AMA: Upwork Director, Product and Solution Marketing, Maria Jiang on Market Research

For opening up new markets, the first upfront research would be market sizing! Before you even build an execution plan to go after a new market, you first need to figure out if there is a market opportunity worth pursuing and understand market potential. This will ensure that you're setting up the right revenue goals for the business and entering the right market. There are a number of ways to calculate total addressable market, but the easiest and most accurate way is a bottoms-up analysis where you find the total number of potential customers/users and multiply that number by price. Yes, you will have to make assumptions and find proxy variables. For example, you might look at competitor pricing. Only after market sizing will you then do further research to decide who you want to target and how you're going to reach them and engage them.

I recommend starting out with the end result and working backwards from there. In other words, create the buyer persona template and then start synthesizing your data / insights into those buckets of data. For buyer personas, I like to keep it simple and break it into the following key questions: 1) What are your responsibilities? 2) What are your biggest challenges? 3) Who are your main stakeholders? 4) How is your success defined/measured? 5) How do you learn about new technologies?

When I was working at startups, I have done really scrappy qualitative research by reaching out to people directly on LinkedIn and simply asking for their time. You would be surprised at how many people are willing to help and share their expertise (even better if you can offer a small monetary incentive or a donation to a charity of their choice). Conducting as little as 8-10 interviews can help you identify common themes to inform product decisions, develop a POV on the buyer persona, or gather feedback on messaging/value props. Here is the message template that you can personalize further: "I saw that you are an expert in _____. Curious if you'd be open to giving honest feedback on the product I'm building in _____. I'd be happy to compensate you with a $75 gift card of your choice for your time. To make scheduling easy, here is a link to sign up for a time that works best for you..." We're currently exploring AI tools like outset.ai to let AI conduct, moderate and synthesize conversations -- will share more details in my next AMA as we're just getting started.

Before a new product launch, I would hope that you've already done all your research by then as launch should be all about the actual GTM motions. Things I like to test right before a launch is putting drafts of GTM assets in front of prospects for their reactions/feedback. For example, I had invested on creating a short promotional video for launch day. When it was nearing its final stages of production, I shared it with a small number of prospects to get their feedback. I believe that any major marketing assets should be tested with an external audience before launch day to make sure you're going to be captivating your audience as much as possible!

I'm a firm believer that product marketing's role is to be the voice of the product in the market and the voice of the market in the product so while there is no magic bullet to the one most important type of market research, I think the most important thing to do is to talk to your prospects and customers and understand their needs, wants, pain points, preferences, and interests. In order to add value to the product and echo their voice to our x-functional team members, we must know the audience better than anyone else! Starting quoting customers in meetings and citing specific examples / use cases, you will surely have everyone's attention.