The value of qualitative research in B2B marketing

Understanding your customers is the foundation of all successful marketing strategies. It goes beyond traditional tactics, focusing on comprehending customer needs, behaviors, and pain points.

This deep understanding is crucial for creating effective and impactful marketing strategies. It is by deep customer understanding that tech giants like Amazon, Apple and Tesla have been able to cement their position as market leaders.

Importance of customer understanding

To truly connect with your audience, it's essential to know what drives them. You need to start by understanding them. Here’s where you can start:

• Identifying needs: Knowing what problems your customers face and how your product can solve them.
• Behavior analysis: Observing how customers interact with your product and the journey they take.
• Pain points: Recognizing the challenges and frustrations your customers experience.

Now, how do you get this information?

How to execute qualitative research

Qualitative research delves into the "why" behind customer behaviors, uncovering motivations, challenges, and desires. Here’s how you execute it effectively:

• In-depth interviews: Engage with customers in detailed conversations to explore their thoughts and feelings about your products or services. In fact, each time we start a new client we host several interviews with their customers so we know exactly how to go to market. Learn more about customer interviews here.
• Focus groups: Depending on your industry and your relationship with customers, you could organize small groups of customers to discuss specific topics and gain diverse perspectives.
• Ethnographic studies: If and where possible, try to observe customers in their natural environments to understand how they use your product. Alternatively, you could also ask them in an interview or focus group – but this isn’t something you could fully understand by guessing yourself or from them filling out a survey.
• Open-ended surveys: When appropriate, you can use surveys with open-ended questions to allow customers to express their opinions freely. Remember, this doesn’t work for everything.
• Customer journey mapping: If you don’t already, be sure to create detailed maps of the customer journey to identify key touch-points and areas for improvement.

When conducting interviews, focus groups and surveys it is important to be able to ask both what they like about your product, as well as what they actively dislike and would like to change. This allows you to create feedback loops, gain trust, and also improve your product or service.

Oftentimes we see companies correctly identify their loyal customers, but are misguided on their interpretation of why they like their product. It’s always best to ask questions and get a full understanding.

Enroll customer success to help understand your customers

Customer success teams should be interacting with customers regularly and can provide valuable insights into their needs and challenges. Here’s how you can involve them more with your marketing efforts:

• Regular meetings: Hold regular meetings between customer success and marketing teams to share insights and feedback.
• Customer feedback: Use customer success teams to gather and analyze customer feedback. Ideally task your head of CS to deliver metric driven reports to the organization as well as qualitative reports.
• Success metrics: Track metrics that indicate customer satisfaction and success, and use these insights to guide marketing strategies such as NPS scores.
• Customer stories: Collaborate with customer success teams to collect stories and testimonials that can be used in marketing collateral.
• Problem-solving sessions: Involve customer success teams in brainstorming sessions to address common customer issues. Customer success should be actively engaged in sales and marketing brainstorming sessions.

Check out our blog: What are the benefits of a revenue call for integrated sales and marketing teams?

Tactics for feedback loops

In order for marketing to be successful, you must have continuous feedback loops for gathering ongoing customer insights so you can evolve your strategies. In addition to keeping up with the above (interviews, integrating customer success etc.), here are some other things you can do to make sure you’re keeping up with and understanding your customer base:

• Surveys and polls: Regularly distribute surveys and polls to gather customer feedback on various aspects of your product or service.
• Online communities: Foster online communities where customers can share their thoughts and interact with your team.
• Customer advisory boards: Create advisory boards consisting of key customers who provide ongoing feedback and insights. Advisory boards can both help you understand your customers better, and also open doors to new professional relationships for your business.
• Product reviews: Encourage customers to leave reviews and regularly analyze this feedback to identify areas for improvement.
• Virtual and in-person events: Hosting a virtual event, or scheduling time with clients around large industry events are fantastic opportunities to get more FaceTime with your clients and get to know them better.

Marketing benefits from qualitative research

Qualitative research provides valuable insights that can be used to create effective marketing collateral. By understanding your customers, you can develop materials that resonate with them, for example:

• Case studies: Use real customer stories to showcase how your product solves problems. Happy customers are usually happy and product to help your brand grow with them!
• Testimonials: Gather and share positive feedback from satisfied customers. There is nothing more powerful than actual verbatim quotes from interviews to create both great video testimonials and ad copy.
• Whitepapers: Provide in-depth analyses on topics relevant to your customers’ needs.
• Blogs and articles: Write content that speaks directly to customer challenges and offers valuable insights. I like to center our content calendar around questions that clients ask us during interviews.

In addition to marketing, your company can also find benefits on the following areas:

• Sales: Your customer interviews can turn into testimonials, which are great conversion materials that will help your sales team close prospects faster. Additionally, these interviews may help your company build reports with new data, or identify new pain points that can sometimes evolve or overhaul your pitch entirely.
  Product: This increased rapport with your clients will help you identify high value features and help you shape your roadmap at an accelerated pace.

Qualitative research can transform marketing for your business

Qualitative research is a powerful tool for understanding your customers deeply. By prioritizing customer insights and leveraging qualitative research methods, you can create more targeted and effective marketing strategies.

Involving customer success teams and establishing continuous feedback loops further enhances your understanding, allowing you to stay connected with your customers’ needs and challenges. This deep commitment to customer understanding transforms marketing from a tactical function to a strategic driver of business growth.

Need help with qualitative research or marketing? Reach out to us!