How do you incorporate voice of the customer into positioning and messaging?

It’s so important! I like to do some exploratory research before I draft anything — both quantitative and qualitative if I can — to hear in an unbiased way what our target audience values, looks for, struggles with, etc. That will put some (necessary and helpful) constraints around our messaging and positioning, because whatever we end up with has to be within the bounds of what our target audience cares about and will find valuable. Then there are a lot of great ways to use customer research to ...Read More

I love bringing the voice of the customer into messaging! It's one of the most powerful inputs you have. Nothing beats actually talking to or hearing from customers. Shadow some sales calls. Listen to customer presentations at meetups/conferences. Schedule interviews with your "friendlies". This is invaluable to understand what matters most to them and how they're talking about it.  I've also worked at companies that do broader customer surveys and market regularly. I think this is great to unde ...Read More

We collect and incorporate the voice of the customer in a few different ways: First - the sales team tends to be a great proxy as they are on the front lines and can provide great inputs on what they are hearing from customers, what seems to resonate and what does not. Second - our product marketing team actively engages directly with customers through executive briefings, partnering with the sales team in customer discussions, webinars, events etc. Third - we regularly engage with reputed analy ...Read More

Great question. Bringing in customer voice is not optional for marketers anymore. People just want to self-serve when they buy anything, and they dont trust what us marketers have to say. They trust their peers and what others have to say more than anything else - there are enough studies out there proving this.  IMO, happy customers give us great content on this all the time in the form of quotes in our regular interactions with them. Problem is we rarely think to capture those when they happen ...Read More

Voice of the customer is one key component of great positioning and messaging. It's important to gather the information first-hand. At a minimum, product marketers should be watching or listening to recordings of the market research conversations. With that in hand, it typically makes the biggest impact in two areas: In positioning, VOC shapes your vectors of differentiation while maintaining or improving resonance. How do market participants talk about your product's category? Are you aligned w ...Read More