AMA: Indeed Director of Product Marketing, Sherrie Nguyen on Customer Research

Great question! You actually squeezed 3 topics in here, which are all inter-related and important to buyer journey maps. In my experience, I start with segmenting my audience (total addressable market by country, company, vertical/industry, etc), identifying personas within my target audience (buyer/user), mapping the journeys for each persona, and then testing which content formats/channels work best. This means if I'm selling to Enterprises vs. mid-sized companies, IT vs. Finance buyers, I sho ...Read More

I first start with really solid positioning, which should clearly identify how your offering is differentiated from other competitors in the market and lean into that. Second, I listen and shadow sales to see how often/why competitors come up in conversation. Then I can create appropriate messaging. Depending on your position in the market and how competitive the space is, you may go head to head in a more visible brand campaign, or if you're a category leader, you may keep an eye out and handle ...Read More

You can make the case on paper, but you can also spin up an MVP to affirm the value of a VOC program. 1. In my previous experience, I gained buy-in by outlining all the ways programs like this can drive product feedback, referral of new customers, retention of current customers, and upsell/cross-sell of products. 2. We ran an MVP at our yearly summit by inviting top spending/high potential customers to do a roundtable with our execs and heads of product. We learned what's top of mind in their wo ...Read More

This is a great approach. It's best if you get as specific as possible to identify prospects (ie. country, company size, verticle/industry, job title) and get clear on where you want to focus.  I shared in another answer that we partnered with a leading thought leader for a specific vertical (retail) and conducted a survey with their audience, who was our target person (retail execs). We used the survey results to share industry trends and insights and used this asset for lead generation, which ...Read More

I love this question. I've done this in a really scrappy way at a start-up and then approached this with significant budgets at a larger company. The scrappy way was to identify a couple leads, reach out with a request to learn from them to influence your product roadmap, and bring them swag. This worked well for store managers, and I literally walked the mall and bought people coffee at the starbucks for my interviews. For a much higher level executive who can be harder to reach and medium budg ...Read More

At Indeed, we segment employers by small, mid-sized, and enterprise, and we also look at specific industries/verticals that make up a bulk of our users. We also do this for job seekers, so it's a very B2B2C approach. For launch, we should identify which persona we're targeting before we even build, so that our research along the way informs the approach to meet this persona's needs. We refresh our personas yearly but will use current customer data to understand adoption, spend, retention monthly ...Read More

I work with market researchers to understand higher level problems, use cases, personas, customer journeys, brand consideration, preference, trust, etc. for my company and product as a whole. Buyers/users don't need to have actually used our product but should be a target persona or have a use case/problem relevant to our product. I work with UX research to understand specific user feedback of the product itself (whether it's a prototype of a new product/feature or observing them click through t ...Read More

As a leader for Indeed's Parents and Caregivers Inclusion Resource Group, I have to talk about this topic! There are a couple ways to approach this.  1. Add self-identifying optional fields so you get a better picture of your audience's demographics. This can be useful for a survey and can be anonymized through graphs and charts that slice data by race, gender, veteran status, etc. 2. For more personal qualitative research such as focus groups, 1:1 interviews, etc. you may have to create specifi ...Read More