Chapter 01
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Unfortunately, marketing research is often one of the first things on the chopping block when budget concerns crop up. Why? Marketing research requires a heavy investment of time—and money. You need the right technology and tools, human resources, and plenty of time to do your research right.
But doing it right doesn’t have to feel like an overwhelming and costly chore. And in truth, if you don’t know who you’re selling to and why, then you’re basically just throwing money into an echo chamber anyway.
We’re here to help you do your marketing research right the first time, every time, with our tried-and-tested five-step approach.
To kick off the marketing research process, you need to define what your problem actually is, lest you dive into research and analysis blindly and never solve a problem at all.
Start by speaking with your sales and marketing teams to pinpoint the major problem areas that need to be investigated and addressed.
Your marketing research will likely answer one or several of these common questions:
Part of ensuring you have your problem properly defined is asking questions about your buyer personas, or the semi-fictional figures representing your ideal customer. Be sure to consider as many variables and possibilities as you can based on the quantitative and qualitative information, as well as persona interviews.
Some of the questions you might consider asking about your ideal buyers include:
Once you’ve zeroed in on the marketing research problem question you need to answer, consider all of the things you can do once you solve that problem! For example, knowing your key demographics will give you insight into the type of generation-specific or regional language to use in your marketing materials. Although it might seem insignificant, your customers will consider you out of touch if you’re using the wrong regional term for a sub sandwich or are using language that resonates with a baby boomer instead of your millennial target.
Additionally, with the research you’re about to do, you’ll not only solve a real problem, but you’ll be able to come up with content marketing ideas based on real, actionable data. Yes, you’ll be able to create content that prospects want and need, rather than what you think they want and need.
With marketing research data and analysis, you’ll also be able to pivot your marketing efforts to the buyer persona who is actually converting at record speed, rather than the one you think should be converting quickly. Some other things you can do with marketing research data in hand include:
Before you dive headfirst into research (and chase after all of its benefits), take the time to develop a research plan.
Figuring out the primary problem you’re trying to solve is only half of the marketing research process battle. To make the best use of your time, money, and resources and uncover potential solutions and marketing opportunities, you need to have a systematic and organized approach to researching the problem.
We recommend taking a three-pronged approach to your research plan, using interviews, surveys, landing page tests, and secondary data. Let’s take a look at each and why they’re uniquely valuable.
Conducting one-on-one interviews—whether in person or on the phone—with your prospects and current customers is the best, most transparent way to gain insight into who your buyer personas are. By asking in-depth questions that build upon each other, you can learn your buyers’ needs, desires, challenges, problems, and so much more.
Start by talking to your sales team, which will be able to help identify customers or prospects deep in the buying process who match each of your target personas. Then, reach out to those customers and let them know you’re trying to get feedback on a specific topic (i.e., your marketing research problem). More often than not, customers are happy to give feedback, especially if they’re loyal to your organization.
If you’re worried about interviewees not wanting to take time out of their busy days to speak with you, consider offering some type of compensation in the form of a gift card, swag, or a discount on their next monthly service fee or product purchase. Just remember that compensation can sometimes sway an interviewee’s opinion, whether they intend it to happen or not.
Also consider focus groups which, if you have the budget, can be a powerful way to see how a group responds to your marketing research problem. For example, if you’re launching a new product or service, a focus group might be a good platform for seeing how a group comprised of your target personas engage with the product in a group setting.
Surveys are one of the most popular and commonly used ways for businesses to get feedback from customers about their products or services. Surveys can uncover strategy gaps and help identify potential areas of need before problems arise.
For example, sending out a two- to three-question survey with an additional comments option at the end about a customer’s checkout experience could uncover accessibility and usability issues on your product pages that you hadn’t even considered.
Whether you go with a simple survey through Google Forms or want to send out a survey with more bells, whistles, metrics, and other options through Typeform or SurveyMonkey, remember that your customers and prospects are inundated with hundreds of emails every single day. You need to make sure your outreach actually gets to them by being creative with your subject lines and keeping your survey short and sweet.
Also, consider including an incentive, such as a discount code or other offer, to entice them to take the time to fill out the survey, and use personalization tokens. According to research by Accenture, 75 percent of customers are more likely to spend money on brands that greet them by name and remember details about who they are and what they need, so get personal! Here are some survey subject line ideas:
One of the easiest, most cost-effective ways to gather a lot of data is through A/B testing, also known as split testing. This method compares two variables to determine which one is best received by your contacts or site visitors, depending on whether you do A/B testing on emails, landing pages, or something else entirely.
A/B testing lets you learn about your target audience’s behaviors so you can refine your messaging, bring in more traffic, and convert more leads—and the benefits don’t stop there. With A/B testing, you can:
To get started, keep your plan simple. Choose a page or email you want to test, and then determine which element or variable you want to test, such as:
Whether you’re using HubSpot, Marketo, or another platform, A/B testing is a powerful way to get hard numbers on how people are engaging with your content and where they are in the Buyer’s Journey.
By leveraging HubSpot’s A/B testing capabilities and campaign tool, you can quickly review your contacts’ timelines to answer some vital marketing research questions, including:
Marketo provides a similar look at what your customers are doing through its A/B testing functionality and Landing Page/Email Performance Report in the activity log (what HubSpot calls the contact timeline). Marketo gives you deep insight into landing page interactions, including:
Now that you’ve decided what your marketing research plan will look like, it’s time to put your plan into action and start gathering the qualitative and quantitative data you need to zero in on the solution to your marketing research problem.
For example, if you run an A/B test on your website to see if a new pricing tier would bring in more business, you’d also want to interview several customers about whether the new pricing tier would appeal to them and why or why not. Yes, the “why” is something you can’t get from quantitative data, but sometimes the “why” is the linchpin to solving your biggest marketing problems. It’s not enough to know that someone took a specific action (or didn’t), you need to know why.
To get the right qualitative data and find the underlying “why”, you must ask the right questions. Keep your questions unbiased and direct—and never suggest a particular answer.
For example, instead of saying, “You think we should add in a higher pricing tier with additional services, right?” consider framing the question like this: “How would you feel if we added a higher-priced tear with additional services?” The first question leaves the interviewee with a simple yes or no option, while leading them to answer with a “yes”, whereas the second version of the question allows them to express their feelings openly.
But don’t make all of your questions open-ended, lest your interviewees feel overwhelmed. Ask both open-ended questions and closed, yes-or-no questions, plus multiple-choice questions to get a depth of answers.
Helping your buyer personas move through the Buyer’s Journey more efficiently is one of the major goals of solving any marketing research problem, which is why collecting data on your personas is vital to your process.
In addition to surveying and interviewing your actual customers, which we discussed earlier, consider interviewing your sales team, because they’re most intimately involved with the leads who convert into customers. They know your customers inside and out and can pinpoint specifics about your personas that the marketing team may be in the dark about. Some questions to ask include:
Some additional passive techniques you can use to gain even more information on your marketing research problem include:
With all of the qualitative data you’ll have in hand, we don’t want you to forget about the quantitative data! The hard numbers matter and can support your qualitative data in big ways.
Be sure to pull data on the following:
When pulling data on the health of your database, look for the following metrics:
Now that you have data flowing in, it’s time to analyze and report on what you’ve found.
Marketing Research Pro Tip:Lest you get stuck focusing on specific metrics or assumed patterns, we present the first rule of the marketing research process: Always focus on the trends and patterns actually present in the data and research.
It’s easy to get caught up in the wrong things when you’re looking at raw data, which is why we recommend analyzing and reporting on your research findings in dynamic, visual ways with HubSpot, Marketo, and Databox.
With HubSpot, you can view data graphically in dynamic charts and examine reports quickly and easily on a dashboard interface. If you need the raw data, it’s there, but HubSpot’s interface makes it easy to see persona trends, conversion rates, and source reports.
If you’re asking yourself which persona buckets most of your clients fall into or how long it took for a contact to convert into a customer or which of your personas are of higher value, HubSpot can help you unveil some powerful reports.
For example, you might be creating tons of content and running campaigns to reach Practical Pete, but the data may actually point to Living Dangerously Dave as the bucket that most of your customers fit into. You might be pouring ad spend into reaching SaaS Manager Steve because you think he’s converting quickly, but your marketing research may actually show that CTO CeeCee is not only converting at breakneck speed but is also a higher value customer.
Additionally, with HubSpot reporting, you can take a deep dive into conversion rates and traffic sources to benchmark how customers transition from contacts to leads to MQLs to SQLs and, eventually, to customers. Having a view into these insights is important for understanding how your customers are flowing through the buying process so you can modify the process to better serve future customers and delight your current customers. Knowing where your customers are coming from also means you can direct your ad spend in the most effective direction to maximize your ROI.
Like HubSpot, Marketo can help you turn data into deep understanding and insight with its Revenue Cycle Explorer/Revenue Cycle Analyzer (RCE/RCA) tool, which lets you pull opportunity reports, email metrics reports, and much more, including:
The goal of digging into all of these marketing reports, of course, is to understand how your personas are engaging with your content so you can provide them with more intentional and conversion-driven opportunities.
Instead of pulling and crunching numbers from dozens of different sources, Databox is your one-stop shop for data analysis across multiple sources. For example, if you want to pinpoint the overall cost per acquisition across all of your paid marketing campaigns, you should pull in sources of spend into your Databox dashboard, such as:
Then, you can compare that total spend against the number of closed customers to find your total cost per acquisition. What may have taken hours to compile across dozens of apps or sources—or even departments—happens in seconds on Databox’s visual, dynamic dashboard.
With all of the data you’ve collected in tow, it’s time to present your findings. It’s important to assess your original hypothesis, what the data and facts actually said about your hypothesis, and what you can do to either pivot or take advantage of an opportunity.
Start developing data-driven campaigns that leverage your findings, focusing on a few goals at a time so you can see how what you’ve learned can positively impact your marketing efforts. Additionally, build out your content library with the blog articles, e-books, white papers, case studies, and other types of content that your buyer personas need at each stage of the Buyer’s Journey. When you have the right content, you can reach the right audiences at the right time and accelerate your lead flow and boost revenue, not to mention create a powerful environment for sales enablement.
Also, don’t stop the moment you’re done researching a single marketing problem—you need to continuously analyze the data and make optimizations to keep up with your target buyers. Marketing research should be something you’re always doing in order to refine your marketing strategies to cater to your customers and what they need from you.
Whether you need help getting your marketing research process off the ground or aren’t sure which areas of your marketing efforts to tackle first, we have the expertise and the passion to help you tackle your biggest research problems. Let’s talk.
The 5 Step Marketing Research ProcessDownload this guide and our bonus persona template.
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