Customer Research without Interviews
When people hear the words "customer research" they typically think of interviews, focus groups, and surveys.
These methods involve collecting data directly from your audience.
Indirect methods such as getting data from public sources, commercial sources, internal sources, and using inference are often ignored even though they can provide a wealth of data.
You build the deepest customer insights by combining your direct and indirect research.
Public Data
Public data is data your audience has released publicly and can include:
What your audience is saying in communities
- Press reports
- Marketing campaigns and materials
- Information posted on social and community profiles
- Your audience’s comments in communities and forums deserve special note for how rich the information can be.
Commercial Data
Commercial data comes from businesses that sell it, though they often release data and reports for free to market their paid products.
- Data brokers
- Third-party surveys and reports from company, media, and independent sources
Internal Data
Internal data comes from within your business. You can find a number of great sources internally, especially with your coworkers who talk to customers regularly.
- Ask customer-facing roles like sales, customer success, and customer support about your customers
- Customer app profiles in your product
- Marketing collection from content download forms
- Data from offline and online events
Inference Data
Inference data is data you can extrapolate from the data you already have.
- Analyzing data
- Using IP for location data
- Determine business model by pricing model
- Content subjects from job responsibilities
This is a lesson from Better Marketing Decisions, a weekly email series where I explain in 250 words or less the key marketing principles I used to grow startups like Heap Analytics and Periscope Data .
