AMA: Momentive Director of Product Marketing, Global Insights Solutions, Morgan Molnar on Market Research

We just went through this exercise at Momentive, focusing specifically on building buyer persona "packs" – a collection of materials to help our broader organization understand our target personas. Depending on your project timeline, you'll likely want to conduct a blend of primary and secondary research as well as both quantitative and qualitative research. Quantitative research (industry reports, surveys, etc) can provide great stats, but qualitative research (interviews, recorded calls) is wh ...Read More

There are many ways you could segment your market for your marketing and sales motions: from industries to personas to company size to geographies (and for B2C companies, major demographics like age, gender, etc come into play). The questions you need to ask are "Do these groups of customers have fundamentally different needs for our product?" and "Would we acquire these groups of customers in different ways?". Wherever the differences are greatest, you'll want to start there. Another key consid ...Read More

Hah! You kinda answered your own question here. Create competitive intel that is easy to read and applicable to how Sales will use it! Sales doesn't want a novel about each competitor. They want high-level bullets that help them understand how to put their own company in context of that competitor if it comes up with a prospect.  And most likely, competitors come up in sales conversations when a buyer is evaluating multiple options or if you're trying to replace an incumbent. Consider including ...Read More

All the time! Again, I'm lucky to be a product marketing leader working on a market research product, so I have unlimited access to our own message testing solutions. We approach quatitative message testing a couple different ways: - Our live marketing assets provide a great testing ground for messaging: you can A/B test things like ad copy and email subject lines and copy. Click-through rates can be a great indicator of what resonates. (Keep the visuals the same so you know results are only rel ...Read More

Organizations will typically have the most behavioral data on their own customers and visitors. They know what customers are doing (and not doing) on their platform... where they drop off in a conversion funnel, what they click on, how frequently they log in, the product/feature mix they have used/purchased. This wealth of information can inform where to focus on if conversion/renewal/repeat/expansion within your own customer base is the goal. In some cases, for example if you're experiementing ...Read More

When you have no budget: If you already have a survey platform in place, conducting interviews and surveys of your own lists (customer & prospect databases) is free! You just need a way to recruit them. For interviews or smaller sample sizes, you may want to go directly through your customer success team who has relationships with your customers. For larger sample sizes, you may want to send a few emails to invite people to take your survey.  When you have a small budget: You may not be able ...Read More

There are several departments who currently share "ownership" of competitive intelligence at Momentive, but we have plans to hire someone dedicated to this in the PMM org. Some of the top sources, tools, and vendors we use for competitive intelligence are: - Crayon.co for our comprehensive competitive intel database/repository & news feeds for specific top competitors - Clozd.com for Win/Loss and competitive intel related to specific deals we've lost to competitors (and also where we've beat ...Read More

Here is where market research can and should fit into the GTM life cycle: Exploration / business case justification: Market sizing; TAM analysis Market trends analysis Usage & Attitudes study (incl identifying use cases) Competitive intelligence Product development: Shopper insights Persona development Idea screening Feature prioritization Concept testing UX research Price optimization Launch / introduction: Package testing Name testing Message testing Campaign creative testing Adoption &amp ...Read More

Qualitative research is purely a category of research methods, and can be used for a variety of business needs / research goals. Qualitative "qual" research methods are can include observation, ethnography, 1:1 interviews, focus groups, and more. Qual research typically deals with unstructured data like behaviors, audio, text, imagery, videos, etc unlike quantitative research that deals with measureable quantities (i.e. statistics; numbers) like survey data, transactional data, etc. UX research ...Read More