AMA: MetaRouter Director of Product Marketing, Michele Nieberding 🚀 on Market Research

Whether in-house or with a consultant, the goal remains the same: to deeply understand your market and customers, and to leverage this understanding to make informed, strategic decisions. Deciding when to conduct research in-house versus bringing in a consultant is a critical choice that can impact the quality, depth, and utility of the insights gathered. Here's my perspective on navigating this decision: In-House: Leveraging Internal Expertise Deep Product Knowledge: Your in-house team has an i ...Read More

Ah, the classic “feedback scavenger hunt”! We’ve all been there, trying to piece together customer insights from a labyrinth of surveys, spreadsheets, and snippets in Slack (though I do believe Slack can be used strategically). Keep in mind, all feedback is good feedback. It's better to have MORE than less! Of course, the goal is to turn that feedback chaos into a streamlined, insightful narrative. Here’s some best practices I would recommend to collect, analyze, and share customer feedback like ...Read More

I have a love/hate relationship with personas and their effectiveness/impact in an org. But that's for another day..Here are my tips and tricks for developing personas that your teams will actually use! Categorize by Source and Theme: Organize your data by source (e.g., customer reviews, interviews, internal feedback) and by themes or topics (e.g., pain points, motivations, behaviors). This categorization helps in identifying patterns and trends across different data sources. Extract Key Insight ...Read More

I hate to say it, but it depends. Techniques like scoring each question based on its potential impact and feasibility can help you allocate research resources effectively. Here are some ways I like to think about prioritization: High-Impact Areas: Prioritize questions that address high-impact areas – those that directly influence key performance indicators (KPIs) like customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and market share. For example, understanding "What are the primary reasons customers cho ...Read More

Oh boy, this is like opening Pandora's box for me! Some other challenges I've faced, and why at previous companies we chose to work with Clozd (assuming you have the budget for it!):Internal Bias and Politics: Sales reps might downplay their role in lost deals (or WHY they lost. For example, "cost/price" is often not the real reason for losing a deal), or paint an overly rosy picture of successful ones. This internal bias can skew the data and make it difficult to extract objective insights. An ...Read More

Market research shouldn't be about throwing money at surveys or analysts (which can be easy to do!). It's about acquiring strategic insights that inform key decisions. Learn from my mistakes! I've broken them down into some DO's and DONT's: DO's DO align with a broader (exec level) company goal. This helps you get more budget approved faster, but also helps prove the value of your market research project -- which can be hard in Product Marketing! DO define clear objectives and outline the scope: ...Read More

I work at a 30-person startup right now (aka limited budget, and I'm the only product marketer AND part of a 2-person marketing team) so I totally feel you there. Here are some "tips and tricks" I've found to be really helpful that are low effort but high impact, and of course no budget required! Leverage Free Tools: Tools like Google Alerts, Social Mention, and Feedly allow you to track mentions of competitors, industry trends, and relevant keywords. Set up alerts for key terms related to your ...Read More