How to study your customers

What makes a market research insightful are the data gathered. Sure nowadays, it seems almost miraculous to be successful in this competitive era. But, rest assured that with a clear understanding of your customers, after studying patterns, you will be able to create wonderful product that find wonderful clients.

“Happy customers are your biggest advocates and can become your most successful sales team.”

— Lisa Masiello

Whatever type of business you are doing; as a entrepreneur, you are building an organization which solve a specific problem. Which means you are developing solutions for stack holders, and you are going to support fort he shareholders only if you can provide proof that you are creating something useful. Market research studies are here to help you impede the effect of issues related with risk of not serving the right customers, being blocked by competitors or even the state regulation or social norme. In other words, to know if and how to invest, you should do market research.

Get to know your customers

Your customers should be at the center of your decision, so you need to involve them in the research. The easy path is to get your customers to perform actions with a prototype. their feedback is going to help you get useful information.

6 ways to study your customers

Data analyst

You can use research, reports related to the market insights. The main issue with this method is that sometimes it can be near to impossible to find up to date data. By making use of the information available online and offline, you will be able to gain customer insights. Where can you find the required data? social media analytics, customer relationship management, website analytics, google keywords; whatever you use, do not forget that those data should be used to identify patterns.

Journalist

you can conduct interviews to gain insights on your customers. But unfortunately sometimes the customers either don't know what they want or be biased when answering. As a good journalist, you should pay attention to your research process as following:

1. create a customer profile

2. create an interview outline

3. conduct the interview

4. map out the jobs, pains and gains you learned about

5. search for patterns

6. review the interview

Anthropologist

the key skill here is observation because you are going to see how your potential customers are behaving, which type of solutions they are looking for, the problems they are running away from. It can take a while before you get sufficient data.

Here you are going to deep into your potential customers' worlds to gain insights about their jobs, pains, and gains. Ok, so what should you do ? Observe shopping behavior to detect patterns, Participe in the daily routines of your potential customers; feel free to be creative and immerse yourself in your targets' life.

Spy

This time you are going to put yourself into your customers shoes. Try to experience what your competitors are offering. This way you are going to have some insights about the market. However, this time the biases is related to how you yourself compare to your customers.

Opensource

This is usually done by software developers. It is interesting because this process allow your customers to co-create. By integrating you customers into the process of value creation, you are going to easily develop new ideas. The con of this method is that your product could become so narrow that you end up serving only a niche.

Scientist

You can create a participative experiment related to clear hypothesis. At the end of the said experiment, measure the outcome, it is going to give you fact-based insights. The minus of this technique is that it can be costly to implement. As a true scientist, use experiments to test :

Interest

Make sure that your products create enough interests for you customers to perform actions that go beyond lip service.

Preferences

here your aim is to get evidence that indicate which feature is important for your customers.

Willingness to pay

You want to sell your products so, having enough data which states that your customers will pay for your solution should be a key-point of your strategies.

How to recognize potential customers ?

As an entrepreneur, you want to make sure there are people who are going to pay for your products. As of now this seems useless until you face a "bad client"; the type of clients who almost make you hate your business. Then, how do you differentiate them from your true customers?

There's no given radar, but you can make sure with the following stages:

1. They have have a need

2. They understand that they have a problem

3. They are searching for a solution

4. The problem is so important that they started using an interim solution

5. The customer has committed or can quickly acquire a budget to purchase a solution

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Credit Source: The lean start-up Osterwalder, Alexander. Value Proposition Design

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