team does marketing, you’ll need to keep talking to customers. For switch and churn interviews, you can set them up on an ongoing basis to learn about why customers choose your product and why they leave it. These ongoing interviews will help you write better copy and construct better personas, though you can always do more research to make things even better.
If you want to take it a step further, you can set up quarterly or biannual retros to check your progress, In Katelyn’s workshops, she starts off by asking teams to outline all of their upcoming efforts. To put an effort on the board, teams list the value the effort brings to the customer and how many customers will be affected. In many cases, marketing teams have a value in mind, but can’t attach a number of affected customers to a given effort. Mapping things out this way makes it easier to see who you’re doing your marketing for: your internal team or your customers. You may want to start your qualitative research efforts by doing this activity, then keeping it up to make sure your entire team stays customer centric as you grow and scale.
Resources
- Seth Godin's book, This is Marketing
- Profitwell's study on building from customer feedback (most companies talk to less than 10 customers a month 😱)
- A quick overview of Jobs-to-be-Done by Harvard Business Review
- Want more JTBD? Check out this Medium publication
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