AMA: Narvar Head Of Product Marketing, Jeffrey Vocell on Competitive Market Research

There are a lot of great research tools on the market - QuestionPro, Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, and more that will all ultimately help get quantitative data you need. Whichever you select, make sure to align with other teams cross-functionally on the tools you are evaluating and what has been used in the past. It's possible that another team already has a survey solution you can use without having to purchase any new tool.  For qualitative research since it's so varied and tends to be longer-form ...Read More

I've found a few of the top methods for conducting competitive research: Competitive Content - Starting with your key competitors and understanding how they're positioning themselves, what content they are creating and releasing is a great starting point. Based on your product expertise (of your own product), this should give you some high-level insight into key differentiators. You can also infer a lot between what they share versus what they don't (for example, is their technical documentation ...Read More

Great question! Voice of Customer programs are incredibly important to keeping a pulse on your customer base, and ensuring your product/service is meeting the needs of customers. Gaining buy-in can be a challenge, but I'd recommend a few things: Set the vision for your VOC program. Ideally this can mean a few objectives to focus on initially, and some medium-to-long-term objectives to expand to once you see initial success.  Tie VOC objectives to core business goals and objectives. Great VOC pro ...Read More

With a lot of inputs, organizing key attributes or commonalities of each persona is important. There are plenty of templates and tools available on the market (and many free) -- but I've always used a spreadsheet to consolidate and synthesize data, and then a slide for the persona. I'll breakdown some details of what's in each below. Synthesizing persona data: Ideally you should have multiple tabs, or columns with data including... Demographic data (age, generder, location, income, etc) Psychogr ...Read More

A few tips to get to the right decision makers: Look in your own database and reach out! Existing customers, as long as they're happy with you, are generally low-hanging fruit and fairly easy to reach. Look on LinkedIn for people who fit your ideal persona/customer, and reach out. Response rates are generally low, but the better your copy and CTA the more likelihood you get a good response. Use a research audience tool like SurveyMonkey, QuestionPro or others to target a specific audience beyond ...Read More

I don't think it's a question of industry reports VS in-house research, It's "And" and looking at both to get the full picture. Oftentimes big publications, or analysts will run industry reports which can be great for broad market understanding and numbers but in-house research can help fill-in specific details. If you have a subscription with an analyst firm, I'd recommend checking out the research they offer for broad market understanding. Also, if you regularly connect with specific analysts ...Read More

I think being aware of and ideally staying ahead of trends that change the way you work, or impact your buyers is important. But some trends are short-term and don't change much at all. Seeing the difference and not chasing after every trend will be important to the outcome of your research efforts. Rather than doing specfiic research on every single trend, I think it's important to continue to do research on how your audiences work and how that evolves and looking at how this information evolve ...Read More

Prioritizing buyer vs user research I think ties into broader business goals. Do you need to power acquisition efforts and broader brand teams? Then I'd prioritize buyer research. On the other hand, if you have an acquisition machine that is generating plenty of sales but retention could be improved, then I think looking at user research needs to be prioritized in this case. As with almost anything the answer is a bit grey, because there are plenty of examples where both types of research can he ...Read More

There are a lot of great ways to drive participation, some more scalable (but generally lower response rates) and some more high-touch. Here are a few ways you can think about driving participation: Customer Advisory Board (CAB): This is one of the easiest ways, and channel that generally has the highest participation. If you have a CAB, then you should be meeting every ~3-5 months and can use an upcoming meeting to ask for participation or share a specific message to them to ask for their feedb ...Read More

First, I think you need to start at a broader level and look at the overall company and product priorities. If you have a yearly roadmap, marketing themes, then it should inform the types of research you are doing. After that, I think you can break down your research a bit more granularly... Does this research tie to a theme, or major product launch/priority for the business this year?             If not, then pause and consider whether you should be investing in the research. To be clear, there ...Read More